Why are pc game sales declining?

What they will simply do is increase the price point for new cards----wait a minute...

 

Good luck with that

 

If hardware development slumped it wouldn't really be a bad thing for anyone but ATi & NV. It's not like the cards we had two years ago are being pushed to their extreme limits. I think most current games are so poorly optimized that the added hardware performance is just being near totally wasted.

Personally, like I said earlier, I hope the market damn near falls apart. It would be a interesting shift for sure. And I don't think there would be much bad about it.

 

Who knows mabye it will crash and then rise and become bigger than it ever was

 

So why do you want a free xbox

Anyway the best argument for consoles killing PCs is when they allow the uer more freedom, freedom to watch DVDs (like we already had), freedom to browse the internet, freedom to put on useful programs.

Doomtrooper why dont you hook up your pc to a HDTV and use it there if it helps you get your rocks off? Since every video card now has at least s-video out it shouldn't be to difficult.

I don't have a big old HDTV cause I am poor since I waste money on PCs but I do have a computer hooked to the TV still, as a PVR and what not, it is quite nice and once I put a decent video card in it (better than the current gforce4mx) which I should be able to get a 9600 for like $30 then it will play games that look as good as the xbox, and $30 is cheap.

 

I'd say that consoles are indirectly responsible for the decline in sales. Virtually every PC game to come out these days is a cross-platform title. This has several negative impacts on PC gaming, including major concessions made to make the games console-friendly. Just look at Deus Ex: Invisible War as an example.

Like any good gaming platform, the PC needs a significant number of exclusive titles that take advantage of the platform. I mean, how successful would the PS2 have been if every single one of its major titles during its early lifespan (like Final Fantasy X, Devil May Cry, and GTA3, to name a few) had simultaneous XBox launches? Likewise, would the XBox have caught on as well as it did without the likes of Halo, Ninja Gaiden, and other exclusives?

In the end, it doesn't matter which platform is "superior"; All that matters is the one with the most amount of games that appeal to a wide audience. And I think that the number of good, exclusive PC games is dwindling - largely due to Publishers' fears of putting out a PC-only title.

When people bemoan the lack of titles like Katamari Damacy for the PC, it's not because PC developers are uncreative - it's because they're unwilling to take a chance. When fantastic, original, and deep games like Vampire: Bloodlines can only aspire to sell moderately well, making a game where you roll a ball around would be financial suicide. These days, unless the game is the sequel to an already established franchise, it's difficult to get your game green-lighted, and it will probably sell dismally.

 

Dead on Nupruptor, dead on.

 

Except this isn't true. Here are the current top 10 sellers (on the PC) according to GameSpy:

I count one game among these that is cross-platform. I seriously think that the biggest problem with PC gaming today is that too many publishers just don't get it. Spewing crap only gets you so far. You actually have to put out good games to get really good sales.

Yes, PC's are more expensive, but you also do more with them. Yes, many games are cross-platform, but there are also a large number of top-selling PC exclusives.

 

I blame WoW, world hunger, and the french!

 

Except that you make my point for me: All of the top sellers are non-cross-platform titles. Hence, there needs to be more exclusive titles if overall sales are to go up. When a title such as, say, Psychonauts is released on the XBox, PC, and PS2 simultaneously, the console versions eat into the sales of the PC version.

For the past 1.5-2 years, PC gamers have been settling for (often delayed) ports as our gaming bread and butter. At least 70% of the games I've purchased in the last year were XBox ports. Or, at the very least, designed concurrently with an XBox version.

 

Beside San Andreas(a console port) none of these are of interest to me. Where are the deep single player rpgs like fallout, planescape:torment, immersive hybrids like deusex/system shock 2, space sims like freespace 2? I'm not interested in yet another fps or online rpg(or another SIM title), which seems, are the only games being exclusively released for the PC right now. I think after being a pc gamer exclusively for the past 15 years I'll break down and buy a nextgen console(and forget pc gaming in the process, not worth spending the money on upgrades if the platform has no games I'm interested in playing).

 

Live .

ALot of my friends aren't pc freaks and now that we are old we can't allways get together . This way we can all chill .

Pcs are still my primary gaming platform .

 

if pc gaming tubes. then the market will be owned by folks who pay (pennies) for the engines that produced Halflife, NOLF, Sin, Deus Ex, etc

and great games will be available. i'd prefer more titles like these i think, than many of the top shelf one's i've played the past couple years!

AND i've only been gaming about 3 years! so it's NOT nostalgia. it's better gameplay, done by developers who loved games, moreso than money perhaps. or at least put product ahead of profit. capitalism has it's faults.

 

Well, there was Vampire the Masquerade and X2...

 

X2 is not a space action title. It's a space empire economics simulator with space travel involved because they needed graphics in there somehow )). The flight model is so terrible.... And the game just has a bad interface which is just a big big problem with it. It's not Freespace 2.

Vampire was so bugged and unfinished it was really sad..... But what is there is really great. It's like what happened to KOTOR2. An extremely promising game with either not enough time or not enough resources. KOTOR2 definitely was the former though.

KOTOR2 could have been so much better than the original. There are so many little things about it that add up to a great experience... You can just feel the dreams of Obsidian when you play it but you also see how they just didn't have time to get it all done. I play it and I see these things and I almost can't play further because I know it's just going to be like this all the way through, and everyone is bitching about how pathetic the ending is. So I don't really want to invest the time into these characters and learning about them, and the story just to be hugely let down at the end, AND by all the flaws on the way.

And there's also a good possibility that LucasArts is holding some patches back. If any of you've been following Obsidian's forum you'll know what I'm talking about. Obsidian said to expect a patch to replace the poorly encoded music and other things, back in April. That patch quietly disappeared in LucasArts' Q&A dept. It's bullshit like this that drives me insane. LucasArts used to be a tier 1 developer and look what's become of them.

The '90s were the heyday of great games on the PC. Post 2001 or so hasn't been the same at all. I'm not into MMORPGs really at all. I own Guild Wars but that's just not all that great IMO.
RTS games have 3 formulas of which the Age of Empires formula is ridiculously copied over and over. Real RPGs are decent but very few and far between. FPS games are the same as they were 4 years ago, only graphics have changed. I'm not into historical combat FPS games. I don't want to relive terrible historical events like every other red-blooded human seems to. I like a game with a great story that is not overly realistic and takes you somewhere you can only dream of in real life.

Really how many genres are still active in PC games? FPS, RTS, MMORPG, Sim, RPG. That's about it. And really only FPS and MMORPG are seriously developed. RPGs don't seem to get serious attention other than from one or two select developers. At least for serious games. I don't really include Barbie, puzzles, etc. Casual games. Consoles have more variety and what you find on consoles may really surprise you. I played thru Resident Evil 4 on Gamecube and was truly blown away by what Capcom put together there. There's NOTHING like that on PC. And nothing on PC that runs that well on 4 year old hardware yet looks nearly on par with HL2! And isn't buggy or quirky. It's truly amazing.

Overall I feel that PC gaming is basically tailored to 15 yr olds. Or at least what the industry has turned the 15yr old gamer into. Rapid fire brainless nonsense FPS for the most part. I mean, wtf is GTA SA supposed to be? What's so good about that game? It's like some downtown ghetto simulation for God's sake. But I guess that's what all the punky kids want. But OH it's rated M. Yeah and like that stops ANYONE! LOL. At least Postal 2 went to an extreme extreme.

 

Sorry jvd, but can you tell why do you thimk that a 3000$PC (at least), will make things better against this next gen consoles at 300$, and even 300$ is to much for a lot of people, plus consoles do have a lot more tipes of games (RTS are they only weak point), much better online, they are a lot easier to use (games and media), and simple things like co-op (splint screnn or online) make the deal against higher rez (HQ levels), and to end it does not offer any problem like PC.

I think that PC gaming still active (in it corrent form), because of:

Key/mouse (for some games e.g.RTS and FPS, for the others they are usualy worst IMO)
RTS
MMO
Mods(user contents)
Piracy
Some people simple prefer PCs

But even this ones are being less, because RTS,MMO and mods are starting to apear.

Anyway, take this with a (big) grain of salt , because I am a prymary a console gamer.

 

Well, I'm not sure you can completely absolve Obsidian of blame here. They've since gone to full production status on NWN2, and may not have had the funding to keep enough people working to really get KoTOR2 fixed (I'm sure Atari wouldn't like their funds being shunted to KoTOR2 patch development...).

Anyway, I really think that Obsidian has the people to make great games. They just need to either:
1. Get hooked up with publishers who have more patience or
2. Learn how to better estimate how much time things actually take.

 

Well, first of all, you could build an incredible, complete gaming machine for about $1500.

Secondly, the actual price of the PC as it relates to games is typically just going to be the cost of the graphics card and CPU: for most people, the rest of the system they'd want to have anyway in order to do non-gaming tasks. So even $1500 isn't a realistic number for the price of gaming on a PC.

And finally, the experience of gaming on a PC is still vastly different from that on a console, due to the different control interfaces, the ability to do more than just play games, and the types of games available.

 

They primarily need more clout. LucasArts couldn't manhandle Bioware like they did Obsidian and the reasons are probably because LucasArts was depending on Bioware for a good game, whereas Obsidian was brand new at the time and just wasn't able to say lay off. Even if they are composed of industry vets, they were unproven as a whole.

If you play KOTOR2 you'll see that what is there is amazing for about a year of work. I think they were only about 1/3 done by E3 of the year they released the game!

 

Oh, yeah, I've played it. And yes, that would help, but the game still would have been better if they'd been more careful about how much to implement.

Now, granted, I blame Obsidian for making a mistake, so I can't really be upset at them. I blame LucasArts for being abject assholes and totally ruining a game, so I can be quite upset at them.