Lucas Arts >?

I was talking to a friend of mine from the US, who works for one of the major game developers and he informed me rather shakily about an internal memo that said 5 of the major players in the industry are moving away from PC Games development, and that his company is also considering taking this action.

He quoted Lucas Arts and ID, as being on the list in his internal memo.

Has anyone else seen anything of this online public domain ?

So what are they going to do now? Database Applications? :-p

I'll have to consult my memos.

Make games for the console market only apparently...

Seems like a rather shortsighted move if you ask me since the PC market drives the hardware, and the console market is still playing catch up to PC hardware.

Iv been using google to try and track down any public information on this but can only find a few scattered articles from people on 3Dshack and other game related sites that seem to indicate its true without actually comeing out and saying it.

There must be a press release some place about this. need to dig more till I find it.

Never happen.

Why would a developers 'internal memo' have details of rival companies strategies?

Don't have a clue, depends on who sent the memo i guess. you telling me that all the memo's you get at work if you get any at all are always about your own company ?

Iv seen some hilarious memo's companies name and shame their rivals products and have a piss laugh doing it.

Having not actually seen the memo I don't know, only going on what my friend told me about it. and only reason I post here to ask if anyone else knows anything is cos I know he does not read these forums, I really should not have said anything but it got my attention fast as it would have HUGE implications for the small indie developer as well as the AAA developer.

Who did you work for?

True or not the trend towards consoles has been obvious for a few years now.

A few more companies jump ship, oh well...

...except there's nothing official. And probably won't be.

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/09/id-software-ceo-piracy-pushed-us-multiplatform/

Apparently Hollenshead shed some light on the reasoning behind id software's console fondling during his 'The Videogame Piracy Problem: Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest' lecture.

I seriously doubt any big league PC devs are going to fully bail on the PC market. There's still much money to be made. Who cares if they do anyway? More room for indies to stomp in and take control. Someone needs to create an Indie Developer magazine.

This better not be true considerng I just spent 1.5K on a new system.

I think prior to the advent of broadband, software piracy wasn't such a problem because it was so inconvenient to download a 300 mb file. Now that download size is no longer an issue, I don't mind online registration systems like Steam.

I hope it is true. Would mean lots of money for indies.

Aside from burning CDs and passing them around, torrents are the main reason piracy is so rampant. It's almost as if publishers are scared of losing money from cracking down harder on piracy. I'm sure there are more measures that could be taken to prevent it.

Regardless, the more consoles become mainstream the more they will be subject to piracy.

Yes. But more importantly how would this company know what its rivals were planning?

No, it'd mean that the only games PC owners would be able to play, would be cruddy, bland crap from the likes of Vulcan Software. And that "Rise of the Robots" abomination.

Farbeit for me to hark back to the death of Amiga.

lol GfK :)

mmmmm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_PC_game_sales_in_the_US

Though, thats really not enough to show that many people are in fact moving from PC's to play their games, its a good point where it states MMORPG could cause a down trend, I mean, people were seriously hooked on WoW!

It might also mean people are getting more out of their games than before, I mean, GTA, Oblivion etc are massive games, that in effect, you dont really need another one for months!

Maybe game design got better, and more people are playing the same games longer

Dabz

[EDIT] Added more, needed loo! :)

Until devs are able to use consoles to develop games...with no PC interaction...there will be PC games. It would be silly not to release a PC version.

"There's a deeper issue in this, and that's 'what do we need from platforms?' Look, I spoke to some people at Microsoft, and as I said, I can't point to a single feature in Vista that I care about that solves problems for us. At all." - Gabe Newell

Priceless.

:)

Dabz

P.S. I still like vista though! ;)

In my opinion the only time Microsoft cares about piracy is if it affects their product(s). Otherwise they could care less. Should they?

talking about vista, and I know this is OT but its my thread so tuff..

I walked into my living room just as an add was finishing , having not seen it since I was sure I heared on the TV that some mag UK was giving vista away on its cover, it might have been computer active or something... anyone else see the add, ?? they could have just been talking about vista I dont know..

> In my opinion the only time Microsoft cares about piracy is if it affects their product(s).

Just like every other company.

I saw the advert, not sure what they were on about though! :)

Dabz

That is, unless you lose the email address you started the steam account up with and then forget the Steam password.
Then you're just outta luck. Like me. I bought a number of steam products that I can no longer use.

Stupid system.
</offTopic>

Do LucasArts still _make_ games anymore? I thought they just got other companies to build on their licenses for them.

ID don't make games, they make engine demos.

Who else do you have?

The death of PC gaming has come up as much as the death of BSD. PC gaming is practically dead as it is. Other than some good exceptions, what do you have? WWII shooters and other FPSes. For everyone else, we have MMORPGs. I haven't bought a new PC game in ages.

Even console gaming is pretty dead. You have the same racing games, the same FPS games, the same sports games, the same Japanese RPGs, the same licensed junk. You have good exceptions here too, but overall, there's not much. The Wii had me excited because of the new input method, but so far it's just a place for lazy Gamecube ports with the Wii-mote control tacked on (kinda how the DS used to be with ported games and the stylus.)

I play quite a range of new games on the PC. It's true that there are a lot of FPS's amd MMORPG's. But there are plenty of good games that come out too.

These are the games I currently have installed on my PC.

RPG, RTS/Strategy, RTS, and a Racing Game, all outstanding and released within the last few months.


Oblivion
+ Knights of the Nine
++ Shivering Isles

Medieval 2

Company of Heroes

GTR2

its about time pc games got a shakeup, not everyone looks forward to the fiftieth incarnation of Doom or the hundredth RTS that plays exactly the same as the other ninety nine.

Sure loads of game ideas are out there but the big companies still churn out the crap games. If PC games are to die its because we let them die, we should have bought titles that didnt fit the norm but were good to play instead of that EA sport title or the other RTS.

I think if some companies left the PC market there might actually be some decent games coming out instead of the shelves being filled with the latest WOW upgrade or sims expansion pack.

With PC sales having a steady decline (recent surges exclusively World of Warcrafts fault) and the rest of the video game market shooting through the roof, it seems like the only sensible conclusion.

So when people fling around phrases like "piracy is killing PC games" it doesn't bring back any memories at all? :o>

No. It's going to happen for the same reason it happened to the Amiga. The big players are going to stop developing games for it. It's not going to matter what indies do (like it didn't matter what Vulcan Software did), because most (everyone except Blizzard) of them don't have the market penetration needed to drive the market forward. Looks like Blizzard and Will Wright are the last bastions of hope for PC gaming.

BTW vista was on several magazine cover dvds as a silver edition, a bootable dvd, with a couple of apps (guess paint.eve, minsweeper etc.:) ). It's a pretty good emergency bootdisk since it handles all partitions including vista, fat, nt, linux etc.

The reason why they can do that is the windows automated installation kit WAIK that contains the vista core and may be downloaded as an image from microsoft for free. You may also need winbuilder.exe to manage the installation of additional tools for your vista boot dvd or cd. You can do this even on older windows machines, although MSXML 6.0 must be installed.

This happens through every Games Console cycle.

Year 1: PC Games are HOT
Year 2: PC GAmes are Warm
Year 3: Ooh. Those new consoles are coming out next year
Year 4: Consoles Are HOT! PC Games Warm
Year 5: Consoles hit their stride with 2nd Gen Games. PC Games are cold
Year 6: Consoles start to Show their Age, PC Technology vastly superior by now and PC's are getting Warmer
Year 7: PC Games are HOT! consoles warm
...

> This happens through every Games Console cycle.

It didn't happen through the last one, PC games have been on a slide ever since they came out. (discounting WOW that is)

Personally I use the "EB Game shelf space" rule, the less space a system has in EB Games the worse it is doing, in my local area PC games are now half a shelf in a store with 20+

@dynaman,
Internet.

PPl with PC more likly to by PC Games Online than ppl with console. Also steam etal electronic download.

Agree with Shelf space Idea, (I Use Game), but PC games not compariable market to consol Games ATM.

In my opinion, right now is one of those drought seasons for decent (and original) AAA games.
Happens all the time. (And indeed, it sucks).

I wouldn't be surprised if LucasArts gave up on PC, though; they lost their way a long time ago. They used to make games that would only suit the PC (or at this point also Wii and DS, I guess), but now all they care about is half-assed Star Wars re-rehashes and other such cheap first person shooters, each one of less quality than the last.

Besides that, AAA games these days get a release on every platform imaginable; Cell phones, XBox 360, Windows, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS, Game Boy, PSP... it's ridiculous!
The reason why there is a decline is because people are not choosing between games: They're choosing between which hardware manufacturer has the biggest mouth.

What I worry about is that the PC has traditionally been a home for the more unusual AAA titles - 'sleeper' games that don't sell well, wouldn't be contemplated by console game publishers but are recognised as extending the art (perhaps years later).

With the advent of broadband piracy, I worry the margins for those sorts of games will/has dried up and the market is shrinking/moving to 'safer' console titles.

We desperately need another 1998.. Games that aren't even really THAT good look amazing.. Take God of War 2. Sure. It is a really good game, but it isn't really all that ground breaking, it doesn't introduce anything new, even GoW1 didn't really invent anything.. The game has a nicely crafted story, and some pretty nice settings.. But in the end, it really is the same old. Jungle, Ice, Fire worlds we see over and over.. The formula is the same.. Level, Miniboss, Level, Boss so on. It is really short.

Compare that to what OoT was, or Starcraft... or a host of other games from that general timeframe..

It wasn't just the move to 3D either. Starcraft wasn't 3D, neither was Fallout.

Again, a few years back we had a small 4D revolution, with Blinx, Prince of Persia and some other games... That could have meant some great new gameplay styles, like the 3D revolution before it.. With OoT and even Mario 64... but it didn't happen... It was very gimmicky.. And that is the problem.

Gameplay schemes have become "Take established genre A, and add in gimmicks B C and D."

They didn't make the Z-targeting in OoT into a gimmick, they made it make the gameplay work.. In a lot of ways it created a whole new genre, the 3D action/adventure... Prior to that, you only really had 2D action/adventure games.. Like the other Zelda games.. Without the lock on, it wouldn't have worked..

They failed to really make Time elements into something required... PoP did pretty well... And God Of War 2 did a great job of bringing time slowdown into great effect.. but it isn't what the game is all about... And in PoP it was more a way to prevent death... Infact, that's how they came up with the whole concept..

We don't need to have dimentional upgrades to evolve gameplay... We need to stop being tied to genres..

Indie games shouldn't be worried about marketability.. They should be worried about making great games in great new genres.. Unfortunately... Many indie designers are out to either make it rich, or realisticly to just make some money... If you want to do that.. get a job at a game company after you make a few games... Why bother being indie if you are going to be a slave to the same things the AAA people are slaves too?