Do you think PC gamers are being shafted lately?

[Benetanegia]

How about PC games that require steam, can hackers bypass that shit!

No you can't do it AFAIK. At least easily. And that's actually another argument in my favor. Valve games that require Steam can't be pirated as easily and are good games. Does that make them sell more than others? I don't think so. HL2 episodes were as "piratable" as HL2, they were not easier to pirate, but they sold far less than HL2. Does that mean they were pirated more? Or did it mean that they were crap in comparison? (I enjoyed them a lot, and I mean a lot. I love HL and Valve, but... facts are facts).

EDIT: More facts.

List of best selling games by platforms (it's wiki, I admit it's not the best source):

PC

* The Sims (16 million shipped)[156]
* The Sims 2 (13 million)[157]
o The Sims 2: Pets [expansion pack] (5.6 million)[158]
o The Sims 2: Seasons [expansion pack] (1 million)[158]
* World of Warcraft (11.5 million subscribers)[159]
o World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade [expansion pack] (3.5 million)[160]
o World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King [expansion pack] (4 million)[159]
* StarCraft (11 million)[161]
* Half-Life (9.3 million,[14][15] may include PS2 version)
o Half-Life: Opposing Force [expansion pack] (1.1 million)[14][15]
* Half-Life 2 (6.5 million,[14][15] may include Xbox version but does not include Steam sales)
* Guild Wars (6 million in North America, Europe, and Asia; includes Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North)[162]
* Myst (6 million)[163]
* Doom (5 million)[164]
* Counter-Strike (4.2 million,[14][15])
* Cossacks: European Wars (4 million)[165]

Look how the best selling ones tend to be old, circa 1995-1998. Nothing but MMORPG after year 2000, PS2 when multiplatform and crappy ports started to grow like a plague.

PlayStation1 sales at the time for comparison:

* Gran Turismo (10.85 million shipped)[97][98]
* Final Fantasy VII (9.8 million, includes Final Fantasy VII International)[99]
* Gran Turismo 2 (9.37 million shipped)[97][98]
* Tomb Raider II (8 million)[100]
* Metal Gear Solid (7 million)[101]
* Tomb Raider (7 million)[102]
* Crash Bandicoot (6.8 million)[103]
* Final Fantasy VIII (6 million)[104]
* Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (5.7 million)[105]
* Final Fantasy IX (5.30 million)[106]

I don't know you, but they look comparable. Even the PC wins by a bit. Now THE reason that is not that way lately (after 2000) is because piracy right? Piracy is to blame!! Look at this chart from the TweakGuide article that was posted above:

1996-1999 decline on piracy. The golden age of PC gaming. The era that saw the birth of what IMO (and the opinion of many) are the best FPS and best RTS of all times (Half-Life and Starcraft, for the distracted), and also my favourite adventure Myst. Not to mention Doom and Counter-Strike (fab online shooter) that marked a before and after. EDIT: Games had NO DRM!

After year 2000 piracy grows again. Linked or not, multiplatform games start to appear around this time, PS2 released. There's not many remarkable PC games and definately didn't sold as much on the PC. Egg or chicken? You pick.

 

[Widjaja]

Most people who owned a console back then were still weary of mod chipping.
Over here it was almost like the dark ages and filled with superstition and dial up XD.

Plus broadband was not cheap and locating places which offered pirated PS1 games were hard to come by.
People often still had to pay some dodgy fat guy and the key makers to get the pirated games.

Now a days with the internet being so much faster and the majority being on broadband people can easily pirate a game if there PC is able to run games.

But the catch in pirating is no online gameplay.
The reason why WoW has such high sales.

If the game is a single player only, the chances are it will get pirated regardless of quality.

There are also other ways devs are getting around piracy.
patches.

DiRT 2 for example.
Patches only when you log into GFWL.

 

[KingPing]

And what about profiles, eh? I share both the PC and the ps3 with my brother, but while in the ps3 i can have a profile for me and another for my brother, in some PC games i cant. example in ps3 MW2 i have both my profile and my brothers at a cost of 60$, while in PC to do that i would have to buy 2 keys for MW2 (since there is no profiles option in the game like MW1 had) for 120$, and thats without DLCs!.

So yeah i think PC gamers are being shafted, specially those who share their PCs

 

[Lionheart]

Didnt the PSone get a mod chip in which it could play copied or burnt games!

 

[Widjaja]

Didnt the PSone get a mod chip in which it could play copied or burnt games!

Yeah thats what I brought up before.....
I don't know about over there but over here the mod chipping was a OHHHH DODGY sort of thing.
But as I said, we were in the dark ages compared to the rest of the world then.

Plus the majority had dialup except for the wealthy

Also getting hold of the pirated games was only through a seller.

 

[erocker]

Back in the day, I could go to several different 'Video Stores" and just rent any game I wanted for a buck fifty. I had no reason to pirate or mod my console. I miss those days, Blockbuster ruined everything.

 

[TheMailMan78]

Back in the day, I could go to several different 'Video Stores" and just rent any game I wanted for a buck fifty. I had no reason to pirate or mod my console. I miss those days, Blockbuster ruined everything.

Yup. I remember those days. Good times.

As for this thread its beating a dead horse for me. I told all you suckers about this MONTHS ago before MW2 even came out. Even before that I was bitching. You guys are just NOW getting it? The game industry as a whole is crashing. Its going to be ET all over again. You guys think I'm crazy but you know what? I was RIGHT!

 

[Delta6326]

woot i was the 100 voter do i get a cookie!? and also this is getting on my nerves dang games just aren't made like they used to be.

 

[Widjaja]

Back in the day, I could go to several different 'Video Stores" and just rent any game I wanted for a buck fifty. I had no reason to pirate or mod my console. I miss those days, Blockbuster ruined everything.

I can't believe I forgot that I rented games WTF......

Oh it was so long ago....

 

[Triprift]

Back in the day, I could go to several different 'Video Stores" and just rent any game I wanted for a buck fifty. I had no reason to pirate or mod my console. I miss those days, Blockbuster ruined everything.

I remember them days to sadly though here in Oz your hard pressed to find many video stores anymore as alot of them are going to the wall.

 

[Benetanegia]

I can still rent games here, and I do frequently.

 

[von kain]

can i ask something.?
well many pc manufacturers believe that desktop will be dead in a couple of years,irrelevant?coincidence ,fact???

maybe the world will return to the time before amiga.console for games-media and pc for work and internet.

 

[TheMailMan78]

can i ask something.?
well many pc manufacturers believe that desktop will be dead in a couple of years,irrelevant?coincidence ,fact???

maybe the world will return to the time before amiga.console for games-media and pc for work and internet.

Do you have a source or are you just being a Greek?

 

[von kain]

Do you have a source or are you just being a Greek?

i will always be a Greek.proud too.(hahaha most Europeans works so we can have 6 months vacations actualy shame on us.)

well if you search many sites-bloggers says the same thing plus the cloud era approaches.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Bloggers? What do they know?

Cloud computing is for drone computers at corporations (one computer to fix instead of two-dozen)--not the home.

 

[Mussels]

Complaining to developers and posting in forums about the issue has already been shown to be, on its own, ineffective: consider Modern Warfare 2. There was a petition for dedicated servers that got over 250,000 signatures, there were petitions on IW's own forums (which were "accidentally deleted"), there were complaints and boycotts and outrage on clan and gaming forums all over the Net. And I doubt that all that resulted in a single change to the game.

Here's the problem: despite all the drama, MW2 was the biggest entertainment launch in history, pulling in over $1 billion in revenue as of six weeks ago. Firstly, the PC gaming market is just too small compared to that of consoles, and secondly, Activision/IW called the bluff: despite all the PC gaming community's outrage, PC gamers bought plenty of copies of the game; MW2 outsold CoD4 in its first week and as of yesterday, was the fourth most-played game on XFire (fifth now, Battlefield BC2 flexing its muscle baby!).

If you want to effectively change the way game makers treat the PC gaming community, writing a few books' worth of posts on their forums and sending them hate mail isn't the best course of action. Neither is trying to boycott a game, because even if you and your clan refuse to buy it, there are plenty of others out there who aren't involved enough in the gaming community to hear the drama and get in on the boycott, so the game makers will still sell copies to them.

The number one way to get game makers to listen is to get more people playing PC games, and get them playing games that give the community what it wants. Get your console friends off their Playstations etc. and show them the light. Help make the PC gaming community the dominating force in modern gaming, and then it will have the power to sway game makers.

Make it worth it to game makers to put forth the effort.

it did get somewhere - look at the official responses from the bad company 2 team over those issues, stating they wouldnt be as stupid. THAT is the response we want.

 

[Triprift]

It makes sense lets be honest you can spend thousands of dollars to get a machine that can run the latest games. You need to greatest card cus if you dont you wont get max res then you need a 30 inch or just below monitor best cpu you can ect ect. or you can spend a a couple of hundred bucks on a console thats contry to alot of pc gamers do not look bad a t all with the biggest expense being the games and a hd screen. Yeah at there best pcs are prettier but thats after shitloads more money and the majority of gamers are not hardcore there casual. thats understandable in the non stop world we have were alot of ppl dont have the time for super long sessions.

 

[von kain]

Bloggers? What do they know?

Cloud computing is for drone computers at corporations (one computer to fix instead of two-dozen)--not the home.

in the long way what happens in major scale come down to our houses.cloud will be partial in this (and maybe next )generations of OSes but surerly the fore-next (windows strata?) will be absolute cloud (imagine ios-android-chrome)

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Your PS3/Xbox 360 is more likely to end up on a cloud than your PC is (for DRM sake). Hell, they already are. You can't do any gaming online without registering with Xbox Live or PlayStation Network and connecting to their authorized servers. There is no peer to peer there. All that they are missing is placing the OS on their already exisiting cloud infrastructure.

 

[Benetanegia]

It makes sense lets be honest you can spend thousands of dollars to get a machine that can run the latest games. You need to greatest card cus if you dont you wont get max res then you need a 30 inch or just below monitor best cpu you can ect ect. or you can spend a a couple of hundred bucks on a console thats contry to alot of pc gamers do not look bad a t all with the biggest expense being the games and a hd screen. Yeah at there best pcs are prettier but thats after shitloads more money and the majority of gamers are not hardcore there casual. thats understandable in the non stop world we have were alot of ppl dont have the time for super long sessions.

That's the most used, tired and stupid of the arguments that have been circulating forever. If you need the latest graphics card, 4gb of ram, the latest CPU and a 2560x1600 30 inch monitor in order to play your games at 60-100 fps and 4 to 16xAA and max settings, which is what you need the latest for, you are NOT going to buy a console that is capped at 30 fps, renders games at less than 720p with no AA nor AF, medium quality textures and has 512 mb of ram.

If you are happy with the latter you can take your old computer (ANY dual core with 2GB of DDR 266 or DDR2 400 Mhz will do the job) and put a $60 HD4830 inside and that's it, you can even hook it up to your TV. Or you can buy a $250-300 console and pay an extra of $10 per game that can easily pile up to an extra of $500 over the lifetime of the console if you are a true gamer.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6240905/p-4.html

COD:MW2 High settings 1680x1059 8xAF no AA

8600 GTS = 34 FPS
HD4670 = 56 FPS

On medium quality even a 7900GS will do the job for you.
7600 GT will cut it if you want to go as low as consoles in terms of resolution and textures.

 

[Triprift]

Most ppl dont look at the stuff you just menchined if they did thered be buggerall consoles and gaming pcs everywhere. All they see is a PS3 for 400 odd bucks while the top end gpus cost more than that alone.

 

[MadClown]

{bad english}Don't worry guiz, when I becum a game develupper, I can does make good pc gaymze 4 u!!1 nO dijittal rytes manahgmunt(DRM), no see-D keez, no horseshit.{/bad english} Every game will have lean, even racing games, and solitaire. But in all seriousness, this needs to stop, It's a sad day when I have to rebuild a pre-2000 era computer just to play some good games.

 

[von kain]

If you need the latest graphics card, 4gb of ram, the latest CPU and a 2560x1600 30 inch monitor in order to play your games at 60-100 fps and 4 to 16xAA and max settings...

or play crysis on a constant 24 fps you need everything god can give you.

 

[TIGR]

it did get somewhere - look at the official responses from the bad company 2 team over those issues, stating they wouldnt be as stupid. THAT is the response we want.

I doubt they were ever considering setting something like IWNet up for BC2.

 

[Benetanegia]

or play crysis on a constant 24 fps you need everything god can give you.

False. At the settings that a console would play the game a 8800 GT can play it perfectly. At 1920x1200 4xAA Crysis Ultra High needs a very powerful card. If you are willing to play at 1024x768 no AA and medium/high settings, it runs perfectly on a 9600GT. At those settings it plays just as well as any other game.

The problem with Crysis is that it doesn't scale as well as other games as you increase resolution, or should I say that it does scale with resolution unlike other games. 1920x1200 has 75% more pixels than 1280x1024, it would be normal to obtain only half (1/1.75) the performance. Most games use a pixel based lightning effects, shadows and post-effects, while Crysis uses jittering and a simulation of a physically correct model on every effect.

For example take Dirt2, it's lighting, shadows and effects look much better, crisper the higher the resolution and blurred on low resolution. That's because everything is based on screen pixels, that's it a soft shadow border will have i.e. 20 pixels thickness no matter the resolution, resultin in far fatter effects on lower res.

Crysis on the other hand uses jittering based on the scale in the 3D scene. In certain moment a soft shadow border will have 5 physical centimeters or 3D engine units and it's transparency will be calculated using jittering and not simple interpolation like in most games. At 1280x1024 that will be translated to X pixels, at 1920x1200 that will be translated to more pixels and more work to the GPU.

This difference results in a much nicer picture, but lower performance is espected, because the picture is better! More than 2 years have passed and nothing has touched Crysis in terms of graphics fidelity. You can't have a nicer look without a cost.

Why will Crysis 2 run on consoles? Mainly because they are going to run it at very low resolution compared to what people played Crysis at and because it's mostly going to occur in New York, where geometry is far simpler and hence physical calculations far easier for the GPU. Use the above on Crysis on your PC and any mid-range card from 2 years ago will play it smoothly.