'The hypocrisy of PC gamers'

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I think you have to compare the sales made with consoles (xbox as a first priority) to the sales made on pcs with "AAA" and "AAB" (???) titles . Last I checked they were behind. You could say consoles as a whole had around 60% more sales. And I think there is a hue paradigm change going on in the gaming industry. The reasons games were still developed in a huge manner for pc is because xbox and pc is interchangeable in the hardware. xbox is just a closed system pc and easier to control in specs and sales. And it already has Steam-like distribution systems.

Valve said all their games (Orange Box, L4D, Portal 2) sold better on PC than consoles combined.

Eh, I'd say the paradigm shift started around 2003-2004. By now it's already over.

I will say this: Steam's mettle will be tested when multiplatform games start coming out during the next generation of consoles that (finally) begin to tax the capabilities of modern PCs.

There is still some time until this happens. If I were Valve, I would try to make some kind of partnership with a PC OEM to provide discounted new PCs to my customers that could run these new games. In this way, Steam can in effect become a kind of fourth console.

The point I was trying to put through was that I think Amiga would've survived if Commodore would've kept designing better computers, and kept them coming. Fall of Amiga was due numerous reasons, such as they delayed releasing Amiga 1200 for something like from year to year and half (depending on source), not just piracy. PC won't die as gaming platform but it might become more specialized.

The fault for Amiga failing is indeed on Commodores side (WTF releasing a weaker amiga instead a next gen one?). But the dying of software/games for the amiga was mainly because of piracy (I didn't even know it was illegal when I started). Atari and c64 got supported a long time, too after the hardware was old and before development stopped.


There will always be piracy and I have no problem with not buying every game you want to try. But if someone thinks buying a game once every 10 years on steam for 4$ is enough he's wrong. This will not encourage further development.

Personally I can't take lame excuses like: This suckers release a day one dlc!! I will never buy a game from them again. But I'm rich btw and doing this only for the greater good. Although I will rape their dog and kick their children. They fully deserve it!!!! Hurr, hurr...

Would be a possibility if they are big enough to compete with MS. But do you think gaming would be as we know it for pcs? Do you think you would like it?

I don't think we're done, yet. It was only a foreplay and testing new ways and abilities.

They are typical pc games, afterall. With mouse becoming redundant in favour of a game pad I'm not so sure anymore. A lot of pc gamers have already a console at least as a second asset and things like cover mechanics, thirdperson etc. becoming more popular. You could say they are already the standard.

They're already big enough. It's a win-win-win situation. MS wants to sell more copies of Windows OS. OEM wants to sell more PCs. Valve wants to sell more games.

And I wouldn't care about it as long as they let me build my own PC.

They will tax modern PCs for about five minutes just like the previous consoles.

I doubt it, graphics are not the strongest selling point of PC games anyway, people go after mouse & keyboard controls, mods, and playing games on a system they already have. Besides games that are only playable on PCs, like RTS & MMOs.

In fact, in the first months of the new generation, PC sale will probably rise, as PC gamers will still be able to play next-gen games on their PCs, while console fags willl have to buy a new one.

The first few months of the new generation will not have games that challenge PCs. It will take them a year or more to create games that fully exploit the new hardware.

Exactly. It's a great chance for a PC comeback, PC gamers will have ~a year of acess to next-gen games without the need to do any serious upgrade, while console players will need to pay at least $499. A well played marketing strategy could make all the difference for Steam.

1. Make a good game, so people will buy it after point 2 and 3 are satisfied
2. Price it right, because I don't care if you spent 20 billions of marketing for a 4 hour game, I won't still pay 60 euros for it
3. MAKE A FUCKING DEMO, you cunt developer, because I won't blindly waste my hard earned money for "faith"
4. Don't infest your product with virtual anal probes (invasive DRM). DRM is ok, one shot online registration is ok, spyware software is not.


Not entering the DRM argument, demos are critical. I don't support piracy, but you'll see me in the torrent counts because I want to see if the product is worth my money.
Many games I pirated, tried and forgot, and many others I pirated, tried and then bought.

Do you really believe this will ever happen? Xbox720 was rumored to use a gpu that is kind of midrange at the moment, not to speak of ~2 years from now, when it's finally released. There was maybe a 6-9 month period some time after the Xbox360 launch where it was graphically impressive. But after that point, it was always the same story of PC gamers playing shitty console ports with texture packs and post-processing injectors so it doesn't look as shit as on a console.

Unless we hit a major technological wall in regards to gpu performance (not very likely given current trends), PCs will always have the advantage.

M:

Who said it was unbiased? I linked to the only survey I knew of, that's all. Better to have biased data to discuss than have no data to discuss.

You know what's worse than displaying a biased survey? Complaining about a biased survey without providing a link to a less biased one. Thanks, Shannow, you're doing a great job at promoting discussion.

Oh and

The survey givers were not the DE:HR guys.

Exactly, I remeber that a friend of mine got DOOM from a parent travelling to the US, then made shitloads of copies he traded with everyone at school for games he wanted. I gave him a copy of SimFarm IIRC....

DRM, clueless since 1992.

The real "hypocrisy of PC gamers" is the one about playing badly done console ports on PC 90% of the time instead of their native platforms and feeling about it.

Yes, I believe it could happen. You have no idea how many tards out there are using shitty old computers from 2005 that can only run even today's games on the lowest settings.

I would argue this point in the following way:

1) Are publishers loosing money over piracy?
Answer: yes

2) Is that significant?
Answer: Not as much as the claim is.

3) What should be done to reduce piracy?
Answer: more agreeable prices not dissimilar to but probably slightly larger than those of steam sales.

If there is a good argument against piracy its steam.

Interesting general article about piracy I came across today: http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/neil-young-is-right-piracy-is-the-new-radio/

Sheet music was considered piracy once... crazy. That means Chess must've been considered pirated at one point when people decided to fabricate their own boards and pieces instead of buying an "official" set.

This is so fucking true. One thing that Steam does perfectly is that is 10x easier, confortable and even a little faster to buy steam games than to pirate. Ever since I got a job, waiting some months to buy the game on sale (or pre-order if I really want it) and freely play it seems way more pratical than to pirate it and hunt a new crack on GameCopyWorld everytime the game is patched...

Especially since I got a job around the time NWN 2 was released, and the cracked version always crashed when you left the village...

There's also the matter of ISPs that use traffic shaping to make torrenting slow down to a crawl. My ISP, for instance, only lets me download torrents at an acceptable speed during the night. Even then, speeds rarely exceed around 400 kilobytes per second.

Meanwhile I can download things from Steam at 1 megabyte per second at any time I want.