Ubisoft jumps on the bandwagon.

The PC is the new Amiga. Read it and weep, history does repeat itself. Just waiting for this generations Martyn Browns to blame it all on low scores in PC Power, then we'll be all set.

Damn! Ubi was the only PC developer I valued..

There is piracy on every platform they are just using it a whipping boy to try to explain the demise of the PC gaming market. The PC simply makes it easier to pirate games because it was never designed as a games machine in the first place and that is NOT it's primary function.

The market is dying off because the PC's last main advantage; HD Gaming, has now been lost to consoles. So (for gaming) there is now nothing that you can do on the PC that you can't do on a console (if they wanted to release an Offical Xbox 360 mouse they could in a second).

People are voting with their wallets and PC gaming is no longer the driving force in gaming. You can buy a console for the price of a single grapnics card upgrade and you will never have to spend any more money on it, you certainly won't need any performance upgrades and you can enjoy games at a higher resolution than most PC's can manage.

For me that was one of the drivers behind switching to console gaming, I've decided, I'm not going to spend any money on PC performance upgrades ever again, I will just replace parts as necessary when they wear out. If a PC game requires I upgrade my hardware, I won't buy it and if I want high performance gaming I will use the console.

I'm not weeping for the loss of PC gaming, it's always been the same: Adapt and survive or don't and die.

Darkheart

perhaps if they lowered their sights a little with regards to system requirements
a little out of whack analogy
perhaps when they were selling games that needed 486dx machines with cirrus logic accelerated cards the 'average' gamer was happy with their 286 and low end vga

im in the id rather play on the console camp for most of my gaming habbits (which are now few and far between)

edit:
ive just read the article and most of the comments
a pc version MIGHT come out some 6 months later, but if you own a console what incentive is there to buy the pc version?
they are not only loosing out potential sales to pirate versions (who might never buy it anyway) but also to console owners who would have bought the pc version given the choice but 6 months later the game is completed and no longer wanted and recycled so many times in game that it sees more consoles than your average nightclub staff turnaround (least the one i had the misfortune to work in for 4 days)

They just need a reason not to comply with the very vast range of hardware out there.
And also, like Ginger Tea said, they create games for a non-existing market on the PC. My flatmate tried the latest Warhammer Online on his machine (a decent Athlon64 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, 7600GT) and it runs to a crawl (~10FPS) on minimum settings. Why on Earth wouldn't it run decently on this type of machine? If we look back at the Valve survey, 50% of people have either an integrated graphics card or something weaker than a 6600; 50% have less than 1GB of RAM, 50% only have a single core. They create games that can run of 10% of the machines out there. However, 99% of XBOX360 owners have the machine to run the next XBOX360 title - the other 1% got the red ring ahahaha.

Odd. WAR runs pretty good on my machine, which in every aspect but RAM is worse than your mates.

Type your name into the high score chart?

There is a massive market for PC games, there just isnt a massive market for high end latest hardware only games. PC gamers tend to be a bit more mature in years than the average console player and as a result they've seen all these games before, it takes something innovative to make me purchase yet another RTS/FPS etc game. That happens so rarely now that i've stopped looking at commercial titles completely.

They havn't lost their market to piracy, they just aren't catering for the market that is there with their games and then are blaming it on piracy.

For years the mature market has been telling the industry "we are tired of the same old rubbish with prettier graphics" and for years the industry has been saying "hmmm we dont think people want anything other than more of the same".

RTS games are still better on the PC too.

i agree on alot of the reasons why some games dont make it to consoles, some of it is the controll method or lack of keyboard, i dont know if the chat board or the ps3 keyboard clip on things work the same way as a keyboard would if plugged in, but i cant see that many wanting to use either long term.

and if anyone has ever played megalomania on the mega drive (or the tvgame version that came out with sensi soccer and another sensi mega drive game) youll know that it was pants to controll with a dpad compared to a mouse and it had little to no gfx overhaul from the amiga version
same as bloodwych 2 player joystick, without a grid snapping method (which it lacked) it was just too slow moving from one end of the screen to another wheras the mouse just nipped in seconds

I think someone is forgetting Mods. Counter strike would have never seen the light if Half-Life hadn't been a PC title.

Dont' forget all teh customised game settings and maps on counterstrike on PC, one of the many reasons it never got popular on consoles.

Not forgetting the last big benefit of PC's over consoles. Anyone can write a game and release it on a PC, none of this closed off market that consoles have and high cost of entry for new developers.

you can alos depend on PC's having hard drives, which you can't do with consoles right now (Wii doesn't, xbox arcade doesn't).

PC games are also much more open for releasing expandsion packs that console games.

Did you know the Xbox 360 supports any USB keyboard out of the box? All consoles have "virtual keyboards" available too and have for some time.

XNA provides a development platform for both the Xbox 360 and the PC and while "anyone" can release on the PC there is also a lack of a focused marketplace and centralised support means your chances of getting noticed and building up a user base is much lower. PC's are actually moving closer to consoles with Portals being the big selling agents for casual PC games.

The sure signs that PC gaming is dying off are:

PC game prices are dropping everywhere, even mainstream new games are now selling for £20 or less.
The number of PC games released is declining year on year, and has since 2002, this year I think it will reach a critical low in which it will be difficult for the major players to stay "in" the PC market, expect to see many more PC game projects cancelled.
Nearly all AAA titles are now releasing on Consoles first and most innovation is being done on them, the only two genres that are sometimes still releasing on PC first are FPS/RTS.

Darkheart

With XNA mods are a possability on the console, the game itself would have to allow it as well though. If I had to speculate I would say that Sony and Nintendo will eventually come out with something similar as well.

Without a mouse I'm still not playing console games though. (I'm just too darned old to get used to a console style controllers - and the Wii still was not responsive enough for me to use)

Can you use a mouse as a controller? If not, I doubt I'll ever become a "console gamer".


Exactly. They have nobody to blame but themselves if their games don't sell well.

I refer to my earlier posts on this thread, it has been possible to use a mouse with the 360 for ~2 years and a keyboard since launch...

Darkheart

-=Darkheart=-: You have to buy an adapter? Well, it's pretty nice that you can use a mouse, but there's really no point because you'd probably get banned if you tried using it online anyway (nobody could compete with you).

Besides, what I meant was consoles will never really be a "keyboard and mouse" system because they're not meant to be used on a desk as a computer is, and it would be a big hassle to use anything but the default controllers.

Yes you have to buy an adapter, because so few people want or need to do this, but a moment ago it was such a big barrier to entry you wouldn't consider buying one unless you could do so.

I don't understand how anyone could tell wether you used mouse or the default controller, it just plugs into one of the USB slots. TBH most people who haven't had to do it for any length of time overestimate the difficulty of using dual analog sticks. It feels wierd at first and takes some getting used to, but after a while it just comes naturally. This is very similar actually to when I started using a keyboard and mouse which felt so strage the first time I played my first FPS.



Doesn't seem like a big hassle to me, if you want to use a mouse and keyboard you plug your mouse and keyboard into the adapter (two USB connections, 2 seconds) and the USB adapter into the 360 USB port. Seems pretty simple to me.

I think you are just making excuses.

Darkheart

Piracy didn't kill the Amiga. The inept suits at Commodore managed to do that all by themselves.

Sorry, but I'm not. Like I said, the problem isn't plugging it in (even though you have to buy an adapter), but setting up surfaces for the mouse / keyboard. Normally a console like the XBox360 is connected to the TV, and used from a couch, etc. If you set up a desk to use a keyboard / mouse as a controller, it defeats the purpose of it being a console and becomes a hassle to use unless you set up a permanent desk, in which case it becomes a crippled PC taking up room.


Of course, you can aim fairly precisely with an analog stick, but it doesn't even come close to the efficiency, precision, and speed of a mouse. For example with a mouse in an FPS, I can rotate 180 degrees and aim for a 20 pixel diameter area easily in less than half a second. In a RTS, the advantages are even more obvious, as you can select and command units very quickly if you're good with the mouse.

I don't really see the attraction to console games. For the most part they are too simplistic and target the lowest common denominator gameplay wise. Like someone mentioned earlier, I played them all before in one form or another these past 25 years. The only thing that stands out is the graphics but all great graphics do is highlight the shortcomings in other areas like typicaly linear mechanical on/off gameplay AI and triggers, linear storylines and basic stat building and collecting is what makes up 90% of games.

Should game mechanics get some love that matches graphics I might actually be interested in playing games again. On the PC I've played Gears of War, Race Driver Grid, Assasins Creed, etc. All incredibly shallow boring games. The only games I have enjoyed in the past year was Witcher and Crysis and Mass Effect. Crysis was fun till you got to the aliens, and Mass Effect was ruined if you picked the wrong main quest early on before you got into the human characters. The Aliens were all a but meh. Assasins Creed was just a tech demo, and other games did Gears of war better, including MOH Airborne, allthough it was nice of GOW to introduce the cover mechanics, the game was just too simple, kind of like frogger with guns.

Kieron Gillen once made an interesting point about mouse/keyboard control having reduced FPSs to floating-head galleries -- control without constraint doesn't necessarily add to the experience for everyone.

Have you played any modern PC games? By adding swaying motions, random firing inaccuracies, etc. you can have a very realistic, fun, balanced gameplay.

Of course any game where every bullet hits exactly where the crosshairs are wouldn't be fun. That's why good PC games involve a level of skill in the aiming mechanics just as anything else (and there are a lot of badly designed PC games like this, usually when they're ported from consoles).

It's probably time for you to just get a new hobby LOL.

You're talking about some of the most fun games around. A lot of people dumped on Assassin's Creed for being redundant but Gears of War and GRID were sweet. I'm very surprised you didn't enjoy the racer, the cars in it had a very nice feel with the in-car view. Grated I played the Xbox 360 version on a 60" HD set at my cousin's which might have offered a different experience than a PC monitor but still that game was a rush.

I do think there's a point a gamer can reach where they stop letting their imagination aid the gameplay experience and they just become apathetic. If you sit there and think about games in a stark fashion there's really nothing exciting about them. It's not like you can actually gain something real from them, it's all in the mind of the beholder.

Additionally, I played all of those games with other people (at least in the room taking turns). I know you're real big on single player stuff which changes the game.

I thought Grid was exciting visually but rubbish where controls and handling were concerned. Just a little realism would have gone a long way but the turn in was all wrong for cornering and didn't feel like you were driving a car at all even though it all looked great. I really wanted to like it but couldn't. Was a bit better with a real force feedback wheel than with a gamepad but not much.

If they have spent more time on the controls and feel it would have been a really good game. I guess I just prefer my racers closer to a Sim with some realism. Which Grid doesn't have. Even arcage racers like Burnout have FAR better controls, so it's not really the lack of realism that I dislike about it.

I think I just played them for too long. Still remember playing space invaders coin op in 1978. When you play the same game for 30 years with different clothes it just gets boring. Things just haven't moved along all that much these last 5 years.

Have you tried Live for Speed AdrianT? I'm a simmer when it comes to race games myself and that one has by far the best physics at the moment - although i've not tried iRacing as it's just a little too much on the pricey side for my purse. rFactor has a lot of mods some of which can be quite atmospheric, but LFS' physics are wicked good.

Yeah, I like LFS, GTR2, and rfactor. I didn't really expect Grid to be anything like those since they are pure sims, but I had hoped that the cars would turn in and lose traction in a more believable if not semi realistic way.

I still like GTR2 best despite it's age, with LFS and rfactor both tied for second place. On consoles I really liked PGR 1&2, and Forza was pretty good, the burnout series was fun for a short time too but didn't have much longevity.

I liked GTR2 as it has atmosphere and some goods mods but I have a MS Sidewinder wheel which is bugged on the ISI engine, if I clip a kerb the FF starts but then never stops. I spent ages playing with config files and meant to try that realfeel plugin but I kinda got to a point where I thought if the game is so bugged it wont work with a proper steering wheel out of the box why should I spend days flaffing around trying to get it fixed. It's not like mine is an obscure wheel - it's the mother of all FF wheels as the one which started the whole thing. Anyway i'm that chick who did the CTRA thingy. :wave:

Gears may have been simple but it's one of the most fun games I've played in ages and Assasin's Creed was a little reptitive but it was a great experience and stunningly beautiful, Burnout Paradise was the simultaneously the most fun and most annoying driving game I've ever played.

You can always find things to critise but to attempt drag the thread back on topic the Xbox definatly has the best games portfolio at the moment and the PC is just hanging on. Unless they find a new USP for the PC it's destined for the end of it's carear is a games device and it's back to the office for the PC.

The PS3 has tested to destruction the concept of people paying extra for an all-in-one home enternatiment system and it's not what people want, at least right now.

Darkheart

They'll be back.

Now you're just talking in circles. Is mouse/keyboard better because it's more precise or not? You can't have it both ways.

Just because people say something doesn't mean it true... show me the numbers, I've yet to see any substantiated numbers from the software industry. I've seen far too much information that refutes these claims. Not that there isn't piracy, but that there is plenty of support for a company to make big profits. look at my response in the last thread about the supposed death of pc gaming. for gods sake even crysis, a game with super high HW requirements sold over 1.5 million as May and returned it's $200 million development costs and is now making profit. oh my, when it first came out it was supposedly "plagued" by piracy too. hmmm.

I like this posters thinking although I can't substantiate it

Obviously it's a preference thing, but personally I like the mouse better. Again, it's not only the precision, but the speed that it gives you. For example you can quickly glance left/right or even behind you as you could in real life, but with an analog stick you have to (relatively) slowly rotate around, making it impractical.

What I said about games introducing random firing inaccuracies simply means that the argument saying it makes it unrealistically easy to place precision shots is wrong. A well implemented mouse based game is far more fun, to me, than a well implemented analog-stick based game.

Although it does depend on the game. For example racing games and flight simulations are better with stick controls than mouse controls.

People will always need a PC to do important stuff with. The Amiga
was replaced by the PC, a new computer system might replace the PC
but not a console ....

well seeing as im guessing they still make a loss on hardware sales and take a pinch out of the price tag 2+2=4 or 5?
you decide

but i like the fact that consoles are a closed system
A> you dont have to upgrade every so often to play the game, ok they might downgrade bits to fit on the console once its starting to look long in the tooth
B> you know that it will work out of the box (assuming developers get out of the pc mantra of ship it and patch it later)
C> developers only have to worry about a limited amount of hardware specs, 360, ps3 and wii the mine field happens with the pc version

dont forget that pc originally stood for personal computer and that factored in nigh on every home micro at one point so the pc will be replaced by a *shock horror* pc
the king is dead long live the king ;)

i never saw the amiga as a business machine, trying to use workbench on most tellys was always a blurry affair and the price of a new amiga + commodor monitor = just shy of the price of an entry level pc
and when i worked in an indi/amstrad dealer pc shop when they said "just games" we showed em the amiga, then theyd start adding other things that the amiga could do it just didnt seem to do them better than a pc
and im sure it got to a point that some of their 486sx's matched or came in lower than an a1200 with hard drive let alone monitor on top

I believe the C64 was originally marketed as a business machine.

Rockstar is doing the same with Grand Theft Auto. Ubisoft never got much of my attention tbh, they are just another spinoff Electronic Arts or Activision getting their hands on as much as they can, and maximizing profits all they can.

and like the amiga who used it as one in an office ;)

Regarding "The PC is the new Amiga", what exactly is this supposed to mean? Do you think PC's will suddenly die out simply because less people are playing games on them? If anything, laptops will become more popular, but there's no way Personal Computers are going to "die".

I don't know much about the Amiga, but I assume it was abandoned in favor of the similar but superior PC/Mac systems. In this case (PC vs. Console) it's an entirely different matter - businesses aren't going to abandon PCs and stick XBox360's in their offices and try to do business on those.

oh i dunno i heard sage accounts for the game boy was a big seller in its day

:P

When push comes to shove, that's all that really matters (and why we could argue about whether constrained control is 'better' or not forever without coming to a conclusion). But I doubt anyone could be surprised to find that gaming PCs are too expensive and PC games too 'same old' for even that preference, where it is held, to translate into a healthy market.


Yeah the analogy really has nothing to do with the PC dying out, it's to do with the PC dying out as a mainstream gaming platform.

that and commodor going belly up thus killing the machine's future, if other people made amigas too who knows what it would be by now.
thats how the pc survived it wasnt governed by one companies idea (ok it kinda is in a way thank you microsoft ;) ) if ibm kept it all in house to start with wed have a totally different computer to use in the home and ibm's would probably still have green screens

The Amiga died out partly because it was a closed system kind of like a console, but with a keyboard and later HD built in. Development of the hardware stagnated and the PC overtook it graphically and was upgradeable so developers focused on that and the Amiga fell on the wayside.

Consoles do have an advantage early on when they are new and the hardware often outdoes a high end PC at a fraction of the cost. But these days Consoles have a hard time keeping up with PC tech in almost any area other than convenience. PC's aren't going anywhere, but they could lose some of their usefulness in the home if web browsing and email became more common place and everyone had high res HDTV.

Banshee, you can pick up logitech FF wheels pretty cheap used. I got one originally designed for the PS2 but being USB and having PC drivers for it all the games work really well.

This is absolutely fantastic news. The more major publishers that bail out on the PC (for rediculous reasons or otherwise), the more of a market there is for US. Just waiting for EA to leave the scene now, which will probably happen when their shareholders start asking why their latest DRM scheme hasn't helped to curve piracy whatsoever.

I won't personally miss any major publishers on the PC anymore. They just don't make games that I like.

yay - this is great news indeed ! :)
Have a Great Weekend everyone !!! :)

The Amiga was murdered by the game developer industry dropping it like a bad habit and blaming piracy. You worked for Gremlin, you know the score. The Amiga was dead long before Commodore went bankrupt, it just took a long time to die.

Which they had blatantly ripped off from Rogue Trooper.

It doesn't have to be true. It just has to be probable, at which point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just like the death of the Amiga, or the current economic "crisis". Here is how it works:
Posit: Developers think the PC platform isn't cost-effective.
Consequence: Developers stop developing games for the PC platform.
Result: Pretty soon, the PC platform isn't cost effective.
Conclusion: You can kill a platform, without having the numbers to back it up. Just like it happened with the Amiga.

Sure, but not a PC capable of also playing games. Look at the current trend; 9/10 of the best selling "PC's" are ULCPC's and netbooks! Besides the Amiga was replaced by the PlayStation, not the PC.

Yes. Because games are the only market left in which there is still a little competition. Once the PC is no longer a viable games machine, technology will stagnate, because not only is there no competition to drive the technology forward as Microsoft pretty much have everything else monopolized, but there is no need for having a real PC, when a netbook or iPhone will do everything else you could ever possibly need a PC for.

Why not? The XBox 360 is an excellent thin client, and it's much, much cheaper than a similarly powerful PC. The idea that businesses can keep you alive in a competitive market, is exactly the reason the Amiga failed. When there is no incentive to buy a product, it doesn't sell really well. Look at Vista.

I'm sure Team 17, Vulcan Software and clickBOOM said the exact same thing. Unfortunately neither of them could live up to the demand, and by the time clickBOOM finally managed to ship Napalm, nobody cared any more. No. I'm afraid a market simply needs competition and capital to survive.

It wont be long before Console games too are released with bugs and such, once they start providing internet updates and patches for them, the bandwagon for rushed shipping and later hotfixes will happen on consoles too.

I dont see piracy as having that big an effect on the PC gaming market.
Consoles survive because he younger generation want to kjust play games out of the box, with less messing about. The multiplayer aspect of consoles (not net based either, but two or more people sat aroud the same console) is something that home computers for general lack of multiple controller inputs and games designed for this (Yes, it's easily possible, but games are just not being or have not been designed for this - I'm talking generally, don;t flood me with references to the meagre few games that do support multiplayer functionality on PC) has meant that consoles far beat the PC in this manner of 'social gaming'. The huge popularity of quick, fun online multiplayer games for the PC shows how it appeals to the market. Though even online is not the same as sitting with your friends in the same room.

LAN parties etc. are just not readily possiblee for the majority of youngsters, so the console and their friends to p[lay as well is clearly the winning combination.

Malice,
I'm hoping that console games will stay at a higher general standard of release quality because:

1 Hardware standard is easier to manage and therefore showstopping performance problems can (and certainly should) be ironed out before production.

Driver issues (a major source of problems on the PC) should not be a problem.

Although many consoles can now be connected to the internet very easily; it is not gauranteed, by any means, that this will actually be so; therefore if a game ships with a showstopping bug then they are likely to get a lot more returns and bad reviews and these problems will be unrecoverable for a significant portion of users.

Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo themselves do QA on anything released for the platform and it's not in their interest to damage the rep of their platform no matter how much commercial preesure a publisher might bring to bear these companies can brush them off if they need to. The big companies do have the ability to say, "You can't release this until it's in a fit state to be released.".

You could be right, but I hope we never get into a situation as bad as PC gaming where at one point more than 10 patches was considered acceptable.

Darkheart

Did you know R* paid the £20-odd thousand pound licence fee to release a PS game 5 times for GTA:SA because they found major show stopping bugs after they had already submitted their final build and on some instances where already starting production runs.


None of which where picked up by Sony.

Dont be fooled into thinking that licence fee is anything at all to do with QA. It is purely to keep out us the little guys. Business is about profit and money, it is absolutely not about the end user, under any circumstances, what-so-ever, ever, period. Screw 'em, and screw 'em hard... Then again Sony is also the firm which said of it's early faulty PS3's "The unit powers off periodically as a design feature to stop kids spending too long infront of the screen"... Go figure.

On one hand, it makes sense to do console development if you are a large company. While PC gamers will blame your design for bad sales, console gamers just buy whatever they are told to. If you are investing 2 million in a game, it's easier to sell it on a platform where no one will care how good your execution is.

On the other hand, it does feel like MS is trying to move gaming off onto their own controlled platform, and fix it so anyone who wants to make a game has to pay them tens of thousands of dollars. I think the big studios like it because they are too big and bloated to be creative, and they are afraid of competition from up-and-coming studios. I mean, compare Unreal Tournament 3 or Gears of War to STALKER and you see Epic cannot compete on a level playing field anymore.

This does present some unique opportunities for companies that focus on the PC. Do you think FPSCreatorX would be NVidia and Microsoft's showcase for DirectX 10 if Epic was still in the PC market?

Some years ago (1996 I think) I bought Psygnosis' Formula One for the Sony Playstation, it had quite a few bugs and not very subtle ones either. One bug was that if you switched 'pit stops' on in the options, the CPU cars would at some stage drive into the pits and from that moment onward they'd drive into the pits EVERY lap. I had been looking forward to that game so much.. looking at the same magazine screenshots for months, I guess it had become too good in my imagination.

In fact I think I recognize some of those screenhots here:

http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/articles/look_ahead/formula_1_world_championship/

"the most realistic F1 driving game to date"

Hehe, not quite, but ok, that's what you get with previews.

Valid and true, but I just do not see the PC market crumbling in the same way. As was said previously PCs are not just going to dissappear because there aren't any games being released for it and you don't hear app companies complaining about piracy left right and center and their apps usually cost $rediculous. So OK the average PC may not be able to play cutting edge games but the thought of an all-casual market is likely to make some people wet.


You obviously havn't seen the state of The Orange Box on the PS3. That time is already here and what's worse is that PS3 Orange Box got as many updates as a regular EA product and is now dropped. Still broken.


Well, something went horribly wrong with Sonys QA for The Orange Box. Seems like that's a common occurrence for Sony...

i wont be taking my 360 online when i get it, (im on mobile broadband with usb dongle and even if it did work with the 360 its probably too slow for online gaming) so if any games are broken on mastering i think ill be sending em back to the shops

they need to get back into the mind set of 'carved in silicone' as i think they used to say of cartriges
make sure it works first time every time

ok some levels might have a glitch that you cannot replicate without playing for hours solidly (without cheat mode enabled, who knows perhaps cheatmode 'fixes' the bug so its never found) so some do fail at points beyond resonable controll
when working in indi pc shop some guy wanted to return his amiga game cos on level 17 this that or tother happened
how are we to know that he didnt just copy it and make up an excuse that wed have to spend ages on to prove otherwise just to get his money back

you missed my point but effectively made it with your comment.... it's not *piracy* that's "killing" the pc games market, it's the major players trying to do it on purpose! They have the belief that they can maximize profits and control the market by controlling the hardware.

I just spent $70 on the new Settlers, a Ubisoft title, and between the two ridiculous bugs (scrolling by moving to the screen edge stops working if a story character is on screen, and a hard crash is possible) and sheer boredom of the game, I only spent a few hours on it before giving up. Piracy might be a problem, but focusing on what you can control - the quality of your games - seems to be a better idea.

Yeahh right... If piracy is no problem for consoles, how come prices of console titles are equivalent to PC titles? Isn't piracy always conveniently used as the tired excuse for the ridiculous prices we are seeing now?

..they talking trash..there is piracy on consoles, and as I said before, I saw by my own eyes in Korea and Malaysia whole shopping mall, just for pirated software, including games and God knows what...

down in china i can expect to see nock off goods spilling out onto the street, i guess you have to look that little bit harder for knock off xbox/playstation games

ive seen nasty pirate dvd's with badly home printed covers (well they could be vcd's for all i know) here and there but never on the market where you had to be established, where i used to live there were always tradig standards bods walking around waiting to find the next haul of dodgy disc's

the closest ive got to seeing counterfiet goods on sale is in the form of those nes gazzillion in one tv controllers

european pirated console games are probably only ever found via torrents, some guy even youtubed his printer spewing out a freshly printed halo 2 or 3 that at first glance would have fooled you during the casual browse of his collection
most people i know who run pirated games just write with a cd pen, why spend money making it look nice if your the only one playing it

and afaik thats what the guy was doing as it probably cost too much to counterfiet the full on cover and lable to make it cost efective unless selling at 2nd hand rates

Piracy is worse on pc due to it being harder on consoles, mainly because you need to physically modify most consoles to run dodgy games but pc games reguard a file copy.

But when companies like Ubisoft say that they are not release EndWar on PC when they release it on console due to piracy, you can also predict what they say when they do get round to releasing it and it has low sales. Yes thats right, they will blame piracy!! But its more likely due to that fact that people have already got the game if they wanted it , on there console and don't want to spend money again!

The main problem with pc gaming (and is what is casuing the demise)is simply that to get good performance you need to spend a LOT of money, whereas on consoles, you get the performance that the developer tells you you are gonna get (DMC4 not even running at a hd res and getting upscaled, LBP on the ps3 is 720p 30 fps as another example). Consoles are cheaper and simplier!

That used to be the case, but I can now set up a new machine that is more powerful and cheaper than the Aus cost of a new PS3.

Would that be one of those magical machines which doesn't need a DVD drive because "everyone's got one hanging around" and doesn't need an operating system because "everyone has a spare license" and doesn't need a case or power supply because "people are always giving those things away"?

No, those things are rediculously cheap. Except the OS, but let's say we use Linux.

thats what i said a few posts up
who buys the same thing twice if they can afford not to?

ive rebought alot of my vhs onto dvd but im buggered if im going to do the same on blu-ray or the next big thing untill they stop reading dvd's
but at the time i wouldnt have gone out looking for the betamax version too just cos we happend to have one knocking around

same as albums on cassette, why were they around?
sure if you had a walkman you could buy the album but most had the lp and having the lp negates the need to have the cassette version for portable and personal use
and when CD's came out people migrated their buying habbits from lp's to CD's consumers and publishers created this catch 22 of no one wants the lp so we'll stop making them
and consumers who wanted lps found them un available and thus had to buy the CD

and with console games costing what they do no one who owns a ps3 and a 360 is going to buy the same game twice for each system, so why expect them to buy the delayed if more tweaked pc version
if anything it will force people who were on the fence about consoles to pick a system just to play the pc games that no longer get developed

I havent bought a console because most the the games I wanted to buy came out of the PC anyway. I'm not as impatient as I was to have the next best thing, like I was in my teens and 20's. Back then I'd upgrade my GPU every 8 months and my CPU biannually.

These days a video card is good for 2-3 years and a CPU 4-5 even the latest games are playable with most of the bells and whistles turned up. So long as you keep a reasonable res and don't mind 20 - 30 FPS. Sometimes the games look better in the PC version, even on my ageing PC. Mostly due to more detailed textures.

I think the above about sums up my dislike for consoles and console titles.

Then you are missing out, simply because of a preconception that simpler to use means less complex, satisfying games but that's up to you.

It won't change the tide in the real world which is shifting away from the PC as a gaming device and towards console based devices and games with a broader appeal to more people.

Darkheart

..personally, I like to see big developers disappear from PC world..it will be less populated by same games with different names, and most important it will remain open space for smaller creative teams who can be very happy with profit what is usually not enough to cover basic expenses for one Ubisoft for example..that I guess will provide some decent games with some fresh ideas rather than polished old stuff exposed as a 'next gen'..

Your idea that a handful of "smaller creative teams" can possibly sustain what has become a multi-billion dollar industry is at best somewhat naive. The "small creative teams" you're talking about exist because they're standing on the shoulders of giants. Without heavy industry support there will be no market for middleware, and possibly no out-of-the-box support for games on Windows. Without middleware or suitable support tools (or Direct X for that matter), you're back to writing your own tools, engines and APIs. Suddenly it's no longer feasible for a small team to develop a game any more. You might as well be developing for Linux.

Now there's a scary thought; I knew Sony had thrown in the towel for indie games support on the PS3 when they offered Linux as it's indie game dev platform.

There are however no Linux games that have been developed that are even vaguely equivlent to the current 360, top 10.

Flameduck is absolutly right though, without being able to piggy back on the cash spent by the big boys Games dev on the Windows platform will rapidly stagnate and the PC will go back to the office permanently. The PC has only been sustanined as a games machine through Microsoft's huge chequebook as gaming was their latent feature to get PC's into people's homes. Now they have done that, no more need for games.

Darkheart

..apart from big game developers, what about GPU corporations?? They will just sit down and do nothing and simply loose tens of millions computers for their gpu stuff and let themself killed because Ubisoft and others dont want to develop games for PC anymore...I hardly dont believe such huge cake nVidia and ATI going to drop off..

Without many mainstream PC games I don't see how you can have a big high end gaming business, I think the days of people updating their GFX cards every year to play the next game are long gone.

I don't see what Nvidia/AMD can really do, if there's no mainstream games business there is no demand. I really doubt Nvidia's exortations for people to go BEYOND HD have moved many people at all but NVidia has been heading in completely the wrong direction for a while.

Companys like Alienware and Rock Direct should by seriously looking at wether their business model is sustainablein the current economic climate.

Darkheart

They will have to evolve adapt or die, like 3Dfx and Matrox. They'll have to compete in other markets (laptop/netbook/mobile) and on other parts of the value chain (price/performance/quality/reliability). Computers are not the only things requiring GPUs.

That cake is nowhere near as large as you imagine. Besides what are they going to do? Make the games themselves? I don't think so. More likely they're going to do what Ubisoft are doing. Shift their focus to consoles.

Especially since the console costs the same, but lasts 5 times longer. Remember in the old days, how the PC crowd would ridicule you, because all your Amiga hardware cost 5 times as much as their PC hardware, and you would ridicule them back for saying stupid things like "We get our hard drive for free"? Yeah. Imagine that.

PC graphics are used for other things than games too.

So if I understand what is being said above, this is what will happen now:

1) Ubisoft announces the PC release of some stupid game will be after the game console release
2) All big game companies agree and stop producing games for the PC completely
3) People stop buying PC parts because "Gears of War 6" won't be out on PC
4) Hardware manufacturers stop making parts for PCs
5) Everybody stops using PCs because once they're broken you can't get new parts
6) Microsoft releases Office 2011 for the Playstation

One good thing is our Blitz Basic dx 7 games will be compatible with PCs forever, since graphics cards won't be updated anymore.

I guess we won't be seeing many 'amazing' games written for DX10 with all these companies dropping out

True that. 3D acceleration has been crippled by nVidias determination not to release drivers for the Cell.


Not something anybody should have been expecting regardless; DX10 was doomed before release.

I'm sure PopCap, Big Fish, etc. disagrees... Maybe more companies should start making games people want to play on PC. Surprisingly most people don't care about shader models or polygon counts, or even know what it is, they just want to have fun.

As much as I respect the hardworking people at UbiSoft I don't see a voice-controlled RTS with an authors name on the cover finding a significant market anywhere, piracy or not.

I don't think PC's are going anywhere soon. Consoles aren't upgradeable and each generation gets overtaken by the PC quicker. In only a year PC's had better graphics than console games in the mainstream market. The latest GPU's that hardcore gamers use these days are far more powerfull than PS3 or 360.

Quite often cross platform games have their graphics reduced on PS3 and 360, and on occasion the PC version gets bigger enhanced levels. This is most common on ports from the PC to consoles which does still happen on occasion.

The biggest problem for PC games is that MS want to focus game dev on their console to win the console war and aren't doing much to encourage the development of PC games unless people are willing to buy into their new OS first.

>>Especially since the console costs the same, but lasts 5 times longer.<<

Are you sure what you saying mr.Duck?? nVidia 9800 GX2 cost about 100 bucks here and its brutally overpowering any console out there with smile on the face..i would say, there is no console what will last 1 year without been overtaken by PC, regarding GPU's you pointing on to..

..and comparison with Amiga is way wrong i think...how big was userbase for amiga anyway?? how big is user base for PC systems?? as Fredborg said..Im not sure that BFG, RealArcade and GG and similar folks simply going to sit and do nothing...They do have money and interest to support PC gaming, and im sure..loads of small studios can produce respectable titles for PC....I cant see why PC gaming will die or disappear just because money hungry mega corporations cant sell same crap all over again and again on PC..wanishing of dinosaurs from face of earth, didnt make life stop moving...some other things came on to scene...but apart from that...such huge userbase like one PC has, is not something what will that easy drop off..i may be wrong of course, but i hardly doubt about it...

I don't care if a game appears on pc yes/no even tho I don't have any newer console. If I want to play a FPS, there is still enough choice for me on the PC.

And people that are saying that consoles last longer than a pc..... Console versions of the same game are mostly twice that expensive as well. After 10 games you can buy that kickass new graphics card on the pc compared if you buy the same 10 titles on PS3.

Other then that I can choose the controller I like. I can choose if I want to dualstick or rather use keyboard and mouse, it gives me a lot more freedom. I even have the luxury of not swapping discs anymore with Steam. And on the PC I can play even the oldest games I bought for it, there is always some emulator available to make something run again.

But I see it as a good thing if the big brands leave PC and go Console. This gives all us programmers a better chance to make name in the PC game business.

In a conversation about gaming *shrug*... May aswell just admit you're a pirate, you'd get more respect !

Again, so did Team17, clickBOOM and Vulcan Software. Disagreeing doesn't make a difference. Being able to carry the market on your own does, and they can't. With increased competition from WiiWare and XBLA and diminishing returns from PC owners who can't get the games they want on their chosen platform, they're going to have a real hard time coping.

What? All 10 of them? How many hard-core gamers do you think there are going to be on the PC, when all the hard-core games move to the consoles?

Let's assume that's actually true, I mean I know the USD is weak, but over here a GX2 will still set you back $700 USD, but I don't know what kind of "bucks" you're talking about. But fair enough, let's compare that to the XBox 360. You could have had your XBox 360 since 2005 vs. your GX2 which is less than 7 months old. That's 3 years of gaming you've been missing as a PC gamer. Also your GX2 is already obsolete, while the XBox 720 (or whatever) hasn't even been announced. Since you seem to be so interested in userbase, I can assure you that Microsoft have shipped more Xbox360's than nVidia have shipped GX2's, and that the selection of games, from a consumers perspective, that utilize the GX2 vis-a-vis the XBox 360, is at least an order of magnitude in the XBox's favor. Also you can't actually play any games on your GX2 out-of-the-box, you'll actually need a computer (with PCI-Express slots on the Motherboard), all you need for the XBox360 is a TV, and practically everyone has one of those, or can get it a hell of a lot cheaper than a new computer.

About 6 million IIRC. In either case it was a hell of a lot more than PC owners who have a GX2.

The PC user base is not homogeneous. It's not simply a matter of who has more numbers. The majority of PC systems don't come close to equaling the XBox360 (or even the original XBox) in power. If you think that, you're shockingly naive.

Of course not. They're probably going to switch to WiiWare or XBLA, where the money is, once the tools for developing PC games start drying up, and even simple games become feats of engineering. Like I said, companies like Big fish, Popcap and Real Arcade are standing on the shoulders of giants. They are the ones that are the dinosaurs. They're the ones dependent on the current ecosystem.

Also the absurdity that you would use a dinosaur analogy to defend a machine whose architecture hasn't seen any significant change since 1981, when compared to an advanced computer platform from 2005 seems at best somewhat anachronistic.

Sure. But on the other hand you don't have to wait 6 months for them to be ported, and another 6 months for the developers to fix enough bugs to make it playable. I'd gladly have paid twice for Spore if I could have gotten it without the ridiculous DRM, and it had actually worked when I got it. In either case it doesn't seem to be hurting sales much, which is yet another incentive to develop for consoles.

Sure. But the chances of the big companies making 10 games I'd want to buy in the 18 month life span of a graphics-card is pretty close to zero. Not counting expansion packs there are about 8 games I've bought since 2005 (and 3 of those are currently on pre-order), and I've had to upgrade my graphics card twice in that time-span to keep up (first for Tabula Rasa, second for Mass Effect), and yet another upgrade seems likely once GTA 4, Fallout 3 and Dawn of War 2 hit.

Really? Please point me to an emulator that will allow me to play Panzer General 3D Assault, Battle Isle 3, Incubation, or any other of the 3+ year old games I have. Seriously! Please!

100 bucks i was pointing on to is 100USD, place of purchase Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore..but even if you drop off 9800, take 8xxx models..they are way more powerful than any console again, especially Xbox360 you talking about..or 7800GT..its still more powerful than Xbox far as i know, and im very sure, user base based on 6xxx,7xxx and 8xxx models are already bigger than number of Xbox360 units sold..

Anyway, I may be entirely wrong, and you may be entirely right, so, time will tell, and to me, seems that PC will not that easy disappear from gaming scene..

Yeh cuz pirating is such a cool and respectable thing to do, whereas running Linux is just geeky. That doesn't fit into place at a programming forum at all. Whereas everyone loves pirates here. Good on you.


Google tells me Dosbox.


Google says should be fine with compatibility settings.


Google says you're screwed.


Listy listy.

Google lies. It requires DirectX 5. Older Panzer General games will probably work on Dosbox tho'.

Google is right, if you disable videos.

Pretty much, yeah.

Sure, the ones just lying around my desk are:
M.A.X.
M.A.X. 2
Slamtilt Revolution
The Lost Vikings 2
Mech Commander 2

But what if Ubisoft is the new Team17?

> and even simple games become feats of engineering.

The rest of it I agree, but with MS using 3D acceleration for the OS now it should be possible for these companies to update their graphics engines even if there are no more big name companies making games.

Weather the graphics cards for PCs continue to get major updates remains to be seen after major game companies pull out.

Also to be seen is how fast consoles get more powerful - ALOT of the cost of creating a new console was updating the graphics, and a good chunk of that cost was borne by the PC graphics cards that were developed and sold between console releases.

85% Dosbox. =]

[a http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:emQYUPy8NscJ:www.classicbattletech.com/forums/index.php%3Ftopic%3D39339.0+%22mechcommander+2%22+vista&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=au]Mech Commander 2?[/a]

The rest either can go to hell or don't even exist. :)


Some people seem to think Ubisoft is much bigger than Team 17.

Well there are 2 significant differences. For starters Ubisoft have always been been publishers (largely distributing US games in Europe), Team17 grew out of the PD/shareware crowd. Second Ubisoft are bailing early, while Team17 continued development on a ridiculously ambitious project (Alien Breed 3D 2) well after everyone else had bailed a long time ago. A better analogy would probably be Ocean Software or Mirrorsoft, if you have to pick one that managed to bail in time, and still fail. It's not going to make much difference to those who stay behind.

Sure. The question is can they afford it? With virtually no competition to keep Microsoft on their toes, and Microsoft possibly interested in seeing the PC fail as a gaming platform to the XBox 360, there's not much incentive for Microsoft to support smaller developers. Combined with the nightmare already involved with upgrading DX driven engines to keep up with changing and often conflicting DX specifications, each time a new version is released, and the man hours that go into making sure that a PC game works on absolutely everything, you can see the profit margins disappearing, and once the XNA tools catch up to current PC tools, I'm afraid that's going to be the last proverbial nail.

Absolutely. But it isn't in the console manufacturers best interest to keep pushing the envelope. The longer it takes before their consoles start looking outdated, compared to the PC, the longer their platform is perceived to be state of the art, and the longer they have to subsidize the cost of the hardware on games, before they have to poor more money in the sinkhole that is R&D.

I think FlameDuck just failed the Turing test ;)

> Combined with the nightmare already involved with upgrading DX driven engines to keep up with changing and often conflicting DX specifications

I was thinking more of casual games and using something like WPF, but considering how much MS has changed (meaning, just dumped the old way of doing things) with WPF versus the only a few years old windows forms in .NET, well - I can't really argue with you...