so about the lack of PC games…

I haven’t done a lot of gaming in recent years, but I do peruse the shelves of game purveyors once in a while. I’ve noticed that in the last few years, console games are crowding out PC games. According to Id’s Kevin Cloud, it’s piracy whodunnit.

Without a doubt, piracy results in lost revenue, although credible analysis is hard to come by and piracy as the default culprit for lagging sales is getting old. The people commenting on the story make a number of valid points. PC games have increased in price, while not offering much in return other than eye candy. The PC is a fragmented platform, which drives up development cost at a time when game publishers are squeezed to develop on the cheap. Intrusive copy protection and in-game product placement are not likely to boost sales. And so on…

I myself am somewhat of a curmudgeon when it comes to games. I never cared for the types of games I associate with consoles and that well is poisoned beyond recall; on top of that, I’m not willing to spend money on (more or less) single purpose hardware, when I have plenty of perfectly good general purpose PCs around. I haven’t had all that much free time to play games in recent years, but I would make the time if there were games that I could get into. The Sims and other god games are fun, right up until the point when the inevitable micro-management spoils it. FPS and real-time strategy games don’t much interest me and decent adventure games are few and far in between. So what’s a gamer to do…

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Ahh, just let me surmise a bit here and see if I can offer some reasons…

- Online play. Honestly, it became pretty apparent in the days of Doom and Warcraft II that online was the bomb. This is something consoles never had other than amongst friends, and let me tell you, college dorms were still always split between computer games online and a room full of guys playing on a console. Now, console gaming is online and stealing away a lot of that segment.

- One of the biggest boons to PC gaming was the advent of 3D technology, right around when Unreal was released around 1997 or so. Man! PC games looked good! These days they still look good, but the gap has lessened. Other than just faster speeds, PCs haven’t had a big revolution like 3D since then.

- Simplicity. Lots of casual computer users and PC gamers are getting sick of computers. They’re complicated to order and pick out, upgrade parts for performance, and figure out drivers, etc. A console is just that, a console. Pretty easy mode there.

- Consoles are actually becoming more useful than just gaming. I know far too many people who don’t have DVD players because they use their XBOX or Playstation as their DVD player. This is only naturally going to increase to full blown media centers, if not already. Consoles have become a little bit more PC-like in their uses for digital media.

Ahh well, just some rambling by me. I am mostly a PC gamer still, although my interests lie in FPS as much as anything else (been hooked on WoW for a year now though), but I foresee myself moving back to consoles in the near future.

I meant to reply to the above a few days ago, but Sidetracked has become my middle name…

No argument about online play. Back in a previous life, we sysadmins used to lock down our wing and moved a bunch of Sun4 workstations around for a friendly game of Crossfire. The writing was on the wall even then. Consoles were limited in potential until they sprouted online access, but I suppose that couldn’t happen until they’ve saturated their market.

It’s very obvious that there’s convergence between general purpose PCs and the special purpose PC that consoles are evolving into. If TV screens were usable to read text on, the lines would soon blur completely. After all, a modern-day console with a hard disk to squirrel files away on is all the computer most people need. However, as you said there’s an even easier transition from old-style consoles to full-blown media center set-tops. I just wish you hadn’t reminded me that consoles can be used as DVD players.

I do fondly remember Unreal and Unreal Tournament, but I haven’t played any FPS games since. In part, the genre has lost my interest, in part I can’t be bothered to keep my PCs updated for maximum frame rates.

Well, just give me Neverwinter Nights 2 for my PC and I’m happy.

(Note to self: The layout of the comment pages needs a bit more work.)

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