Many people say that PC gaming is dying, and I agree with them entirely. From a commercial sense. The independent gaming community for PC is better than ever.
Why is StarDock, for example "indie" rather than "commercial"? Because they don't produce several games a year? Well, neither does Valve or Blizzard; does that make them "indie"?
Unless you're talking about non-profit gaming, it's hard to draw a real demarcation line between "indie" developers who get paid and "commercial" developers who get paid. They're all getting paid from us, the gamer.
What's happening in the PC industry is that many of the high-end PC game developers are trying to be console developers. Console games have bigger budgets, greater requirements with regard to craftsmanship (GC2's incessant UI oddities would not be acceptable on a console, for example. Console gamers are a lot less willing to slog through nonsense to play games), and so forth. So the greater expense of console games is brought to PC games. What isn't brought are the things that PC gamers need: a mouse-driven UI, typical PC game graphical features, etc.
And then there's World of Warcraft. MMOs in general, but especially WoW. For a gamer who has maybe 25 hours a month to devote to gaming, paying $15 a month for all of that time doesn't sound like that bad of a deal. After all, most $50 games don't last 25 hours, and only a very few last a comparable 67 hours. Well, that's 25 gamer-hours that are
not going to be spent on other games. In many ways, the time-hogginess of MMOs is what makes them detrimental to other kinds of games. It's really the kind of game that you can (theoretically) play forever.
What is really happening is re-specialization. Once upon a time, there were console developers and PC developers, and they really had little to do with one another. PC games were made by PC developers and console games were made by console developers. However, as console's progressed in hardware, they became capable of playing games that were formerly only doable on PCs. FPSs, for example. So many PC developers had good reason to jump ship onto the larger console market. That leaves room for new PC developers (StarDock, et. al) to appear and make their mark on the now smaller PC games industry.
Look at the most successful PC developers: Valve and Blizzard. What do they have in common? A complete, uncompromising focus on the needs of PC gamers. And one of the biggest needs is to be able to
run the games that they play. HL2 can be run on almost anything, as can WoW, WC3, and anything else Blizzard makes. Expect StarCraft 2 to be able to run on anything made in the last 3 years. Also, see below.
I heard that the reason most new computer games require the latest and greatest computer specs is because the market of people purchasing new computers (who in turn purchase the latest games to go with those computers) is greater than the market of those who stubbornly hold onto to their old computers for years.
That logic fails: see Crysis's (and for that matter UT3's) abysmal sales.
The reason it fails is because new computers are not necessarily game-quality computers. Most new computers have on-motherboard GPUs if they have one at all. The few that do have real GPUs with real videomemory couldn't even begin to run Crysis. And they make UT3 run at fairly low settings; certainly not the way it was meant to be played.
Most hardcore gamers build their own boxes, because that's usually the cheapest way to get the high-end equipment of the kind that they want/need.
History shows that the most successful PC games are patently
not the games you have to upgrade to play.
All these factors distort their reviews relative to gamers that don't fit those categories, which I think its safe to say is most of us.
Nonsense.
If someone makes game X, you should judge the game based on it being game X, not being game X/2 because you have crappy hardware/unwillingness to play multiplayer/etc. They should judge the game as the designers intended it to be played, not as someone
might be playing it.
If anything is wrong with the gaming medium, it's the reviews very rarely ever
describe the game reasonably objectively. I've yet to read a review that actually says what Sins of a Solar Empire is actually like, for example. At best, you get a sentence or two that tries to describe it as XMeetsY, which is patently unhelpful. Of course, in the SoaSE case, the
developers don't bother to even try to explain what the game is like, so I guess you can't blame the media for that one.
I don't feel it is dying, just being remade. The choice of words in the title is to bring people in.
So, you decided to lie in your title just to attract attention.
That, sir, is despicable.
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