Say, where did the 20 million copies bit come from? According to wiki, if you exclude bundles with the consoles, the list of games to break 20 million across all platforms consists of the original Poke'mon and The Sims, that's it. The bundled ones only add four more. I'd aim for 1-2 million for expected sales from a high budget PC game.

This is really quite informative if you have a historical knowledge of the games in the lists.

Also, that's cursing, if I disappear, either I was banned or He smote me.

Q3 is fine enough for most games, Torgue is actually good, but it doesn't do everything (only the TES engine does, and you can get it cheap, but others have to buy it (Oblivion/Morrowind, I have seen total conversions)). Second, divide 20M by 500,000. That should mean that I pay no more than $42 for a 20M budget game. Not many games have a budget that big.

Second, are you saying that Tremulous and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, wouldn't be good in a commercial market? Both of them are based off of an engine that's open-source, or have a similar engine available.

Third, ever heard of "Mount&Blade"? The shareware game that was made by a couple, and got a major publisher deal? It's not too hard to make a good game if you have a good idea and the know how and determination.

Heck, you want something that'll run a game, develop the models, do pretty much anything for you? Use Blender. It's free, open source, commercial-quality, and has its own engine with physics. You cannot convince me it's impossible to make a commercial quality game for little or no money. It's been done.

Sorry Alfonse, but you fail. And after I provided a link to the list too, typing slow bites eh?

The Sims sold 50 million copies. The king of games that is, I'll never play it on principle alone, but it sold like rubbers.

BS. It is functional for boxed-in FPS's and 3rd-person shooters. But it simply doesn't look good by today's standards and you can't do anything remotely approaching "outdoors" with it.

Oh, and the code is hard to use.



No, Torque (it's a "Q", not a "G") is not good. I'm a programmer, I've seen its code. It is crap.

Yes, you can make games with it. But nobody wants to; they do it because it would be very slightly easier than making their own from scratch.



Nonsense. The store has to get its cut for stocking it, the distributer has to get their cut for shipment costs, etc. At the end of the day, the developer may only see $10 per copy sold if that. The increase to $60 allows developers and publishers to double the rate of return per game sold.

Further, this assumes that you can't expect



ET:QWs is already on the commercial market. And the Doom3 Engine (which ET:QW is based on) is most certainly not Open Source. Also, if you have even a passing familiarity with ET:QW, you would know that they made major modifications to the Doom3 engine for the game.

And no, Tremulous would not be good in the commercial market. Not for $50. Probably not for $20. It can't hang with CoD4, TF2, or any modern multiplayer FPS.



It was started by a couple. They've expanded since then. Plus, they haven't actually released a game yet; it's still in beta.



You think Blender3D's pathetic game engine can be used to create a "commercial quality" game? You've got to be kidding, right?

Rate of return per game sold is dependent on the number of games sold. Supply and demand fluctuate with price, rising to $60 will net them a loss in numbers to go with their increase in per unit revenue, possibly leading to an increase in overall revenue to offset the development costs, possibly leading to less revenue.

Also, stores don't ignore price when factoring their percentage of the proceeds. If they upped the price to $60, the stores would expect more as well.

It was started by a couple. They've expanded since then. Plus, they haven't actually released a game yet; it's still in beta.

    It's purchasable and polished enough.

You think Blender3D's pathetic game engine can be used to create a "commercial quality" game? You've got to be kidding, right?

    Yes, it can. Macromedia Flash can be used to make a commercial quality game, it's just not as much done with Blender.

ET:QWs is already on the commercial market. And the Doom3 Engine (which ET:QW is based on) is most certainly not Open Source. Also, if you have even a passing familiarity with ET:QW, you would know that they made major modifications to the Doom3 engine for the game.

    Ah, but Wolfenstein:ET is open-source, and has similar gameplay. Plus, id releases most of the engines into the open-source community (Doom, Quake, ET) in a few years.

The problem with pc gaming is piracy. Look at the sales of cross platform games sometime. Good pc versions tend to sell 1/4 of the copys or less, even though there are way more pcs in the market capable of playing that game vs. xboxes or ps3s.

    Actually, there aren't as many gaming PC's built for gaming as there are Xboxe 360's and PS3's. There are torrents for every game, sure, but I've seen ROMs and downloadable discs for console games also, it's not impossible to pirate for consoles, most of their users are just too dunderheaded to try.

    Not to mention that consoles can't get mods or community support as easily as PC games.

The Doom 3 engine is leaps and bounds above any Q3A variant, including the ones used for the most recent titles like Jedi Academy. There should be absolutely zero comparisons between the two.



You can make a commercial quality game with QBASIC. Dwarf Fortress is a game that could have been commercial but is made up of ASCII tiles. Technically, you're right in that you can make a commercial quality game with Blender, but you're wrong in that your chances are extremely slim and on par with patenting an invention by using Widget Workshop.

That's exactly the opposite of what I said. If you read it in context, I was saying that despite primitive graphics _anything_ can go commercial. I'm also saying that while there are a ton of stand-out games using old or primitive graphics that could go commercial, the vast majority do not, and the average chances get worse. Using a game engine that subsists on physically dropping in logic gates and Python scripts is not going to help your chances. It's an "easy way in" to learning game development but it's no more than that.



Okay, so I read about and watched videos of that game on YouTube. Its quality reminds me of Jedi Knight 2 or worse - whether that's poor map design, poor modeling, or what have you isn't clear, but what I can tell you is I've been mapping for the Q3A engine for four years or so and know quite a bit about it, and while it can be made to look good it's pretty obsolete by today's standards.

It is not "open-source". Enemy Territory is freeware. And how "similar" it's gameplay is to ET:QW is up for debate.



No, they release them when they're done making money off them, when they're so obsolete for high-end games that nobody would use them for such.



OK, go ahead and try to sell a text adventure, then. We'll see how far that goes.

Any genre that relies on plain-text descriptions is not commercially viable. It's as simple as that.

If brute force doesn't solve the problem, you are not using enough.

Text adventures have far more gameplay than any Rogue-game I've ever played. Gameplay is not the same as the "gamble-play" that Rogue games favor.

Gameplay != killing stuff and looting rooms.

And no, ASCII art of that kind is not commercially viable either.

The demise of PC gaming... Stuff comes up about this every 18 months or so and has done for the last decade. Usually coincides with something big releases on the consoles. (Or the consoles themselves.)

Dying? No. A paradigm shift? Definitely. I think that there has been a "visual revolution" where games look prettier. However, there has been lacking (in my opinion) an element of fun and creativity. Many new games are simply better looking rehashes of previous ideas. But I think we have yet to see PC gaming hit its peak. PC gaming can only grow as much as the market will bear. I think there has to eventually be a leveling off in requirements. (At least I hope so).

I think that the PC is still a far better platform than the consoles, which tend to bore me.