the state of PC gaming

[Imran Siddiqui]

How many of these freaking threads are we going to have a year?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
How many of these freaking threads are we going to have a year?

im sorry - when was the last one?

[Dis]

we need at least one a year .

Until they have a game like civ3 on a console, I can care less about them.

I want adult games, not kiddie games. Even Kotor is easy and simplistic- but it is fun.

[Standup]

I wonder if part of the problem is that gaming is now an acceptable pastime that most people admit to. By that i mean even 10 years ago it was considered a bit geeky or weird here in the UK at least. The playstation made gaming acceptable and moved it out of teenage boys' bedrooms and into the living room. The downside of this growth was what someone here called Sunday gamers - they don't read reviews, buy judging on the cover or their grandparents buy their games - they're not enthusiasts. As the market widens so its gets more small niches (hex wargames ?) but also the big publishers will want to aim for the lowest common denominator to get casual buyers in.

Agree with the 3D as well - it almost seems like we'll do it because we can. Feels like CGI in films in the late 90s - doesn't quite work yet but it's the latest fad so in it goes.

[DarkCloud]

Sandman

Modding.

I always get annoyed when PC gamers make increasingly vocal demands for games to be modding friendly, and so on, often placing a greater priority on modding than anything else; even elementary stuff like interface, control and stability.

And, often, the publishers are only to happy to provide. The reason? Money. Why bother paying a load of expensive programmers to add value to your game, when there's modders out there who work for free? Sure, most mods are not very good, but the price is right.

Even when a really, really, rancid game gets released, there's always a group of unpaid enthusiasts who're prepared to 'mod it to perfection'. But the work that they do is money in the bank for the publishers of the crappy game, since if there's a good set of mods about, then people are going to buy the game.

So basically, the publishers have an incentive to produce a crappy game with good modding capabilities, rather than a good game. And in my view, even the best mods in the world are no match for a professionally produced game. Add to that the fact that modding can be complicated and somewhat alienating to any new gamer, and you have a recipe for the gradual weakening of the PC games market.

I'd either:

Make more games without any modding capabilties at all; they encourage developers to be lazy and 'leave it to the modders'.

What games have modding ruined? Provide an example? All I can see is good games being made great- and in ways that the developers never foresaw.

Half-Life is one example- the developers never could have done everything modders did because a game does ONE thing... the mods allow it to do MANY things.

HOMM III is another amazing game that mods/scenarios added replayability.

The Sims is another example... and the designers kept releasing free content on the internet.
-

I don't usually buy games unless they are moddable. I want to be able to extend replayablity and generally games like Command and Conquer are too hard for me to beat the regular scenarios so I need to make my own

[pg]

the main reason for pc gaming sucking right now is the combination of having huge development costs and having almost no one to buy those games because the system requirements are so high. that's just my personal feeling because i look at doom 3 and think it looks fanatastic but there is no way i'm going to upgrade just to play it. even tradional games which ran perfect on every pc now a few years ago require monster pcs to get the most out of(yes, civ 3 i'm talking about you).

also there is this -

The other developers told me I was daft to write a space based strategy game for OS/2! So I wrote Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. I was a college student back then so I couldn't afford to get it into the stores. So a publisher called Advanced Idea Machines "published" it. They never paid us royalties and disappeared soon after. Since I had no money, I couldn't afford a lawyer at the time.

So I got smart. Stardock would publish the OS/2 sequel Galactic Civilizations II. So we made the game, manufactured the boxes, took care of all the marketing and getting it into the stores. And just to be safe, we had two distributors. One called Micro Central and the other one called Blue Orchards. Both went went out of business owing us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That particular incident nearly wiped out Stardock.

But no matter, we recovered. We clawed our way back up and made it into the Windows market. We decided to make a Windows version and we decided to work with a well known publisher on it (Strategy First). This time everything would go perfectly...

Well, that was a year and a half ago and we're still waiting for royalty payments on most of their sales. But this time, we had an out -- direct electronic sales. People were able to buy the game directly from us and download the game.

So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken.

http://www.joeuser.com/articlecomments.asp?c=1&AID=21895&s=1&u=0

[Mr. President]

Originally posted by Dissident
we need at least one a year .

Until they have a game like civ3 on a console, I can care less about them.

I want adult games, not kiddie games. Even Kotor is easy and simplistic- but it is fun.

"Console games" does not necessarily equal "kids' games". At least not yet.

[Urban Ranger]

Scratchware anybody?

The phrase scratchware game essentially means a computer game, created by a microteam, with pro quality art, game design, programming and sound to be sold at paperback book store prices.

A scratchware game can be played by virtually anyone who can reach a keyboard and read. Scratchware games are brief (possibly fifteen minutes to an hour or so), extremely replayable, satisfying, challenging, and entertaining.

[DrSpike]

PC gaming will undoubtedly survive, though the trend towards certain genres will continue. FPS/RPG are solid genres, and the PC offers something over and above the consoles in my view, though the console versions of those genres are liked by many.

RTS, as much as some here hate it, is a genre where the PC wins hands down. With MP being more important than it ever has been this is a key point IMO.

Plus, I'll always play TBS, though it's fair to say only a few games can command mass sales these days.

[DarkCloud]

the main reason for pc gaming sucking right now is the combination of having huge development costs and having almost no one to buy those games because the system requirements are so high

Huge Development Costs= a factor YES
System Reqs= NO.
Very few games have high system reqs... those are mainly the shooters/etc. that always have sold well on the PC and continue to do so- the DOOMS and Quakes of the world- Unreal Tournament and the like just never hit it as big- although they honestly should have... but they just didn't have as big a casual following and that led to core gamers pirating their software and thereby ruining their sales.

If you ever travel to Thailand or Eastern Europe, you will see thousands of pirated CD's undercutting the real CD prices...

And it's very easy to pirate games if you have DSL or Cable or T1 hookups... or just have a friend who has a CD rewritable.

That, I believe is why game prices have drastically fallen... they used to be 50-60+ now they cost 20-40 on average... and while this is good for the consumer- the companies aren't getting enough money from sales.

as for GalCiv's complaints- royalties only appear after the advance has paid for itself... now I don't know his full details- but his game just didn't sell is what I assume. at least with Strategy First. Since otherwise the non-payment would border on illegal (nonetheless, I will admit, it's hard to nail a company for that) But I doubt that galCiv outsold its advance.

[DarkCloud]

The only system req. I can admit to as being a factor is just an idiotic quirk of NeverWinter Nights in that it needs a VERY SPECIFIC graphics card to run under. And that has nothing to do with expensive computers... frankly, a 1GHz Pentium outfitted reasonably well only costs about 300 right now. That's easier to buy than a medium-line IBM PC 386 in 1994!

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
That, I believe is why game prices have drastically fallen... they used to be 50-60+ now they cost 20-40 on average... and while this is good for the consumer- the companies aren't getting enough money from sales.

Well...

Brad Wardell said piracy is not a big problem. A recent Stanford/UNC study on music filesharing also concluded that it does not hamper sales.

The main thing is most companies spend too much time on eye candy and not enough time on the game itself.

[LDiCesare]

Brad Wardell posted a blog on exactly that same topic (same title) somewhere I can't remember.
He pointed out that one strength of PC games was, indeed, modding: You can't mod on a console, you can on PC. It's its main strength. When I come back to civII, I ususally don't play vanilla CivII but a mod instead (typically Seeds of Greatness) before I'll go back to vanilla civII.
PC games strengths include multiplayer over the net, but consoles will reach the web soon so one might think they can compete there. They can't becasue they lack a keyboard for chatting.
This means that MMORPGs are on the rise and will continue. The problem is these should naturally sell on the web, and often have monthly fees which are not taken into account when one looks at the 'game sales'. So I suspect that PC gaming has a bigger share than what's shown in the stats.

And I agree about 3D. It's mostly useless, sometimes harmful, rarely useful. I still prefer top-down views mydelf...

[Sandman]

What games have modding ruined? Provide an example? All I can see is good games being made great- and in ways that the developers never foresaw.

Dissident already mentioned Neverwinter Nights as a game that was supposed to be modding-happy, but turned out lacklustre.

MOO3 is another one. There's a selection of mods that make it good - but why on earth wasn't it good to begin with? Same with the Call to Power series.

The first civ3 expansion pack had a load of fanmade stuff on it, not all of it that good, a perfect example of a games company cashing in on whatever mods were about.

There's certainly some games companies who can be devoted enough to produce good games and have some modding support, but the temptation to release a rubbish game and have the fans fix it for free is always there.

[Jaguar]

I think 2003 was rock bottom for PC games. In every other year, I can think of multiple games that were absolutely incredible. Even fairly recently there were some great games. 2002 brought us Warcraft III, Battlefield 1942, and Neverwinter Nights. However, I will grant you that none of them were spectacular. But they were three very well refined games from the three major genres. 2001 brought us Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Civ3, Black and White (included not because it was a great game, but because it was extremely original) Serious Sam, and Max Payne.