Why is it that the PC version of most games is always delayed?! Why do they do that?! It's stupid, unfair, and annoying.
I can think of two reasons: fear that piracy will cannibalize sales (unfounded or not, it is a perception) and desire to protect the consoles from PC competition.
Microsoft is guilty of the latter. Here's what Microsoft Game Studios European business director Peter Zetterberg
has to say:
"If we launched a Halo game on PC and 360 in Germany simultaneously, 80 per cent of sales would be on the PC," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "We basically shoot ourselves in the foot by allowing the German market to choose to play the PC version."
Also note that Microsoft has shuttered its once-powerful PC game studios and focuses on Xbox gaming. Why? Money talks. With the Xbox, MS controls the platform and gets a cut of every transaction. Outside of Windows licenses, PC gamers aren't really giving MS any money.
because I like have boxed copies of games.
Last time I was at Best Buy, many new PC games (L4D, RA3) were being sold in plastic DVD sleeves. I think the days of miniboxes are numbered, at which point my attachment to retail will be zero.
A number of PC games that my mates and I have bought have taken ages to get working for online games.
This is true: many PC games have crappy matchmaking services. But this is the developer's fault. Valve's server browsers, for example, are brilliant.
With a few exceptions, PC games tend to be much deeper than console games.
Agreed.
Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance (what a silly name),
said something pretty insightful about PC gamers:
But yes, what’s powerful about the PC is how gamers will often have a love affair with one game, or with several games. That love affair doesn’t end when the game isn’t in the shelf any more. The console model relies on an attach rate of six or seven games per year, per console, right? If they don’t get that kind of sell-through, they don’t have a viable business model for selling the hardware in the first place. They have a demand that there’s a constant pipeline of games. I guess there’s this danger that games become too good, and players would play it day in, day out. If that happened then the console business model would fall apart. In PC gaming some gamers will have half a dozen games and play, say, Team Fortress 2 for a few months, and then maybe go back to Unreal Tournament 2004, or play World Of Warcraft or Civilisation for a few months. They cycle through these games.
So even if you only play Halo 3 on your Xbox, MS is still making money off of you because you're paying a subscription fee. In the last year, 70% of my gaming time is with TF2, which doesn't really make Valve any money.
That's probably why a hardcore modding community will never develop on the consoles. Mods extend the lifespan of a game (for free). Consoles are all about people buying new games (hence the hatred of the second-hand market) and DLC. Imagine having to deal with MS if you wanted to release a mod. They'd charge people for it, at which point it would become DLC and not really a mod in the traditional sense.
Mods would probably confuse your average console user, too. The chief advantage to a console is ease-of-use and compatability. But the PC can be easy to use (Steam and Impulse make managing a game collection easy), it's just that many developers release shoddy games that frustrate people with technical problems. Valve and Blizzard wouldn't be selling millions of PC games if their products were difficult to install and use...
At the end of the day, treating the PC as "just another console" is a sure-fire way to get lackluster sales. Digital distribution platforms and MMOs wouldn't exist if their creators limited themselves to a console paradigm.
