the state of PC gaming

[Jaguar]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
Computer Games in terms of innovation and quality have been steadily declining since the boom years of 1995-1996. Just a look at the major game magazines lends truth to this claim.

1996 was definitely the year of computer gaming. Warcraft II, Civilization II, Diablo, Simcity 2000, Quake, Red Alert, Duke Nukem 3D...

[pg]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
Huge Development Costs= a factor YES
System Reqs= NO.
Very few games have high system reqs...

i disagree. i think most games which require 1ghz+ to be playable are pretty high. one of the reasons counter strike is a big hit is because you can play it on such low spec machines. there are lots of games with high requirements today that have no reason for them like railroad tycoon, civ3, or even paradox games seem to be requiring faster and faster pcs. higher requirements slashes your market share you can sell to and most games coming out today play worse(interface lag, long loading, choppiness). in many cases even the gameplay doesn't seem to have any real benefit from high requirements. good example being civ2/smac where turns were super fast, you could have a million cities/units to civ3 which runs slow, loads slow, etc with a fraction of the cities/units of earlier games.

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

i don't think pc games have ever not been pirated or strong sellers there. game companies probably don't even factor in official sales from these places as they are so small.

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.

it is easy, but it has been going on forever. i never heard piracy being blamed so much as it is now. the thing with piracy is i don't think many sales are lost. i'd rather buy a game i'm going to play a lot so i can play multiplayer or use mods/patches hassle free. the games i pirate are ones i'd never buy anyways(usually stuff that is old, hard to find or bad value).

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.

afaik galciv sold over 100k copies which is fairly good for a pc games nowadays. publishers probably don't pay royalties just like in music. my understanding is they hide behind loopholes and pretend not to make a profit when they really are.

[Zero]

Very few games have high system reqs...

I think your defintion of high sys req and most average people's are vastly different.

I always have this kind of thing with my friends who are very into computers.

[Zero]

Piracy doesnt only affect PC. Console piracy is probably equal or even larger actually. Places like phillipines and thailand, I saw far more bootleg console games on market than PCs. Plus on warez or shared groups console ISOs are much more popular in my experience.

I think its because most PCs games that are worth playing usually has CD-key or online account of some sorts. Since most PC players are MPers. While Console is &^(@ing too expensive, averaging around 50 bucks per game for game that can easily be ISOed and system modded....

Hell even XBox Live's MP feature can be played with bootleg if you have the right modchip. There's simply much more incentive to bootleg console games.

I dunno, average ppl probably dont mod systems like people I know... But then again, most average folks actually buy PC games too so I think it would be even.

[Jaguar]

I don't know exactly how this works, but with a modded XBox my friend's brother rents games and copies them to the hard drive, thus getting games for only 5 dollars apeice.

[Dis]

Originally posted by pg


i disagree. i think most games which require 1ghz+ to be playable are pretty high. one of the reasons counter strike is a big hit is because you can play it on such low spec machines. there are lots of games with high requirements today that have no reason for them like railroad tycoon, civ3, or even paradox games seem to be requiring faster and faster pcs. higher requirements slashes your market share you can sell to and most games coming out today play worse(interface lag, long loading, choppiness). in many cases even the gameplay doesn't seem to have any real benefit from high requirements. good example being civ2/smac where turns were super fast, you could have a million cities/units to civ3 which runs slow, loads slow, etc with a fraction of the cities/units of earlier games.



i don't think pc games have ever not been pirated or strong sellers there. game companies probably don't even factor in official sales from these places as they are so small.



it is easy, but it has been going on forever. i never heard piracy being blamed so much as it is now. the thing with piracy is i don't think many sales are lost. i'd rather buy a game i'm going to play a lot so i can play multiplayer or use mods/patches hassle free. the games i pirate are ones i'd never buy anyways(usually stuff that is old, hard to find or bad value).



afaik galciv sold over 100k copies which is fairly good for a pc games nowadays. publishers probably don't pay royalties just like in music. my understanding is they hide behind loopholes and pretend not to make a profit when they really are.

move into the 21st century

[Urban Ranger]

You are wasting a lot of bandwidth there, diss.

[Zero]

move into the 21st century

you should be playing console game then....

[Zero]

Originally posted by Jaguar
I don't know exactly how this works, but with a modded XBox my friend's brother rents games and copies them to the hard drive, thus getting games for only 5 dollars apeice.

pffft. i dont even spend 5 bucks. Just about every frat house has bunch of modded xbox with library of ISOed games. chances are if i ask around i'll find the game i want for free.....

[LDiCesare]

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.

I think you're having it the wrong way. Typically, civ3 out of the box didn't come with modding. You can't blame modding for it. I have an example of one company which made 2 games, one moddable, the other not: Troika developped Arcanum (moddable). That was a very good game. They later released Temple of Elemental Evil (not moddable), which was mostly crap (very shallow game). Both games were buggy after release and patched later on. The worst one was the not moddable game, in part because some content had been edited out of the game by the publisher. This content could easily had been put back in if the game had been moddable.
As for NWN, the main thing in the game was multiplayer, which made the single player game shallower than what it could have been. Modding is not the reason why the game is not up to one's expectations.
The lack of quality of PC games is not due to mods but to the internet and the large amount of different hardware they have to run on. Internet allows players to download pâtches, and they have become accustomed to it. Some people actually tweak the game and add contents in patches, which really adds value to the game, but mostly patches are just patches, and the average joe who doesn't play often will feel that PC games are much harder to work with and of lower quality than console games. Those who can download patches may actually think the same.

[DarkCloud]

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

That was because of the c++ programming language.

at least its expansions made it more easily moddable... and honestly civ II was hard to mod unless one knew something about very very basic coding and graphics... until Fantastic Worlds was released

Same with the Call to Power series.

Hmm... I cant speak for CTP II, but CTP I is at least as good as civ III (with the exception of awful battle mechanics and diplomacy- but I don't think that the mods can fix that abyssality)

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.

Civ II did the same. The civ-series never focused on 'weird' mods that were 'fantastic', etc. in their built-in game. The Civ series always has focused on good gameplay and not mods.

The only point I'll give you, sandman is the one about MOO III.

[DarkCloud]

And about Brad Wardell saying that piracy is not a factor. I'm pretty sick with people like him saying that.

Haven't you noticed that games have been creating CD-keys, etc? Haven't you noticed that the main people claiming that piracy 'isn't an issue' are the small-house developers, the people who don't make much money off games anyway and whose games aren't that popular? And whose games didn't cost amazing amounts of cash to make in the first place.

(Just an aside here on GalCiv selling 100,000 copies- that's a lot more than most small houses, but GalCiv so far has been his only 'medium-sized' product... it wasn't an amazing hit.

A hit= 1,000,000 copies sold)

Big-House developer companies have razor-thin profit margins. They need at least 1 hit a year and can only suffer at most one bomb a year. Their art development and programmers cost money. At the minimal, a programmer making 60,000 a year necessitates a game sells: ($40) [I'm assuming that the retailer skims $10 off the top at usual sales places] (40)(1500 games sold)= 60K... and that's not even taking into account advertising budgets and distribution shipping reqs... or the fact that usually teams of 6-10 programmers are at work, plus playtesters (paid hourly) AND art direction... and cleaning ladies for the work place (unless they're decentralized... but that increases development time usually) and probably a whole cadre of other items that I have forgotten.

Indeed, piracy costs the industry thousands if not tens of thousands of unsold games... and games rarely sell more than 2 million copies anyway... and the games that get pirated are usually 'popular' games that are heavily advertised... therefore, the bigger companies are hit more by the problems.

So don't tell me piracy doesn't hurt.

[DarkCloud]

pg

disagree. i think most games which require 1ghz+ to be playable are pretty high. one of the reasons counter strike is a big hit is because you can play it on such low spec machines. there are lots of games with high requirements today that have no reason for them like railroad tycoon, civ3, or even paradox games seem to be requiring faster and faster pcs. higher requirements slashes your market share you can sell to and most games coming out today play worse(interface lag, long loading, choppiness). in many cases even the gameplay doesn't seem to have any real benefit from high requirements. good example being civ2/smac where turns were super fast, you could have a million cities/units to civ3 which runs slow, loads slow, etc with a fraction of the cities/units of earlier games.

I'll echo your sentiment that games with 3D are a waste and are too slow. I play the old games because I like my top-down 2D and fastness. The newer games like CTP are too intensive to run on computers and games like NeverWinter Nights are too bulky and unnecessary when a Baldur's Gate Infinity Engine would have serviced.

That being said however, I'm pretty certain that the majority of 'gamers' who are the people who usually buy games, have systems at least with 1GhZ of power.

Personally, of people I know, the slowest computer of someone who regularly plays games has 650 MhZ or so.

And that being said- interestingly enough, out of 4 gamer friends... the only games they have purchased in the last 4 years have been:

Serious Sam, Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Seige, Final Fantasy 11/12.

and not all those games worked on all their computers (or at least they ran slow) However, I believe that this lack of purchasing games is because the new games are trashy rather than they don't work- since the only games that weren't returned or trashed were Serious Sam and Final Fantasy. (personally I don't own either of those games )

Nevertheless- 1GhZ plays most games- even 750 MhZ will play most games (albeit slow)... it's just the **** graphics-accelerators and Memory (256 MB minimum) that gets to people... and memory doesn't cost that much.

You mentioned that casual gamers can't keep up with people 'like me'... well, generally casual gamers never bought the type of games that 'people like me' play.

Casual games are like : Sim City, The Sims, civ II...

not like Empire Earth, Warcraft III, AFterlife, Age of Empires, Railroad Tycoon, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, etc.

i don't think pc games have ever not been pirated or strong sellers there. game companies probably don't even factor in official sales from these places as they are so small.

Okay, you have me there But you can't say that it helps these companies to have illegal playing going on. And these things do get around, I know friends who come home from Thailand after trips with tons of pirated CD's, DVS's, videos, and music so these things get spread around.

it is easy, but it has been going on forever. i never heard piracy being blamed so much as it is now. the thing with piracy is i don't think many sales are lost. i'd rather buy a game i'm going to play a lot so i can play multiplayer or use mods/patches hassle free. the games i pirate are ones i'd never buy anyways(usually stuff that is old, hard to find or bad value).

Piracy is being blamed more than ever since it is now easy for 'casual' gamers to pirate.

Personally, 'core' gamers and people like me have always known how to crack a CD (personally, I don't know how to do that) but I always knew how to copy one and where to get copies from people

And some with fast connections have had access to mIRC rooms and WareZ sites...

BUt now, more people than ever have fast connections... DSL has spread.

And KazAA and Morpheus have just made this proliferation much easier.

More things are being pirated now than ever before!
That's why it's being blamed more now.

afaik galciv sold over 100k copies which is fairly good for a pc games nowadays. publishers probably don't pay royalties just like in music. my understanding is they hide behind loopholes and pretend not to make a profit when they really are.

If you can prove that to me, then I'll believe you. I'm pretty certain that publishers pay royalties. Although I could be wrong.

zero

Piracy doesnt only affect PC. Console piracy is probably equal or even larger actually. Places like phillipines and thailand, I saw far more bootleg console games on market than PCs. Plus on warez or shared groups console ISOs are much more popular in my experience.

I think its because most PCs games that are worth playing usually has CD-key or online account of some sorts. Since most PC players are MPers. While Console is &^(@ing too expensive, averaging around 50 bucks per game for game that can easily be ISOed and system modded....

Hell even XBox Live's MP feature can be played with bootleg if you have the right modchip. There's simply much more incentive to bootleg console games.

I dunno, average ppl probably dont mod systems like people I know... But then again, most average folks actually buy PC games too so I think it would be even.

Console games are also generally shorter and take less time to develop. They also have a booming rental business.

The reason they cost so much is that there are too many middle-men and the demand for them is too high. That's why they cost 60+.

Personally, I agree with you that they're overpriced, but piracy isn't going to bring down prices...

Just as a note: Did you know that your food and clothes could be priced 10% lower than it currently is at groceries and department stores? Well, yes it can! But theft and product vandalism FORCE companies to raise prices to ensure that they still make a profit.

LDiCaesar I'll second your opinions

[Kuciwalker]

I think you're having it the wrong way. Typically, civ3 out of the box didn't come with modding.

Yes it did.

[Apocalypse]

200k is generally considered a hit, not 1 million. You can get 200k and still make a good profit and have a very good chance at a sequel.