Alfonse



I agree with you, some people just want it to work ... That's it ... if it
doesn't work ... send it back ...

I just purchase a new HP laptop because the prices are low ...
As soon as I started it up ... It has a lot of crappy apps and a lot of
trial ware software installed... Also, I'm not a big fan of Norton
AV software ...

It's took me 1 hour to delete all the crappy software on my new laptop.
As soon as I got it to a point I wanted it. I made a ghost image in case
something went wrong with the HD ..

Bottom line ... people just want to install the game and play it ... If
it too complex or to hard to get it to run ... They return the game ..
an pick something else ..

Basically - I agree with what Alfonse says and would add ...

PC's are now sold in supermarkets and laptops are given away free with mobile phone contracts in the UK. They are, wrongly in my mind, treated as appliances and the current generation of users get frustrated with the inevitable problems that crop up as soon as they try and use them for anything more than email and browsing - heck they even break doing that if you don't "know what you are doing".

Add on the frustration of virus checkers, firewalls, spam filters, online security, backup and recovery ...

Those of us that do know what we are doing can keep a machine ticking over with minimal effort - but then spend our time sorting out the problems on every machine owned by our group of family and friends.

Even if those people switched to consoles for their gaming it would, unfortunately, leave a hole a lot of them still want filled:

- browsing
- email
- digital photos, music (and maybe video)
- simple household data/book-keeping

A secure, stable and foolproof system (appliance) for the above could easily be built now that would last for decades. One of those plus a games console would cater for 70/80% of the PC market.

But that would be a dead-end market so no-one will bother. It is far more profitable to convince people that they always need the latest and greatest new toy. In fact, from what I see, that battle has already been won - you would struggle to convince todays consumers that this box would do them perfectly well for a decade or two.

I have to say that as a software developer and outright geek, I love to see what the new games are capable of and how far they have come in the quality and sophistication of their graphics and sound - and gameplay (when there is any).

I do, however, feel that ever shifting specifications of PC's has led us down a road of OS and driver bloat where a vast amount of the potential of the hardware at our fingertips is wasted just catering for all of the potential differences and trying to keep things stable.

Hmm, I might have got a little off topic there - I better stop before I put everyone to sleep.

Yep, I had the same problem with my HP laptop. Actually, both of 'em. The first one was refurbished, the disk drive didn't work, so it was returned and replaced. The disk drive is a LightScribe drive, and is CRAP. Won't install the abomination that is Tribes: Vengeance. I know it's probably good taste, but I wanted the story mode, darnit.

Also, I use Comodo for all my security. Free, rave reviews. Plus, it's really simple, as far as my experiences go.

just for your information, i work at futureshop/bestbuy and do you know wich gaming platform is selling the more game?
pc.
at each shipement we receive 4 or 3 time more pc game then 360 game.
and pc game are still dicting the way to go and this is from an xbox and sony rep.

 

I didn't know that PC's were selling more games. I thought that consoles were. Are they the same games, or pure volume?

I'm assuming that you mean deciding or dictating in the final sentence. Yeah, PC is the forerunner, but it's often a dying console. Really, I only find Strategy games on PC before consoles.

Helpful Link

What you also have to realize is that a lot of us old coots remember PC gaming back in the days when ALL gaming was something that only nerds did because the football players would beat them up if they went outside (or other such nonsense and lies of the 80s and early 90s).

Now that gaming has gone mainstream, while the market has gotten bigger, it's gotten bigger in that frat-boy football-jock department. These are not the same kind of people who could sit down in front of say, Legend of the Red Dragon or Usurper or The Temple of Elemental Evil and play for hours - they're short attention spanned hype driven consumers. Games on consoles are really being made for them - look at Halo and Madden 200000867 - as opposed to the stuff on PCs which tends towards the RPGs and MMOs and strategy games. People like us are a smaller market, but we're fanatically loyal . I don't think PC gaming is dying nearly so much as it doesn't have the games that are uberhyped - look at GalCiv2, an incredible bit of PC gaming power, but really unknown outside the right circles - and while percentage-wise we're less than the Halos and Maddens of the world, I'm pretty sure we're just as strong as we've ever been, and in fact probably have a whole lot more people.

i think console games are getting more sophisticated. But then, it can only be up to a certain point, i mean...for a console, it allows you to be a couch potato gamer. And when you are sitting on a sofa relaxing, you really don't want to wrack your brain to do much thinking. For pc games, it is different, you sit in front of an office desk, in front of a monitor, in that position, it forces you to think more. Okay, maybe Frogboy is the only exception where he can play galciv 2 on his bed, but majority of people i know would never ever play something like an RTS on your bed. The nature of RTS will elicit too much adreanaline rush in you to allow you to be relaxing. I seriouly don't know how some people can play FPS shooters on an xbox 360. but then, the only thing good about that is auto targeting for you in some of those games. Halo on pc versus Halo on xbox.

You think there's something wrong with the customer who cannot or will not go to the effort of acquiring a gaming PC. I think there's something wrong with the company that shares your opinion when its *AVERAGE* customer, on whose entertainment dollars the company absolutely depends for survival, cannot or will not go to that effort.

It's not the customer's job to go out of the way to cater to the company. It is most especially not the customer's job to go out of the way to cater to the company when there is another "company" available (console games) that makes no such demands on its customers for a very similar (sometimes essentially identical) product.

The dumb and lazy folks here are the game developers who'd rather blame their customers and go to value-subtracted anti-piracy solutions than actually make games their customers can play.

Yeah, PC gaming is dying. Or at least, the grossly dysfunctional brain-dead part of it is. Those developers who do not suffer from corporate insanity and/or clinical retardation will do just fine.

As someone who uses those OSs and drivers, I can state with a good degree of certainty that this isn't true at all.

Yes, there is some overhead for any abstraction layer, like D3D, OpenGL, etc. But the abstraction is a very good thing, as it keeps games from doing the wrong thing. Look at GalCiv2. Here's a less-than-stable game as it is written. It "leaks" memory (or rather, keeps it around for longer than it absolutely needs to). Imagine what would happen to your system if it could treat video memory the same way? It would eventually hard-lock your system, forcing a reboot. Thanks to abstraction layers, that is unlikely.

Further, you're not losing that much in terms of performance. Sure, Windows takes up its share of memory, but when you're playing a game in full-screen mode, it's not using much CPU time. And it will gladly page out much of its memory to the hard drive if you need more room. So it's not so big of a deal ultimately.



Not on my bed, but I'd definitely do it in my Lazyboy if I could. Unfortunately, a trackball is the best I can do from there, and it's not really a good RTS interface. I really need SC2 to support the Wii Remote

And I'm serious about that last part.



You say that as though console games are relaxing/braindead and only PC games provide real excitement. Errant nonsense.



OK, back the rhetoric up a sec.

Game developers don't make choices about DRM solutions. They don't even make choices about what platform their games ship on. Those choices are made by game publishers (some of whom are also developers).

Further, the increasing prevalence of DRM really has nothing to do with "blaming the customers" and has more to do with decreased caring about PC development. If you don't really care about your PC port, if it's only going to sell a fraction of what your non-PC versions will, why not drop some bad DRM on it? It's not like it'll make it sell significantly less, and it'll give those naughty pirates what for (for a couple of days till a crack is found).

The requirements are one of the causes. I won't buy new parts every two weeks to get the new game working. I bought a 360 to play games. Before that, I was a PC game defender, but I switched because I don't have 2000$ to waste on a new computer when mine is still great, but not for the newest games. I'll always play games on PC, games like GalCiv2, Sins, SW Rebellion, etc.

Second, amen to Alfonse's comment (reply #25). Fortunatly for me, I was interested in the computer world enough to get to know it and make a game work if it's not. People who pay 60$ for a game that meets the specs of their rig should be able to play when they get home. Not after 3 freaking days (driver updates and so on). If he buys a 360 game, he will play right away.

And seriously, telling that people are lazy and/or dumb because they don't give a sh*t about computers is... anyway. The guy has a family, obligations and he is a doctor, so really not much time for his own. The 1 hour he has before going to bed, if he has the chance, might be where he will entertain himself a little with a game. Guess what, the game he bought crashes. Oh well, he is so dumb that he will go to sleep. The other guy is a computer engineer, works in complex systems all day long. The last thing he wants to do is debugging someone else's game, he wants to play it. I'm really curious about a thing: are you one of the "hardcore" players?

PC companies have given a lot of crappy games to the community these recent years. Bugged games, unfinished games needing patches after patches, boring games and games that require a computer not even on the market. Consoles may give people boring games also, but at least they work and you are absolutly sure in your mind that they will work on your system when you enter your card number.

But for their defense, it's also impossible to be 100% sure that the game will work on every systems that meet the specs. There is so many different hardware components from different companies, all linked together in a complex system (a computer) and interfaced by a buggy OS (adding CRAPPY OS to this for Vista) that even if all their computers at the office run the game perfectly, here on mine, it may crash. On a console, there is only one system to make it work with and if it works at the office, it will work at customers homes.

Long live to perfect PC games: HL, BG 1-2, NWN, Quake serie, GalCiv2, some MoH, AoM and so on.

Don't for get BG2. PC gaming is the best, but, unfortunately, like a fine wine, there's a fair entry market.

Distinctions without differences. Ultimately, games are released as a collaboration between the developer and the publisher, and neither one gets to arbitrarily decide what happens without reference to the other. They share the blame for the DRM included with their games.

Similarly, blaming the customers and just not caring about them, what difference does it make? Either way, they've lost the focus on delivering a quality product in exchange for those $50 they're asking for, and then giving interviews where they say that piracy killed PC gaming without looking at whether there's more than 11 people in the world who can actually run the game. Stupid game development priorities are what's killing that portion of PC gaming that is dying. Not piracy, not consoles, not dumb customers who can't be bothered to stay 100% ahead of the PC hardware curve, just stupid priorities.

If you don't want to deliver a quality PC game, then don't publish a PC game at all. I find it hard to believe that these games that sell next to nothing because nobody can meet the system requirements, and if somebody hops into a DeLorean to buy a PC that can meet them, the DRM will stop it from running anyway, are actually recouping the cost of porting the game to the PC. I sincerely hope they're not, because that attitude - that PC gamers don't matter enough to justify providing them with a quality product - is what's wrong with the broken, dysfunctional portion of the PC gaming industry.

That's why I always try the games first. It runs? It's good and well done? Then I go buy it. Fortunatly, many games have demos. I'm more than happy to buy a game that deserves my well-earned money. Like you said, piracy has nothing to do with the subject I think.


I don't, I wrote BG1 and BG2 (or BG 1-2) hehe

pure volume and dictating. and not just strategie game. we receive in order, a lot of FPS, RPG, RTS and some casual game or puzzles game. so no pc is not only for RTS.

but i know a lot of people are tired of upgrading their pc to play the latest game with all graphic at maximum, but what they need to realise is this.

most of the time, if a game is on pc and console, the pc version is more powerfull beceause we have the option to upgrade our pc but not the obligation. but for a console, you still have to ugrade, it's just a lot easier and you don't need to customize, you just buy the next console at a 500$ or you won't be able at all to play new game.
so a new pc game can still be played with an old pc(not to old)but for console you will NEED to change it.

an other factor is all the Bug. and for this i can only say that it's not every one that should have a pc, because a lot of people who do have one, at the first sign of a virus they panic and if a game is not working they think it's the PC error not the user. but i know sometime it is pc error!

so i say this, to all of you who say pc gaming is dying, just switch to a console and let us "die" in peace!

If I may - 2 points for your considerations:



Pcdecrapifier - I think i spelled right. It is a small 3rd party app, that is essentially a library of all the crapware that comes preloaded on a coputer. Run it and it will list teh crapware it finds and will happily remove them from your system. Its a really good time saver.



You mean the guys who everyday sit down at meetings and get told by managers that they need to sell x amount of product y? Or they guys who get bonuses to endorse/promote product y?

That works for us in the know, cause we can cut through the BS and we generally know what (large scope) we are looking for. People who don't know a lot about computer hardware are at teh whim of a sales person. Its like walking into a lot and trying to buy a new car, with out knowing anything about cars in general. Even if you've gone teh distance and read reviews, etc, all you have is a few memorized facts, not understanding.

Hmmmm, edit button....Interesting.....



I've had a track ball for 5 years. My "desk" is a modified sewing table, and there is not enough room for a normal mouse. Logitech make some very good trackballs. Remember to buy one that is finger driven (ball in teh middle). The ones which are thumb driven (Ball on side), will wear out your thumb and are a bit clunkier. It takes a little getting used to, but I've even played FPS's with them with out much of a hitch

I need to get that Pcdecrapifier software. It would help me a lot. Laziness is my only computer problem.

Well b*gge*r me if Firefox isn't the canines danglies!
I highlighted "pcdecrapifier" in the above post, dragged it up the tab area to create a new tab and it went straight to the right web site.

gawd I love technology when it works - it reminds me why I got into this business.

I'm assuming you use Windows, but do you mean copy and paste or drag? I need to know if I need some software to drag highlighted text.

No, your local hardware store, not your local best buy. Slight difference there. Some brick and mortor stores (best buy, compusa, etc etc) aren't very good, whereas others (PC Club in my area) are useful.

Drag and drop - in Firefox (in Windows) you just highlight the text, let go, then click and hold inside the highlighted area and drag that up to a blank bit beside the tabs at the top then let go. Bingo it'll do its best to find what you dragged and put it into a new tab. I knew it worked on full links but not on random bits of text.

Actually - it just works on a whole words (no spaces), and just tries shoving www and one end and com or co.uk etc. at the other until it gets a hit - or generates a page-not-found.

Given that just about every word you can think of now is used for a web address you usually get something.

Oh, hey, it works! I was using Safari on a Mac at the time of posting, so I couldn't test it.

Nonsense. Game Publishers pay the bills; therefore, they decide what is and is not to be in the game. Developers who do not accede to such requests will quickly find themselves out of work.

Just as game developers don't get any say as to what stores the game is available in, DRM is a publisher decision. If you're a non-publisher-owned developer with clout (name recognition), you can probably argue the decision one way or the other. Otherwise, you just have to accept it. That's one of the reasons that StarDock is in such a unique position: they may lack name recognition, but they are also their own publisher and distributer. They can do wathever they want.



They don't; that's the entire point that they're making. They make more money on consoles than on the PC.

And as for the piracy issue, there's nothing more demoralizing than knowing that several thousand people are enjoying the product of your long nights and lack of family life without providing appropriate remuneration.

That's why indie games are so good. They break the mold and change what we expect.

Piracy sucks, but personally, I'd rather sell a easy-to-make enjoyable project than one that I have to tear my hair out over.

piracy sux... but its a two way street.
Take last weeks incident where Dustin Sacks of Sillysoft was found to be charging the credit cards of unwilling customers and using the proceeds to support his drug habit.
The bad seeds need to be eliminated on both sides.