IIRC game consoles are sold at a loss to the manufacturer. They simply cannot put the power they need to lure customers inexpensively. They make their money back licensing development kits and taking a percentage of every game made for the console.
So not even the PS3 can play Oblivion for $600 of hardware but they shift costs around so it seems like it and get you at the other end.
Everyone here has very valid points. My point is that in my particular situation, I would rather play games and watch the occasional movie on my console than on my PC. I realize that I could make my PC a gaming monster with better graphics, sound and control than my PS3 would be capable of. But I’m not going to.
I sit in front of a computer at a desk 8 hours a day, 3 days a week. I work from home two days a week, and I sit at my desk in front of my home computer for 16 hours a week. When I want to relax it doesn’t involve sitting in front of another computer. It involves sitting on the couch with a cold beverage, flipping channels or throwing a game in the PS3.
I think that number of people like me (or at least in a similiar situation to me) has been increasing. That, I think, is what has led to the rise in console gaming and the decrease in PC gaming, not piracy.
I would love to buy more PC games, but two things stop me:
My PC just won’t run newer games. It doesn’t even meet minimum requirements, and it’s only what…two years old? I can run Portal, but as soon as I look at the Portal that opens in the beginning (literally, I can look everywhere and it runs fine, but as soon as you look AT the portal itself) it freezes up and crashes. And I have everything on Minimum settings with a Portal Depth of 0. It’s an orange disk on the bloody wall. There’s nothing else I can do. And it ran HL2 fine…
My CD drive is wonked. I don’t know why. It happened on my last computer too. The little light on the drive comes on so I know it has power, my comp says the hardware is running fine and all, but it won’t read any discs I shove in. I’ve tried putting in those CDs with little brushes to try and clean the lens, but no go. This happened on my last comp as well, so I’m guessing maybe it’s because my room is so dusty?..
Nintendo makes a profit on each unit they sell. It’s Sony and Microsoft who have to sell at a loss to stay in the market. This was true even for the previous generation; Nintendo did very well for themselves despite the Gamecube’s third place status.
(Not that this is particularly relevant, but it’s something that’s always worth pointing out. :D)
Still, even the Wii puts out graphics comparable to most mid-level PC games. Certainly not the high-end system-killer stuff like Crysis, but Smash Bros. Brawl is easily prettier and more graphically advanced than City of Heroes, which is what I primarily play now.
This happens a lot these days. Gone are the “old” days of high-end, well built CD-ROM drives (I think Plextor, one of the last, is out of the business now). Frankly they just are not built extremely well anymore and seem to give up the ghost after a awhile.
On the upside they are rather cheap. You can get them for $30 or even less these days and are not difficult to install.
So it’s not because my room is dusty? And even then, I don’t know how to install any sort of hardware, I’ve never learned, and I’m wary to even try. I’ve more or less come to terms with it, but it still sucks regardless.
Could be because your room is dusty, but there’s no way to really know for sure. Don’t be afraid to install hardware in your machine. I’ve seen my mother-in-law do it, and she doesn’t know the difference between hard drive space and RAM. Neat thing about computers is that most things only fit into one place inside the machine. It’s worth learning how to do (says someone who’d rather take her car to an oil change place than do it herself.)
I agree with those that feel it’s a hardware issue. A PC has to do a multitude of things; a game console only has to play games. So a PC is either going to have worse game playing performance than a game console or cost a lot more than a game console for the same performance. People looking to play games are going to find game consoles a better value. And the software will follow the hardware.
Look, I have a very good reason TOWARD pirating games. Warez courier groups know what they’re doing way more than the developers do. These days, if I buy a legit game, chances are one of these two (or likely both) is going to happen:
It’s going to ask me to insert the CD/DVD EVERY time I load the game, despite doing a full install to the harddrive. It only needs the disc to verify that it’s an original copy. I do so much disc switching that don’t want to reach for a disc every time I want to play a game, especially if it’s a game I installed a while ago and want to come back to. Not to mention the fact that constantly inserting and removing discs is going to damage them.
It’s going to refuse to install at all, since I have virtual drive software installed on my computer. Some PC gaming companies have this crazy notion that if I use virtual drives, then I MUST be a pirate, and therefore I might pirate THEIR game, so they don’t want me installing it (nevermind the fact that I don’t even need to install a game to make a copy of it).
Besides the fact that I get a free, working game with my pirated copy, it also includes a crack which will fix these two problems. Simply put, I have a lot less hassle playing the game if I go with the pirated version than the retail one.
Also, I think what is killing the PC industry more than anything is the fact that you have to spend more money on hardware upgrades to play the newest games than it would cost to buy a new PS3 or X360. If you look on newegg.com, there are video cards selling for over $400!!! Being unsure whether the game I want to play is even going to run well on my computer is a huge deterant from buying a new game.
That’s a rather nonsensical excuse I must say considering you can download a No-CD patch without pirating a game. That excuse doesn’t wash at all.
Really? I have virtual drives on my comp and only around 2004 did I have any software that refused to install. Most virtual programs already bundle anti-blacklisting tools in it. And I’d like to point out in your case the developers are right. You do pirate their games.
Well than buy only console games and stop pirating PC games. Just because you’re unsure of what to buy doesn’t give you the right to steal.
Personally I think fears of piracy are way way overblown and developers are listening too much to non-nonsensical overblown estimations that tell them they would have sold 10,000,000 more copies if they could have just stopped those darn pirates, but I also hate the BS excuses offered by the thieves for their behavior. Hell I’ve downloaded a game or two in my time but at least I knew I was STEALING. I only did it because at the time I was broke and usually only downloaded games I wasn’t planning to buy because I was only mildly interested in them to begin with but I was still just a thief. I detest the sense of entitlement and the same lame excuses offered up over and over.
Most decent software is open source anyway, or has an open source alternative that’s just as good. I think gaming is included, but for most people, “just as good” means “as much pretty graphics”, and that’s not the case for me: most of my gaming time is spent in MUDs, I do the vast majority of my computing in general at a command line interface, and I rarely ever play graphical games on my computer–because I like it. Should I pirate a game–and it’s usually a game that’s at least 5 years old anyway–I feel no moral qualms about it. Charging for software in this day and age is pure greed at worst and misguided management at best: open source software is generally more stable, much more secure (which is an issue since pretty much all games are networked now), and much less buggy, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here (although I’ll be happy to refer interested parties to excellent reading material on the subject).
My point is that I feel no compunction to support either pure greed or misguided management. There are only a handful of programs I would even consider paying for (Mac OS, anything in the Adobe CS3 suite, and maybe Final Cut Pro), and I haven’t bought or pirated those and don’t plan to any time soon. As for PC games, I have no moral qualms with pirating them. Your pragmatic appeal in the OP won’t work on me, either, since I play free games almost exclusively anyway. (Not because I’m an open-source crusader–although I am–but just because those happen to be the ones I like.)
It’s great if you’re a fan of open source and I’m glad you enjoy yourself but charging for software is greed? If someone wants to give away their time and knowledge for free in some type of communal spirit that’s their choice but it’s not greedy to produce a product and ask for an exchange of money.
I’m curious how it’s ‘mismanagement’ to charge for software how do software company managers pay their employees otherwise? They need to get money from somewhere the only other option I can figure out is advertising revenue and I already hate how ads are being stuck in every type of software already.
It’s not the charging that’s mismanagement, it’s the development of closed-source software in the first place. I’m a bit too tired to recall all of open-source-software god Eric S. Raymond’s bullet-point-style conclusions in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (a must-read for anyone who’s the slightest bit interested in the applied logistics of software development), but the one that always comes to my mind first is:
All bugs are shallow, given enough sets of eyes.
ESR himself found out during the development of fetchmail that encouraging users to peruse the code freely resulted in a sharp decline in insurmountable bugs, all the way to zero. There’s a long treatise in the book on exactly why this is, but the basic idea is that a core developer is always too close to the project and too biased by his or her own theories, mindset, etc. to figure some bugs out. Those bugs, to him or her, will seem frustratingly deep problems that take massive numbers of man-hours to overcome. It doesn’t help that most bug reports are pretty useless. But when every user is treated like a co-developer, not only are the bug reports much more helpful (“The program choked on its memory management routines; I think the if statement in line 228 might be the culprit”* rather than “Dude, the thing DOESN’T WORK! Says something about memory! Do I need to buy more RAM?”), but there’s always at least one user out there whose perspective is exactly right for him or her to spot the fix.
IOW, Fred Brooks’ classic law that adding more developers makes a late project later, has actually been proven false–as long as the extra developers are users doing parallel debugging tasks and code extensions on an already-usable core program. I can babble about this for days, but I’ve already hijacked this thread enough. I hope I’ve answered your question, anyway; if not, read some ESR.
*That example is off the top of my head, and I know very little about C. Apologies if any C coders just had anuerysms triggered by reading it.
That’s just not true.
PC Gaming is flexible. How you choose to address price vs performance is up to you. For consoles, it’s fixed. You pay one price, you get one performance.
You can buy the $400 video card if you want top of the line stuff, or you can buy the $100 card that’ll still graphically outperform any console. The fact that PC hardware is constantly advancing also makes things cheaper - today’s $400 video cards that’ll massively outperform consoles will be tomorrow’s $100 video cards that, since console hardware is fixed for years, still massively outperform consoles.
Some people are looking at the fact that console hardware advancement is frozen for like 5+ years every cycle as a good thing. You don’t need to upgrade! The console will run every game ever made for it for the next X years. And that’s true - but it comes at the cost of being locked in place and not advancing for years in a field where the advances come fast.
Right now, the consoles are pretty new and so they look somewhat decent next to PCs, but where will we be in 4 years when the console still has the exact same hardware and limitations but PCs have advanced several generations?
My biggest concern about the PC market right now is that EA is buying everyone up. EA is a shitty company that in my experience pretty much always makes a developer they buy out worse. They’re also probably the biggest single factor behind games being released too early - which is a really stupid, shortsighted strategy. Sure, you hit your intended release dates for your stockholders so you don’t get chewed out, but you alienate anyone who might want to buy games in the future and screw your long term.
So then tell me why, after upgrading my computer a couple months ago to an Athlon 4200+, 4GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon something with 512MB of video ram (a $130 PCI-E card, not one of the fancy ones with an extra fan port and a picture of Lora Croft on it, but still better than what I had before), my computer STILL can’t play Microsoft Flight Simulator X, a game that came out almost 2 years ago, decently? And yes, I’ve tweaked with the graphics settings and installed the service packs.
Both the minimum and recommended specs for this game are way lower than what my system has. This is often true for other games too, and is exactly why I don’t want to throw down $50 for a game that will barely run on my computer, despite claiming to on the box.
FSX is definitely a game that had a very high set of requirements upon release. As to why you specifically have trouble running it, I’m not sure. My first guess would be that you’re trying to run it at the native resolution of a big LCD monitor. I have a slower CPU and possibly slower video card, but I can run the game decently on medium settings - but I use 1024x768 as a resolution.
I’m not sure, aside from deceptive requirements, that the game should be listed as a negative for PCs - a console wouldn’t run the game because it’s too technically ambitious, whereas high-end PCs can run it well. You can play it if it’s worth the investment to you - but if it’s not, you’re in the same boat with consoles and lower end PCs, neither can run it.
What ‘advancement’? Sure, there’s prettier graphics and such, buy what I’m interested in is gameplay. That’s something that is fairly separate from actual processing power–look at the number of SNES games that people still play. It’s more than just nostalgia, those game are fun enough that having 16-bit graphics isn’t a detriment.
Honestly, I prefer console games for other reasons, but my point is that ‘technological advances’ is overhyped, IMHO. Make the game play well, sound decent and not hurt my eyes. They could do that in 1990, there’s no reason today’s hardware should be an obstacle to making good games.
You have a point, but this isn’t really a point in favor of consoles, generally. PCs have lots of games that are fun without being technology demonstrators, and consoles (aside from the Wii) are trying to move towards being more technically and graphically advanced.
There are other things that more powerful machines allow more than strictly graphics - like better AI, physics systems, bigger worlds with more detail… stuff like that adds to the gameplay.
My original point was to counter the idea by console advocates that being locked in place technologically for 5+ years in a world where there’s substantial change from year to year is a good thing.
Sure, and those substantial changes are one reason why our above poster can’t play Flight Simulator X.
I pretty much never play console games - but your argument is flawed. Yes, PCs can do all sorts of stuff better than consoles - if everything is correctly patched, there’s no hardware silliness, there’s no system requirements that are complete bullshit, and all sorts of other things that Average Guy doesn’t want (and shouldn’t need) to deal with.
What’s the requirement for running Assassins’s Creed on a 360? Owning a 360.
-Joe
Well, yes, of course. Some PC games have pretty heavy requirements. You can’t expect every PC to run every PC game. Now - the issue of deceptive minimum requirements are a problem.
What’s the alternative? Shun any game that’s designed to push the boundaries of what technology allows? If FSX didn’t exist, then no one would be able to use it - how would that make the situation better?
Something like that wouldn’t exist on consoles (unless neutered considerably, and then we might as well be playing FS2004), so I’m failing to see how this is a strike against PC gaming (again, aside from possible deceptive system requirements issues).
You misunderstand. I’m not declaring PC gaming to be unamibiguously superior to console gaming - both have their advantages and disadvantages.
My point in this case is that console advocates often point to the fact that you can play any game made for a console even years after the console’s introduction. I’m saying that it’s not a clear advantage, it’s a tradeoff. Yes, you don’t have to upgrade your hardware, but you also don’t get the benefit of technological developments until your next console comes out 5+ years later.
If being locked into a single moment in technology was an unambiguous advantage, we’d all still be playing Ataris.