Why PC Gaming is Dying

No, it isn't. That setup is as "top as the line" you can get without paying a retarded amount of money for components that give you a 2% performance increase.

I agree about spending 5k to go top of the line but the fact is I know someone with a top of the line PC, I however opted for the slightly cheaper option and my system still runs everything well and we both need to upgrade at the same time. Offcourse top notch components are good but the actual performance increase in real terms between a borderline top notch PC and a top line PC if both are built with gaming in mind are pretty insignificant in real terms. (There is a differance though and I agree about memory)

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There's not much of a need for top-of-the-line, it's just a small prestige section. You buy your way in.

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Last two news update from this site just owned your post, lol.

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To anyone who said that Crysis sold bad EA said it reached a million copies just in Febuary and it's probably going to sell 2-3 million by the end of the year most likely and continue selling on for years because it's seen at the graphical benchmark that everyone will get when they get a new PC.

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I'll grant that those are decent components, and you save a bit with the rebates, but without a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, and operating system, you're still a bit short of a usable system.

I was thinking of a system spec'd at least to the level of the Ars Technica "Hot Rod" (see their system guide here: http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200803.ars/3), which is closer to $1,600.

The original point, though, is that consoles are much less expensive than PCs, especially if you consider a 5+ year console life span.

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To anyone who said that Crysis sold bad EA said it reached a million copies just in Febuary and it's probably going to sell 2-3 million by the end of the year most likely and continue selling on for years because it's seen at the graphical benchmark that everyone will get when they get a new PC.

Super Smash Bros Brawl. It was written for a console who's hardware was mass produced in 2001 (Wii is a GameCube with a little extra kick). It was written using the Super Smash Bros Melee engine, modified for new characters and abilities. It cost Nintendo maybe $10 million to make. When it's all said and done, SSBB (using Melee as the example) will probably sell 8-10 million copies. If each copy gave Nintendo only $2, that would give them a pretty significant profit. But we all know that they make at least 10x that much per copy sold. A guestimate on the return on investment is 1600%. No, that's not a typo; that's sixteen hundred percent.

Halo 3. It was built on the bones of Halo 2. It probably cost $30-40 million to make. When it's all said and done, it will probably have sold 12+ million copies. Once again, you're looking at a good $25+ for Microsoft's take per copy sold. A guesstimate on the return on investment is 1000% Also not a typo.

Is there any chance that Crysis will provide that kind of return on investment? At best, Crysis may provide a 400% ROI. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if GalCiv2's return on investment was better than Crysis's when all the expansions and such are counted.

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read this:
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10254&Itemid=2

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read this:

Your point being?

First, they refuse to actually release internal numbers as to how much the game is being pirated, so their commentary about it is suspect.

Second, particularly for this game, a pirated copy is not necessarily a lost sale. If I were less scrupulous, I might pirate the game just to see if it can run on my hardware. God knows I don't want to spend $50 on something that might not even function.

Third, if they want people to buy their game, make it something that people can actually rely on to function.

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Do you really need to ask what my point it? I thought you'd have been intelligent enough to see that I was basically posting that in support of your argument that Crysis isn't doing as well as the people on this board are exclaiming.

I posted the link to show that Crytek is complaining about their sales. Yes, they're blaming piracy, and to be honest, they're probably partially correct. However, the main conclusion that you can draw from that article is that Crytek is saying "We didn't make the amount of money we thought we'd make"

Also, a bit besides the point, I'd venture a guess that they monitor the various p2p sites and see how many people are sharing their files. If Crysis is on the top 10 or even no.1 on p2p sites, that would indicate a problem. (that was an example, by the way. I'm not saying this is how it is).

The problem with many PC games/devs these days, at least the games/devs that are jumping the PC-ship, is that there's little incentive to purchase the game. They create really robust engines but offer little reason to go online. Stardock gets around this by updating the game with patches that can only be obtained through buying the game. As well, they have games now that offer compelling online.

At this point, piracy is something devs just have to accept. So then, the question become not "how do we stop it", but "how do we encourage people to buy the game".

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Crysis is only pirated because anyone who bought a computer to run it was inable to buy it itself. (Joke).

That's one of the problems with PC gaming, and it's one of the reasons that developers choose consoles. The only real way to stop it is through a long, lengthy series of checks that disqualify some hardware and systems.

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Do you really need to ask what my point it?

Yes. The article basically talked about piracy being the death of PC games. And it was not just Crytek was saying that.

The problem with many PC games/devs these days, at least the games/devs that are jumping the PC-ship, is that there's little incentive to purchase the game.

Wait, what? The incentive in purchasing the game is that you get to play it! You don't buy the game, you don't get to play it. You should not have to provide more incentive than that to get people to pay for your game.

The very fact that people think that you have to do more than provide your game for sale in order to get people to buy it says that there is something very wrong with the way some people are thinking.

Stardock gets around this by updating the game with patches that can only be obtained through buying the game.

Having played the initial release of GC2, I could just as easily say that StarDock got around this by releasing a beta product that was clearly not finished, thus thwarting pirates with an inferior product, while using the money gained from early sales to continue to develop the game into a mature, finished release.

At this point, piracy is something devs just have to accept.

You have to accept some piracy. It's going to happen. What you don't have to accept is that everyone will pirate your game unless you provide some value-added proposition for those who don't.

Any number of games make money alongside pirated copies of them. Without value-added propositions. You don't need to do that sort of thing as long as you provide an entertaining product at a fair price.

See, the problem is that you're suggesting that Crysys is selling poorly because of piracy. That is, if there were some value-added proposition, it would sell better. That's nonsense.

Crysis sold poorly because it was a poorly made game that is, ultimately, no more fun than the much more accessible HL2. Only a paltry few percent of people could even consider running the game, thus cutting their playerbase to almost nothing. That it sold 1 million copies at all is a feat.

I don't think piracy is a major factor in the downturn in the PC market. Note: it is not a good thing. But it isn't what is running PC developers out of this market. What's doing that is their unflinching unwillingness to make their games cheaper by not spending so much on development.

The most successful PC developers are the ones who make games that lots of people who would be interested in playing them would actually play. Not necessarily unpretty, but they don't rely on the latest technology for you to have a good experience with their games. Blizzard and Valve are the current practitioners of this technique, and both have reaped the rewards. Contrast to Id software, who basically just make engines now. Niether Blizzard nor Valve is particularly concerned about piracy, because it doesn't hurt them that much.

Let's say the average rate of piracy for a game is 10%. That's a high estimate, but so be it. And lets (falsely) assume that each pirated copy is a lost sale. So, if your game can only ever work on 1 million computers, watching 100,000 sales go away is really bad for you. But if your userbase is 10 million computers, you won't be so put out by 1 million sales going away, because you still have 9 million others.

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I've actually been suprised at the number of games comming out that don't need uber machines actually. The obvious one that springs to mind is Sins of a Solar Empire, a perfect example of how a game can be beatiful, fun and run on low machines .

I can sorta see where your comming from, but only because these games are being developed by bad developers in my opinion. The top developers know that the higher the spec, the less people they can sell their game too.

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Piracy is holding the industry back from reaching its full potential, but PC gaming is certainly not dying. Developers are not so much concerned about the theives that have been shoplifting their whole lives - they don't respect the system, and likely never will. We are very concerned about the large number of people on the fence that could go one way or the other.

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Sins is one example, as is Mount and Blade (though it won't run on my PC smoothly all the time), of games that don't require super powerful machines, but even a cheap computer is $400 if you wanna game with it, so you can afford a game easily. It adds up, sure, but why would you buy a computer just to pirate games? I believe that DRM is not the answer. Returning prices to sane levels ($60 is not sane, nor is $90, EA), removing ads (or having them pay for some of the game, if not all), and other small things would put sales up without requiring any DRM, and justify a purchasing decision for those on the fence (I wouldn't pirate it, but I wouldn't buy it).

Another problem lies more with the publishers being too draconian. People will cheat, copy, and do everything to your game, but the more you do about it, the more the innocent pay.

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Returning prices to sane levels ($60 is not sane, nor is $90, EA)

There's this concept that you should be aware of called inflation. It causes the price of things to rise over time. For a good 10 years, videogame prices were fixed at $50, yet the cost of development has quadrupled (at a minimum).

That you only have to pay $60 for a high-quality game is a steal, as that would be the inflation-adjusted price of $50 from 10 years ago. By all rights, $70-$80 should be the standard price for a game that costs $30 million to make.

In short, high-end videogames are cheaper than they ought to be, and you should be grateful for that.

No, the real problem is that game prices are fixed to a single price. One of the reasons for the success of GC2 and SoaSE is that they're sold for less than the standard price. They can do this because they cost less to make. Blockbuster movies on DVD tend to cost more than, say, romantic comedies. There's no reason why the game industry should balk at that.

More game developers should stop trying to make $30 million games. Sure, you're always have your StarCraft II's and your HL3's and your Doom IV's. But they'll be like summer blockbusters in terms of content and comparative rarity.

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Yeah, Black Isle, Looking Glass Studio, Troika Games...

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No, sixty dollars is way too much. A game costs $2 to put on a disk. Use an existing engine, and if you sell 20 million like most high-end games do, you should have no problem charging $20. Plus, if you've ever played freeware or open source equivalents, you will realize that $60 really is a rip-off. Plus, shall I point out that the greedy publishers almost always get the majority of the money, so the developers really don't make that much in all cases..

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No, sixty dollars is way too much. A game costs $2 to put on a disk. Use an existing engine, and if you sell 20 million like most high-end games do, you should have no problem charging $20. Plus, if you've ever played freeware or open source equivalents, you will realize that $60 really is a rip-off. Plus, shall I point out that the greedy publishers almost always get the majority of the money, so the developers really don't make that much in all cases..

That post is so full of ignorance I don't know if I should even try and explain......

Bah here goes......

Nowdays developing games take a lot of money. From paying all the developers to licensing or builging a game engine and game content. Thats not counting the initial cost of actually renting office space for the years it take to make the game, plus the cost of the equipment they use, utility bills, wages, marketing, etc.

Don't think the game is done by a couple of guys working in the garage with their PC like many of those freeware crap (many of those games are of poor quality). Think a big corporation, with a big office in the downtown area, with secretaries and everything one can expect from a respectable company. Now think that the publisher (publisher =! developer) is also a company with costs and bills to pay, and shareholders who want their investment in the company to turn a profit.

You want to keep whining because of the sixty dollar price tag? Fine, do it. the world won't end because you keep whining like a spoiled child.

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Ah, but you're talking from the publisher's point.

The developers are the guys who make or decide upon the engine (don't whine about costs, the Q3 engine is perfectly good, Torgue costs little, and there's thousands of open source entities), equipment should be relatively cheap, utility bills should be cheap also, wages should be not that cheap but not near $1M, marketing could be expensive, but there's always Indie style word of mouth.

Freeware games may be of poor quality, but there are many examples of professional quality freeware games. A big corporation with a big office in the downtown area, with secretaries, is wasting money. The publisher seems to be your standpoint, but you forget that Doom was shareware and grossed how much? And it grew into a huge franchise, shall I point out. Shareholders should not be allowed in a game company, only community, as shareholders ruin business.

I will whine about a sixty dollar price tag, because I pay that much only for a rare piece of art, not every game that feels entitled to its huge price tag simply because it's on the PS3 or Xbox 360.

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Ah, but you're talking from the publisher's point.
The developers are the guys who make or decide upon the engine (don't whine about costs, the Q3 engine is perfectly good, Torgue costs little, and there's thousands of open source entities), equipment should be relatively cheap, utility bills should be cheap also, wages should be not that cheap but not near $1M, marketing could be expensive, but there's always Indie style word of mouth.

Well yes, I was speaking from a publisher point of view, since you said "if you sell 20 million like most high-end games do". Freeware/indie games are not high end.

A big corporation with a big office in the downtown area, with secretaries, is wasting money. The publisher seems to be your standpoint, but you forget that Doom was shareware and grossed how much? And it grew into a huge franchise, shall I point out. Shareholders should not be allowed in a game company, only community, as shareholders ruin business.

Yep, wasting money, but thats how it is. Doom was 15 years years ago, things have changed. Shareholders have the Word when it to comes to what a company does. Remember, its all about the money. Making a game?? Only purpose is to make money. Even the developers are in it for the money, not for the sake of gamers. There are exceptions of course, but again, you said "high-end games".

I will whine about a sixty dollar price tag, because I pay that much only for a rare piece of art, not every game that feels entitled to its huge price tag simply because it's on the PS3 or Xbox 360.

LOL you are cheap.

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Voqar

Join Date 03/2003

+21

I don't know that it's dying but it does seem to be in a recession of sorts.

I've been playing PC games for a long, long time and I've played and bought tons of games.

For me, I don't care that much for RTS and only play the very best of FPS, and those 2 genres seem to be the bulk of what gets released.

I miss the older days of PC gaming where most of the titles were strategy oriented or were more like "pc games" than console games made for PCs.

What truly boggles my mind is that a lot of the best titles, genres, and styles of PC games from before RTS or FPS even existed or became popular are never revisited or revived - instead, everything is remade into yet another damned RTS or FPS (like how Bethesda is bastardizing and morrowindifying Fallout). Nobody makes anything like the old BG games. Nobody makes anything like Colonization (well, they do, but it they're graphically bloated RTS style and just not the same).

There are a lot of excellent things that have come about thru the evolution of PC gaming but to me a lot of the magic of older games is missing from many of today's titles.

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Many people say that PC gaming is dying, and I agree with them entirely. From a commercial sense. The independent gaming community for PC is better than ever. The reason that PC gaming is dying is because of system requirements. You do not need to run a FPS at 90 frames per second with bloom, soft shadows, real-time lighting, next-generation physics, and advanced reflection to make it look good. See Tremulous. 700 MHz, low requirements in graphics, and various other nice stats. It looks nicer than Guitar Hero 3 in my opinion, which requires 2.4 GHz (2400 MHz) and fairly expensive graphics cards. You end up with a cartoony, ugly end-result that can be emulated with the same degree of satisfaction on really low-end obsolete machines (124 kb, and not demo scene ultra-compact, either), with the same gameplay. Audiosurf runs way more stuff than Guitar Hero, and runs on a 1.81 GHz GeForce 6150 Go laptop. Seriously, there is no need for the ultra-high requirements, since the real hardcore gaming community will play anything fun, regardless of graphics. I've played games with 3 poly models, and enjoyed them more than Guitar Hero 3 (Xbox 360). There is no need for your 200,000x 200,000 pixel textures or 80,000 poly models. It really doesn't matter.

Im sorry but thats a pretty stupid arguement.. You might as well say that console gaming is dieing even more because they constantly strive for just that, better gfx that require a new console.

The real reason why PC gaming is dieing, imo. Is the fucking fuzz to get a game started.

With console games, you insert the game, and play. THE END:
It always works. It always runs well. Hardly ever any graphical anomalies, or gamestopping bugs, or crashes, and NEVER any driver incompatabilities.

With PC games, you install (not such a big deal), then you play.
Then with 90% of all games, you notice that its released before its done, resulting in graphical anomalies, crashes or memory leaks (includes GalCiv2 of old), desyncs (Supcom?). Or simply a game FULL of bugs making it utterly unplayable (Loki's mouse-click-wont-register bug, or the entire game of Vanguard).
Hell, anyone remember Oblivion? It took like 6 months before anyone could run that at max graphics in a reasonable framerate with the latest graphics cards (which had horrible drivers for almost a year). Not to mention the hundreds of mods required to make it the game you want it to be, resulting in mod incompatabilities, forcing you to manually edit files and the load order.

And lets not forget about the wonderful $$ companies that create the biggest scam known to the cyberage, copy-protection. Forcing you to be connected to the internet to play a game you already PAID for, or simply not letting you play a game you again PAID for due to the dvd checking being bugged beyond repair..

Thats pc gaming. Its not gaming, its pc dickin about, then possibly gaming for an hour.
Thats why im sick of PC games. After 11 years of building computers and being a diehard PC fanboy, im sick of it.
I wont accept it anymore.
There are ALWAYS tons and tons of bugs, gfx anomalies, slow slow framerate even tough some games look like SHIT, some games run smooth and look amazing, but then there is ANOTHER bug or something wrong. Maby online play doesnt even work. (Sunage, im looking at you, probably the best RTS since Starcraft, ruined by no onlineplay at release, resulting in 0 people online now that they got it working since everyone gave up on it.)

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PC games will do well with an indie development team because two people can take an open-source engine and make it into a wonder of computing, while leaving it easy enough to use.

The idea that all freeware games are crappy is bad, because, quite simply, many commercial games are crappy too. The freeware games are met with more opposition, and many do suck, but there are always some that strive to be better than the rest and succeed.

Examples: ADOM, AssaultCube, Battle for Wesnoth, Cave Story, Cube, Dwarf Fortress, Eternal Daughter, Frets on Fire, Gate88, GearHead series, GeneRally, Glest, Icy Tower, N, Sauerbraten, Seiklus, Vega Strike, from the limited category of "always free" freeware games, not including free to play and commercial to freeware, and some open source. And this is just from the list on Wikipedia that I have tried.

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psychoak

Join Date 07/2007

+225

Dear God, take an economics class...

The initial cost of developing an object is irrelevant to the price needed to make a reasonable profit. It's the cost of replicating that throws a wrench in the idea that games should have adjusted with the rate of inflation and development costs.

Replication costs have gone through the floor. It's almost nothing to stamp CD's, the cost of printing a manual now compared to 20 years ago is a very nice fortune saved. Development costs are going up, yes. Replication costs are continually decreasing. Printing media becomes cheaper, the stack of floppies were replaced by disks that don't have moving parts. The key in selling a product that has massive development costs and very little replication cost is to sell more of it. If they jacked the price up to $100 with their current shelf life, they'd all go bankrupt inside a year. The highest selling games have always been ones that stuck around on the shelves for a long time. They sold far more copies of Half-life at $20 than they did at $50. I doubt they'd make more money if they started them off lower, but they'd sure as hell make more money if they could keep them around on shelves longer or drop them down faster. At least half the games I've waited to hit $20 disappeared first and I forgot about them instead.

Regardless, the argument is irrelevant. PC gaming has no shrinkage, period. It is shrinking as a percentage of the market share in a rapidly expanding market. There are more PC games being sold now than there were 10 years ago, there's simply more console games being sold as well. It's like saying Porsche was wiped out by Volkswagen. This is not to say PC's are performance dream machines and consoles are bugs, although it's not terribly bad an analogy. The Porsche company has been healthy the entire time despite the rise of Volkswagen because they sold to the upper crust, and weren't losing sales, just becoming a smaller part in an expanding market of middle class drivers. When PC sales actually start declining, instead of shrinking in market share, then you get worried. The huge mega publishers might get out because it's too small a share for them to bother with, but they pump out shit for the most part anyway. Most of the good stuff is made by indy developers, they'll go to places like Stardock when the big fish get out of the pond.

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Why did you tell the Lord to take an economics class?

The price of developing an game might be high, but if you expect it to gross 20M copies, why charge so extortionately for each one? It cuts down sales and will limit return-appeal. Plus, it's not like it costs more than ten dollars max to create and ship a game's physical part.

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Why PC Gaming is Dying

And How To Save It