PC vs. CONSOLE WAR: PC's are LOSING. - Page 2

I play both consoles and PCs. I have a Wii, 360, PS3, and a PC LAN with 6 PCs in my house. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. I have no shortage of play time on any of them except the PS3.

Honestly, it is not that Steam is somehow hacker proof, because it is not. It is actually not difficult to hack at all. The reason it is an effective anti-piracy measure is that it supplies a valuable and useful service that you can no longer take advantage of once you have hacked it.

Gamers like Steam. I love the ability to just install Steam on a freshly installed computer and download all of my Steam games at once. It is really rather nice to not have to futz with 30 different game CDs and DVDs in order to get my game library reinstalled and functional. Furthermore I love being able to browse other games they distribute and buy then right then and there and have them to play within a few minutes to a few hours. Their prices are reasonable and their servers are fast.

That is a lot of valuable functionality that I don't want to sacrifice in order to play my games on multiple systems at once. It just isn't worth it to pirate Steam games.

THAT is what an anti-piracy measure should be. It should be a feature that is so useful that losing it due to hacking the system is too costly to be worth it.

The same thing works in favor of Impulse (Stardock).

1. pc's are way more expensive than consoles, so yes of course consoles are going to be bourght more!

2. as original post pointed out . Drivers are the worst thing on pc's its such a hassle to get a new piece of software or hardware working sometimes.

when you compare this with consoles they beta test like made to make sure users dnt have to sit there downloading patches and fixes for bugs and compatability issues!

3. main reason why perants go more for consoles is price and the fact that most perants dnt really understand computers! i know my perants dont. they sit there and waste a good 600 pound on a piss poor dell system thinking it will suffice in todays market! and not only that they blame the systems poor speed and ability on the games i play!

so the reason pc gaming is in a slump at the moment is due to lack of support from developers and lack of knowledge from the group that buy pc's the most i.e people who have money in the collapsed economy.

would do you do when your kid wants to play games do you spend 300 or 4000 pound for a top end system.

and IMO i found steam to be amatuer at best . the one game i did buy from them was like a blast from the past ! shady graphics and glitchy engines!

PC gaming is loosing because console gaming is more user friendly


with a console game, all you do is buy the game, and pop the disk into the dvd drive and the game runs

with PC, you have to buy the game, enter in a overly long cd key, then go through a long install process, click no to install the spyware, aka gamespy, activate and register the game, hope that the DRM doesn't hate any hardware in your pc, keep the cd in the drive to play the game even though it was installed into the hard drive

the main problem with pc games are DRM

theres more drm in a pc game than in a console game so it is more frustrating to users to play a pc game because of all the hoops they have to jump through

with most pc games now, your also at risk for the drm servers going down and taking your game with it

it is a major problem that people are trying to avoid.



all of this usually moves users to get pirated games that are not filled with drm, and when you have to force users to risk infecting their pcs and waste time downloading a game, you can bet that you lost them as a customer


no one wants to buy something that has been purposely made to be more frustrating to a user

it is like buying a boat and the company knocks a few holes into it before giving it to you, it may still work but now it is frustrating because you have to toss out buckets of water


the goal of business is to make your product easier to use. when going from the dos days, to windows, people liked it.


free software is not going to cause the world to want it over paid software



look at linux vs windows

I paid $200 for windows xp pro when I build my PC

i could have gotten linux for $0 but to me, windows was less frustrating to use

with windows most things, including advance things can be done through the GUI, theres almost no need for me to deal with command line

with linux, most basic things require extensive use of command line

in windows, I can install programs I like by double clicking on their install file

in linux, I generally have to go through 10-15 steps and use a lot of command line to get the same task done, (and if you want audigy 2 drivers installed into ubuntu, your in for a really hard time )


game developers need to learn that, people will pay for ease of use

adding drm makes the product frustrating to use




compare windows xp to the mac os, windows is more popular because it is more user friendly, with the mac os, almost every advance task requires extensive command line use, users like having full control over their system and they like having that control easy to use


if game developers want their games to sell then make it much easier for users to get the game up and running.

remove all drm and most piracy will stop also as it will be easier to buy the game than to risk infecting their pc and wasting bandwidth for a pirate copy

PC gaming will survive and it will survive by the companies that happen to not be constantly whining about piracy and how bad the market it, because those companies understand the current market.

Any companies that don't adapt will move to consoles and maybe port things to the PC. I will be sad to see some of them go but it really is their own fault. They have working examples of how to do things right and they still ignore them.

but for a good game to sell poorly, that takes drm and stupidity

You're right, that is a little too simplistic. Just because a game is a success that doesn't mean piracy has no effect on it's sales. Good games get hit much harder by piracy than crappy games. Look at the pic I posted earlier in this thread. People are not pirating that game. Despite being a horribly crappy game it will still probably make some money. No developer or publisher really thinks a title like that will be a big hit, so they must see some reason to produce it. They can create a weak product for a relatively low cost and bank on the generally stupidity of the consumer to buy enough to turn a quick buck- i.e. all of those genre parody movies. Big time titles on the other hand have a much higher risk which in turn should result in a much greater reward. Unfortunatly piracy affects the risk/reward ratio for these types of games much more so than "crappy" games. So even piracy doesn't determine whether an individual game will turn a profit or not it can still influence the quality of games being produced.

I won't even waste anyone's time trying to debate "90%". But I wouldn't classify Alone in The Dark in the category of crappy games like "Hell's Kitchen". I haven't played Alone in The Dark but it looks as if a pretty decent effort was put into the game, although it has failed to meet expectations. Regardless of your opinion Razor I'm sure those making Alone in the Dark at least had the ambition to try and make a good game, unlike say the people who made Hell's Kitchen: The Game. So what was their reward - people go ahead and play their game without paying. Certainly a lot more was put into developing Alone in the Dark so it would be no surprised if they game actually lost money while Hell's Kitchen actually made money because it took no effort to produce. So why even bother trying to make a good game if you can make more money with less effort?

all pc games get pirated like crazy but for games like bioshock and mass effect, the level of piracy was on a whole new level

and those games took the stage for having really bad DRM at the peak of their piracy

crysis was also pirated a lot but not as much even though the DRM was bad, many people couldn't run the game and it would be a waste of their time to even dl it if they cant run it

modding consoles also allow you to use custom programs line video players that support multiple formats

others do it to backup their own games since many consoles now seem to like scratching the disk

and free is also a factor but there many factors against it, mainly the risk of an infected game (not all groups upload a cracked game out of the goodness of their heart)


if you open a electronic store and mark all items as 100% off sale

you will see people from all over the world coming to get free electronics, and if you do it for a few days, you may even see aliens from other planets come to get the free stuff

but if you put a trench around the store, filled with acid and a additional minefield around the store as well as auto turrets filled with angry bees , then you will only get the most dedicated people coming for it

unlike other things like free samples at a mall, pirate games online have a major risk.


also the price of games have gone up over the years

not many people are thrilled to see that the 4-5 games they bought cost more than the the game console

game developers are scared to charge a reasonable price.

before in the old days, I would buy lots of games since most of the games were around $10-15 but now with more modern consoles, i have gone down to 1-2 games per year because of the steep price tag


while console games have lots of drm, it is not noticeable to the average user as you still like insert the game disk and the game plays (it cant get any easier than that)

did not really notice it much as i generally got a new console a little late when many people already got it, at that time most of the good games were cheap and easy to get

when I got into bf2, it was $25, some of the best $25 I ever spent been a few years and I still play it (after bf2 there has been no games with as good enough gameplay to keep me playing the game after I beat it

The problem with Mass Effect and Bioshock's DRM was never that it was flakey or unstable. It was that it was not consumer friendly.

With Mass Effect, and Bioshock when it first came out, you have three installs. If something happens after that and you need to install again you have to call up the publisher and beg for another activation. In the case of Mass Effect, that publisher is EA and they don't seem inclined to unlock the number of activations any time real soon and their customer service department is notoriously uncooperative.

I for one refuse to buy a game that I can only install 3 times before being subjected to such frustrating hoops to jump through. If we sit back complacent, many more games will show up with this and then, every time we want to go back and play one of our older games that we enjoyed we have to make a phone call and wait on hold and plead with someone who probably speaks broken English to let us play our game.

I have drawn my line in the sand and that is well past it.

I think online retailers are giving brick and mortor stores a hard time.

Good work squiZZ.
/endthread agreed

And how so is that? I honestly do not have any hard data on piracy, but my statement was made based on several assumptions that I feel are pretty safe.

-If people want something and can get it for free a percentage always will. The more demand the higher the amount of piracy.

-However if adequet measures are taken to stop piracy the first assumption may not hold true. ie DRM

-Games that are not desirable to a large audience or are just really bad will not suffer as much from piracy. The people behind piracy as well as the people downloading games are usually pretty sophisticated and intelligent. They're not wasting time pirating games they do not want.

I'm not very familiar Galactic Civilisations II, but if you say it's not being pirated and it's a top tier game I would have to guess that it has an effective form of DRM in place.

Doesn't Stardock work similar to Steam? You have an account which is tied to which games you have. If so that is definitely DRM, which works very well for Steam.

*edit* Woops missed:

Yup, that's definitely DRM, and a pretty effective form to.

Yes, it's true that you couldn't get the "patches" without registering, but it's worth bearing in mind that the "patches" were to add a lot of additional content, not to fix a botched product. The shipped version worked perfectly and was worth the asking price, so the registration is entirely voluntary and is a bonus. Whilst this may be considered a form of DRM, making it optional and totally non-invasive is a very soft touch.

Call me a pirate. Call me a theif, or call m a good customer. I will have to agree with the quote that demos can be misleading. For that matter, I DO download copies of games of such piracy sites. The only difference is, if I like the game for the first couple levels, I BUY the retail version of the game. If I dont like the game within the first few levels, start>control panel> add/remove programs>remove*game*

It's also sad that by taking all the preventative measures that they do, PC Game Programmers actually diminish the game with all their DRM stuff, so why not pirate a game that doesnt have all that on it??? I dont pirate, because I want to support the game designers, since i am aspiring to be one myself someday, but thats a reason a lot of people pirate games.

Crysis was so heavily pirated because so many people didnt want to waste 60 bucks to see if their computer could even run the game.

@ Purplerat

You are right, there was a demo before hand, i completely forgot about that (at the time my video card was crap so i didnt even bother with it). But still, I have friends who pirate a lot of stuff and when they do games its either to try it out, or to see how well their system will run the game. My apologies for any misinformed prejudgements

Alas, I think many of you are missing the big picture and the trends that are driving things.

Allow me to share some information that will shed som perspective on the PC gaming situation.

Lets start with:

http://www.geek.com/laptop-sales-e [...] es-in-may/

and this

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/st [...] 2794866C7}

Specifically:

"Gartner's Reynolds said that for 2008, he estimates notebook unit sales will climb 22.1% on year in the U.S., with notebook revenue rising 12.4%. By contrast, U.S. desktop units are expected to fall 11.6% this year, and sales are forecast to fall by 17.9%."

Yes, I have a PC desktop I built for gaming and it plays everything very well and reliably.

I also own 2 very good notebooks. Each has 2gb of ram and core2duo chips, one has an ATI and one has an Nvidia adapter. I will sum up the gaming on the notebooks by saying, it is less then satisfactory.

Like it or not, there is a gap in capabilities between a PC and a game console. There are also advantages in a notebook vs a desktop. Otherwise, notebooks would not outsell desktops in the US.

To buy a "game" notebook is still very pricey. It is cheaper to buy a notebook and a game console then a gamers notebook.

Heck, with the current notebook prices, you can buy a notebook that will do practical applications just fine and a game console for less then a gamers desktop PC.

This is why many industry people are not targeting games for a PC release. Here are the key points:

1. Development takes several years for most quality games.

2. Installed base determines potential sales.

3. PC market is more dynamic (i.e. changing) then consoles.

4. Fixed hardware and software specs speeds up development and gets you to market faster.

5. Uncertainty...... must a game for a PC be designed that when released 3 years from now it will play on a desktop, notebook, PC or MAC for the largest possible installed base?

This is why a PC is less relevant today for game designers then it once was.

I do not expect such a situation to continue. There are several things coming out that I predict will make PC as a game platform enjoy a strong revival in the near future. AMD has started a trend that I see continuing with their integrated platforms. By adding enough GPU power on an integrated platform for reasonable gaming on a desktop, I foresee that the same is just around the corner for notebooks. Once you have a stable (i.e. will still be around and compatible in 3 years) and backwards compatible graphics options (i.e. new hardware runs old stuff, just faster) in a notebook that can keep up with game consoles, PC games will flourish once again.

AMD, Nvidia and Intel have technologies out or in development that hints at this possibility.

Just think if you could by a $750 notebook that did office applications, played blu rays disks, and played games as well as an Xbox, why would you buy an xbox?

ZOMBIE THREAD!

As for PC games dying - they simply shifted sales into online aria (STEAM, Impulse, D2Drive, etc) - in some sense PC games are already in the future, while with console games you still have to go and buy physical copy of the game.

Consoles are cheap compaired to what it cost to buy or build a gaming rig that will run games like Crysis smoothly and with all the bells and whistles enabled. I have an Xbox 360, a Ninetendo Wii, Playstation 1 and 2 and a old Sega Saturn ( just for Vitual Cop 1 & 2) and I hardly ever play any of them. For online games the mouse and keyboard still rule.

This thread really needs to die now.