25 years old, I used to pretty much define myself as a “gamer”, computer games (and video games, though I was definitely a PC guy rather than a console guy) were my life ever since I was three or four, and now… it’s been years since I’ve been able to really muster up interest. I don’t know if it’s just aging, or related to what games are out there, or maybe about not having friends who are that into it anymore, or, quite possibly, related to some serious depression issues. But it’s definitely changed. Permanently? I don’t know; I hope not. But, eh, people and their interests change over time. It happens.
You have opened a can of worms on the same scale as tipping and picky eaters (but if no one is looking, I absolutely agree with you and think that consol games are ruining PC games with ports and a general dumbing down of the genre). I love a good game, but hate bad ones more, so I’m not as likely to take a chance on a game as I used to be.
To clarify, I mean that I’m 25 years old now, not that I was 25 when I was a devoted gamer.
I’ve been a gamer for decades now. PC, console, whatever. I don’t discriminate (which is really what the whole PC vs console thing comes down to - discrimination. There are excellent games on both sides of the fence and anyone who implies otherwise is either inexperienced, making a stereotypical write-off, or simply very narrow in their tastes.).
I go through cycles - my PC gaming is very much on the downswing right now. There’s just not much coming out that interests me. Sometimes I sit down from some pretty mindless King’s Bounty, or a bit of LotRO, or SotS, but the last game that really grabbed me on the PC was Aquaria, which I got as part of the Humble Indie bundle and really rescued me from a rut there. Console titles are working out a little bit better, because 2D fighting games are making a bit of a resurgence, and I enjoy the heck out of them. Also a lot of interesting ‘little games’ - XBLA or XBL:Indie titles.
I think a lot of the major players in the game development space are too busy making sequels to things that don’t really need sequels. There’s a shortage of new ideas, and, truthfully, an unwillingness to work with good OLD ideas. Some of this is remedied in the independent game space, but most of those developers have extremely limited resources, so the scope of the projects they can do is smaller. That’s not necessarily bad, but it does mean that certain things don’t tend to happen in that space.
So yeah. Count me in on the “games used to be better” camp, I guess. It’s not so much that I can’t be bothered to learn new things (Though that is definitely a known symptom of getting old!) so much as that the new things so often seem poorly designed or just uninteresting.
Oh, and to whomever it was who was lamenting their inability to run Xcom/Master of Magic, have you tried DOSBOX? It claims to run both those titles. Can’t help you with Mechcommander though - that’s in that unpleasant space between “so old we can emulate it” and “new enough that it still runs.”
I’ve been gaming since the early 80’s. I went through a long hiatus from the mid-nineties through about 2006 during which time I had little more than passing interest in gaming.
When I read and watched some videos about Oblivion I found it to be compelling enough to get me gaming again. I’ve been adding titles and upgrading my PC ever since.
I estimate that I play around 10 hours per month. It’s not a huge time waster for me. I have games I’ve purchased that I’ve never played. I have many more that I’ve started but never came close to finishing. I love gaming and don’t expect to give up on it any time soon.
Also, since the can of worms has already been opened. I have a friend who has one of those rock band games. He convinced me to give it a try. I hated it. My brother has a Wii and showed me some dumb game where you have to make rabbits run and throw cows and stuff. For some reason he thought I would like it because he knows I’m into gaming. While novel I found it to be pure kiddie stuff. I want to headshot zombies with a shotgun using a keyboard and mouse.
The 360 and PS3 are nothing more than locked down & comparatively underpowered gaming PCs that don’t have keyboards or use a mouse.
For me it comes and goes, depending on the game. I tend to binge on games for a brief period and then go a few months without. I’ve been mostly disengaged for the past nine months or so, but on a whim I picked up SC2 the other day and am having an absolute blast. The game has a frightful amount of depth, so I don’t see myself tiring of it anytime soon.
ETA: Male, 31, with a marriage, mortgage, and baby due any minute now. I work 70 hours per week or so, but still manage to find time for gaming in small doses. I find that the more pressure I am under at work, the more I like to play.
You can assert this fairly correctly about the 360 (though there’s also a bunch of stuff there that isn’t in your PC ‘natively’. Parental controls, drivers, blah, etc. Firmware, basically.). The PS3 though is apparently architecturally quite different from the PC, which caused a lot of headaches for people early on during the development cycle.
All that aside though, to compare them on a strictly hardware basis is silly. It’s like citing the specs of an arcade cabinet alongside a PC. Yeah, fine the PC runs faster, but if you want to play the arcade game, odds are, you need the cabinet. Or wait for a port that may never come.
The truth is that there are a lot of games you can play on consoles that you can’t play on a PC, and there are some significant advantages for the developer working in the console space as well (Uniform hardware means QA testing for a console costs a fraction of what it does for a PC, and also that you don’t have to worry about hardware requirements. Also, piracy on consoles remains significantly less of an issue than it is on the PC.) so it’s rather an unreasonable expectation to suggest that developers will ever stop developing for them semi-exclusively.
The OP’s problems are probably more to do with the types of games he’s playing and the direction of the industry itself than anything with himself. FPS and MMO games really haven’t evolved much since their inception and are arguably the most whored genres in gaming, so it’s hardly surprising the monotony of these games is setting in.
As for the industry as a whole, nowadays it’s all about moving units, and this is most easily done via a lot of hype/hyperbole and pretty graphics/window dressing. What this results in of course is shallow ‘junk food’ gaming experiences that the gamer can take very little away from except the obligatory short-lived high of a new title. Just like a nutrition devoid meal - it’s immediately satisfying but the sugar rush is short lived and you’re left feeling hollow and unsatisfied.
This is the real problem with the industry today, that this new direction it’s heading has no room for the persnickety ‘hardcore’. The industry is more commercial and less soul than its ever been and has no desire to please those who want something more substantive from their pastimes than a quick fix. If Johnny Oldschool is disenchanted with the shallow nature of the sequel to his once-loved franchise, so be it - gaming is mainstream now and as such there are a million other lower-brow consumers who are more than willing to pay for what Johnny ups his nose at.
Been a gamer since the early 80’s. (Elite rulz!) but as someone mentioned - i no longer have the desire to crawl up a lot of steep leaning curves.
Pretty much the only games I play now are Football Manager (but even that I haven’t finished with last season’s version yet) and Lord of The Rings Online.
The latter I play quite a lot. Didn’t think I’d take to the online thing but it’s fun.
Outside of firing up an occasional old favorite (Civ, Total Annihilation, Half Life) I’m pretty much done with PC gaming.
It is mostly the chasing of the new hardware carrot that I’ve grown tired of, and the disproportionate amount of time configuring and installing when compared to consoles. I want to put a disk in and play–I usually get only chunks of an hour or two to game in and I don’t want to spend that time booting, loading, tweaking, etc.
For example, I picked up a used copy of Neverwinter Nights 2 to have some fun with because I’d never played it and many of the modded improvements sounded awesome. A couple of hours later watching install progress bars, repartitioning to optimize HD space, downloading patches, installing and troubleshooting mods, I finally just shut it off before even playing it and went to have fun with my X360 instead. I still haven’t played NWN2.
What’s with all the lame “PC is sooo difficult woe is me!” bull shit? Really? You had to wait a couple of HOURS to install a game? You had to REPARTITION a hard drive to play it?
Are you kidding me?
This is the real issue. Stupid users, not something inherantly difficult about playing PC games.
Let me paint you a picture that is a LOT more like day to day PC gaming than your anecdote:
I was able to pre-download Star Craft 2 several days in an advance of release and didn’t have to go out to pick up a box, though I could have if I wanted to (and I did in the end cause I wanted the collector’s edition). I was playing on release day without a single issue. Total install time was < 10 minutes and I was treated to a story re-cap while that happened. After that I put the disc away and forgot about it.
I loaded up a game and was playing the game at true 1080p resolution (not sub 720p upscaled and ugly like most console games), again without any issues. In the middle of the campaign, a friend IM’ed me in-game asking me to play Left 4 Dead. In three seconds I was in the Left4Dead lobby ready to play with them. No disc swapping, no waiting for internimable load times like on the consoles, and enjoying great gameplay and sweet, sweet graphics WITHOUT A SINGLE HITCH.
Never did I have to repartition my hardrive, or worry about updates, or even sacrifice a goat to my rig. As for the occasional game bugs/hardware issues/updates, it’s the SAME situation on the consoles. How many xboxes were red-ringing again? How many issues with firmware updates have both consoles had? How many times did you have to sit there and wait for a game to patch, unable to do anything else?
All my steam games are kept up to date automatically. And the update process doesn’t prevent me from doing something else on my machine including playing other games. I’d argue that today, PC gamign is EASIER, more convinient, and certainly more open/flexible than console gaming.
But people have these crappy 10 year old PC’s that they refuse to update/take care of and wonder why PC gaming is so difficult. It’s like being upset that your nintendo 64 console doesn’t play PS3 games.
That was a pretty snarky post. PC is my platform of choice but I wouldn’t argue that it’s easier or more convenient than console gaming.
What is more difficult? can you provide some examples?
Installing? Steam games just require a download. Install time - all of 10 seconds.
Updating? Automatic on the PC for modern games, and I’m not prevented from doing something else while updating (in fact most updates run silently in the background).
Jumping in and out of games? No disc switching, jump in and out of a game for a quick multi-player match with friends in seconds.
Accessibility? On the PC you can play with a controller from your couch, on your desk with keyboard + mouse, with a wheel, a joystick, what have you.
Game issues/playability/performance? On the consoles you’re stuck. Remember the performance issues with Mass Effect 2 on consoles? Hell with a lot of console games? On PC community created mods can turn vanilla Oblivion ( a good game) into a game I have on my hard drive at all times and go back to often (a great game), and a hardware upgrade can take me from medium settings to extreme, if I really wanted that - it’s optional.
The only thing that might be more difficult is knowing if a game will run on a particular PC, but this problem plagues mostly non PC gamers. And is solved by all of 10 minutes checking a website like Tom’s Hardware, or the game’s forums, or better yet, 10 seconds in a site like systemrequirementlabs.com which will tell you if you cna run it, and what you might need to update.
And even hardware updates aren’t needed as often as they were needed back in the 90’s. A $200 video card will treat you right for years.
People are lazy, that’s what it boils down to. Lazy and ignorant. If they wanted to the PC could be a better, easier, more open platform for them, but they figure yet another appliance in the living room is the better way to go.
Now, I don’t think that there isn’t a place for console gaming. I own a console, and probably always will. But it pisses me off when people who don’t know what they are talking about (invariably console only gamers), proclaim the platform to be too difficult to use, and when the SAME issues crop up on the consoles they love so much, it gets a pass.
(stupid edit time limit)
… it gets a pass and is not at all indicative of problems with those platforms, but they are all that is wrong with PC gaming.
I mean take a look at the poster above my original reply. The guy seriously thinks that partitioning his hard drive and 2 hour installations is the norm for PC gaming.
I think you miss the point. It doesn’t need to be the “norm” it just needs to happen to someone once. If your Honda exploded when you unlocked it, you’d probably buy a german car next time. 
No, it’s certainly not typical that you have to reinstall or repartition to play a PC game. But with a PC you often wind up wrestling with your hardware and software. There are just so many combinations and things that can go wrong.
A friend and I play multiplayer PC games over the Internet each week. Hosting a simple multiplayer game can be quite difficult. We were trying to play a HL2 mod called Empires and we couldn’t figure out how I could connect to his listen server. The solution had something to do with setting sv_lan 0 or something like that. Simple for those in the know, but we switch among games pretty often and don’t know them inside and out. Same with Unreal Tournament 3, great engine but they made some really strange decisions with file structure and multiplayer setup.
Installing games can be a pain too, like look at GTA IV. From what I read you need to install MS Games for Windows Live and Rockstar Social Club just to be able to play. With setting up the accounts and all I can easily see that taking an hour. Which is why even for $5 I didn’t bother, I had already finished GTA IV on the PS3 several times.
There are plenty of other examples. I’ve been playing PC games since my first 286 with 2 1.2 MB floppy drives (no hard drive.) I love PC gaming but it does try my patience sometimes. Sometimes I just want to sit in an easy chair and play Battlefield Bad Company or Rock Band.
My first MMORPG was *The Sims Online *because I was in a miserable marriage and lonely. Skilling up was something our toons did while we all sat around and chatted in the room or privately. I would play from the moment I got home from work until the wee hours of the morning, and then do it all over again.
Then some of us went to WoW and the cyber flirting went out the window. I wanted to kill stuff. And I wanted to do it a lot. But I was divorced and dating someone new at the time - so I only did it when he and I were not together - so usually Sunday night through Thursday nights. Boyfriends came and went, but killing was forever. Some boyfriends would learn to play but some were annoying to play with - always whining about dying.
I like killing and questing - I hate drama. So after I was tired of some of the random crap with guilds and such, I switched servers and played on my own and therefore didn’t feel the commitments to raid and such.
So it wasn’t surprising that I didn’t play for 6 weeks or more while I took night classes and did other things.
Now I play in spurts - a few nights here and there in between everything else. I’m not ready to cancel WoW yet, but I’m certainly not about to add any new MMORPGs to my life either.
And sometimes, i still want to build pretty house on The Sims.
I can say the same thing about the consoles though. That’s my point. the failure rate of the original xbox 360’s was HUGE. And yet console gamers didn’t flock to some other platform. Why?
Network issues also plague console owners. If you don’t have your router set up right you won’t be able to play games online whether you’re on a console or a PC.
And putting forward GTA IV and the experience you “read about” is hardly evidence of an overall issue with games on PC.
BTW, GFWL is installed along side the game automatically. It’s transparent to the user, and setting up an account is less painful than setting up an account with xbox live.
On top of all that you’re using examples of games dating back to early last decade. Again, MODERN PC gaming is easy, in many respects EASIER than console gaming. And it offers more.
You say: “Sometimes I just want to sit in an easy chair and play Battlefield Bad Company or Rock Band.” As though the same cannot be done on the PC. With the exception of one particular game, you can.
I fact, that’s what I’ll be doing tonight. Sitting back on my couch and playing Dirt 2 with my wireless game pad along with some of my cousins. On a PC. Woe is me! I wonder if I’l have to repartition my drive?! Better get out of work early today, just in case :rolleyes:
I agree with Kinthalis. This notion that PC gaming in the modern era (meaning within the last several years or so as hardware, software and operating systems have become more and more proficient and cheaper) is somehow hard or complicated is just silly.
I don’t have a great rig, but I do have a reasonably fast internet connection . I have a machine I bought off Ebay new for $400 last year, it has Vista Ultimate, an AMD dual core processor, 4MB of RAM and an Nvidia 9600 GT card which certainly isn’t among the best or newest cards. I play lots of games just fine (and not at resolutions like Kinthalis gets, I don’t have a great monitor, its an HP vs19) but games run flawlessly and graphics are sparkling. And Steam is like the greatest thing ever to come along.
I have never once had an issue other than some minor compatability issues with older games like BF 1942 that are pretty easily resolved. This hemming and hawing over PC gaming is nonsense.
My current game library is small, but I love the games I have: Fallout 3, Crysis and Crysis Warhead (which I can play with about medium-high settings and still get a decent framerate), BF 1942 Anthology (and Desert Combat, of course), Left For Dead 2, Portal, Alien Swarm, Serious Sam HD The Second Encounter, Bioshock 1 and 2, Call Of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, and a few others.
Life is good as a PC gamer.
ETA: and I know dick about computers.
Because it wasn’t their “fault”; MS said “oops, we’ll fix that for you.” If you try contacting, say, a game company about a PC game that doesn’t work, they say “Well, have you tried upgrading your video drivers? How much RAM do you have? Have you defragmented your hard drive?” And good luck getting support for a game that doesn’t run from the PC manufacturer.
Most routers plug and play pretty well these days. They’re insecure as heck by default, but they work. 
Well, I got the latest patch for Sword of the Stars a few months ago, and it completely killed the game. I had to wander over to page two of their tech support forums and find an obscure post about installing some random MS C++ Redistributable. Much as you try to whitewash, these things still happen.
Yes, out of those two games listed, only one can be played on the PC. 50% is probably about accurate.
What you and all the other people who are busy tearing their hair out about why people aren’t gaming exclusively on PCs just don’t get is the level of hassle that using a PC still is for the random user. There are MILLIONS of people out there who have no idea what a “graphics driver” is or what it’s for, and who will tell you a ram is a male sheep. But these people want to play games and game companies want to sell games to them.
I really don’t understand why all the “smart” PC users can’t think outside their own little box long enough to grasp that. Not everyone grew up with a PC at hand like you and I did. Some people who did still weren’t interested. PC literacy is not a requirement in modern society yet. Will it be in 10/20/30 years? Maybe, but that’ll still just be the kind of literacy required to USE a PC, not to troubleshoot it. It’s the difference between being able to drive and being able to change your oil filter.