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I'd be glad to be pointed to evidence stating the opposite, but I'm under the impression it's just a handful of publishers who are getting rich and the rest of the industry isn't getting a lot out of selling PC games.

I think it's more accurate to say that like all mature markets, there are a handful of companies at the top of the heap raking in the dough by the double bucketload. However, unlike the console market, the PC gaming market has plenty of alternative storefronts for the smaller publishers to sell their wares and remain profitable. (And I haven't even really scratched the surface!)

The end result is that there is a far, FAR richer variety of games available for PCs than there is for consoles.

Durn. Had a reply all written out, then checked my hyperlink without holding down CTRL. Idiot. Oh well, in summary:

Steam not all bad, though even slight chance to lose rights to things I paid for not acceptable to me (digital age be damned! - doesn't change fact that w/physical media someone has to break into my home to steal it, or I have to lose/damage the discs).

Agreed, manuals useless/not needed for many run-of-the-mill games, no matter how fun they are, therefore PDFs good for reducing paper waste. However some games are sufficiently complex to actually make having physical documentation a requirement.

Finally, I'm divorced, so I wouldn't mind seeing ex-wife choke down a few of the dusty manuals :) -- I keed, I keed!

Drop Team
X2:The Threat
Savage 2
Unreal Tournament 2007
Enemy Territory:Quake Wars

zOMG, is this Battletoads? http://www.battlefront.com/products/les_grog/scree nshots/thumbs/030805-12.jpg

also check out http://battlefront.com/

They started out with a squad level WWII game (Combat Mission) that takes place on the western front and uses a really interesting (and effective) WEGO game play model. The game is everything that Avalon Hill's Squad Leader boardgame wanted to be but couldn't, because of the immense complexity of the Squad Leader rules.

Battlefront/Big Time Software started out distributing only via online purchase (with CD sent in the mail) and were spectacularly successful for an indie game. Despite selling smaller numbers, they seemed quite happy with the financial returns (the principals in the company have long experience as game developers for other companies), and have released a couple of sequels, plus published games for several other developers, and are working on a new, more powerful game engine.

To top it all off, they release for Mac and PC at the same time.

A couple of the things in their formula for development that I think made a big difference:
1) the guys developing it are game players, as well as developers, and developed a game they wanted to play, first and foremost.
2) they developed a great game first, and worried about the eye candy later. Eye candy might help sales up front (wow! you can see where the bolts on that truck were rounded with a wrong sized wrench!) but game play and repeat playability is what keeps the game selling.
3) they developed a community on their message boards and really listened and responded to comments and questions. During the beta days they were very active on the boards. As it got closer to release time they were less active, but when they showed up they gave really good information about what was going on. They've continued like this for subsequent releases.
4) they didn't promise what they didn't intend to deliver. If they weren't going to put something in that people wanted, they generally said so, and often explained why.
5) they had great advance stuff to show off the game. They showed bits from an actual game, with comments by the players, even at the alpha stage. They released a fully functional beta for free, with a couple scenarios, but no editor. The beta had some bugs, and some things that just weren't quite right, but I ordered in advance after I realized that even if all they did was ship the beta plus a scenario editor I was going to enjoy it for a long time. Even with only two scenarios the two player play was good enough that people played them for months against various opponents and never tired of it. They got a ton of good feedback from the beta, and took advantage of all of it to improve the game.

Hard core board wargames tend to have rather long, detailed, complex rulebooks that have to be learned and internalized in order to play. I played wargames for years as a kid, but getting opponents was often hard because of the learning curve.

One of my favorite board games was Squad Leader (I started playing long before ASL), which had 36 pages of rules, and which spawned 3 add-on gamettes that each added another 36 pages of rules, including some very particular special cases: e.g. attackers in close combat attacking a unit at lower elevation have their firepower doubled, unless they're Finns or Ghurkas, in which case it's tripled, or Italians, in which case it's normal FP.

A couple guys in the northeast (http://battlefront.com/ came up with the spiritual descendant of SL, called Combat Mission. They actually developed a very intuitive UI and made it semi-simultaneous, with each turn generating a movie (3-D, pannable, zoomable) that you have to watch to see the outcome. The computer takes care of knowing all the gruesome details (and they modeled it in immense detail) so the player just has to give fairly simple orders. You learn the various rules (e.g. speed variations on road vs. muddy ground) by simply playing a bit. They've sold enough to make two follow-ons on the same engine, and are developing a new, better engine for the next version.

Being able to hide all the complex rules like that gives complex computer games a huge advantage over boardgames in accessibility. This means you don't have to be nearly as hardcore to enjoy it. Plus you don't have to leave it set up for months in the basement, with stacks of cardboard counters on hexes (which cost a lot more to make than duping a CD), only to be knocked over by a cat or a sneeze. Play by email is much easier than play by mail ever was, and many games also offer direct on-line play with chat as well. Try that with a boardgame, or try a boardgame version of GTA.

I'm not sure whether you're voluntarily closing your eyes or if you really can't see that not all kind of games do run on consoles.In my personal case, i love simulators.

Tell me, which console offers me *one* flight simulator? And please, i *mean* simulator, i don't mean 'a game featuring a plane'. Where are the equivalents to MS Flight Simulator, X-Plane or FlightGear?

I do also appreciate submarine simulations. Where are Jane's 688 games or the Silent Hunter titles? Nowehere near.

I also happen to play wargames. I *mean* wargame here, not RTS. What the heck on a console comes close to the Combat Mission series?

Even when looking at game styles also present on consoles, there *are* huge differences. I enjoyed a lot the first game of Thief series and the first Deus Ex. I hated the last Thief, and the second Deus Ex. Guess what? Both titles were designed to *also* sell on consoles. In both cases, the games have been dumbed down. The gaming style seemingly did not fit to the mainstream console public.
I could go on to find more examples, but i suppose you get the point. Consoles do *not* provide everything. And please don't think i have anything against consoles: i have very good times playing FIFA/NBA/etc sports game, as well as GTA:SA on my PS2, and i'll probably buy some next-generation console. But there is no way i can ditch the PC as a gaming platform, and i'm far from being alone in that case. It *does* provide lots of games which simply have no equivalent on consoles. Do you really think that PC gamers are stupid enough not to buy a console instead of a PC if it was *really* doing the same thing?

It's probably not that modern consoles can't accomodate such games, as they now are gaming-oriented full computers. It is more of a decision by the game editors/designers. You don't find every genre on a console, and even in the same genre, the gaming style sometimes vary as the public is not the same...

For those of you who didn't read the article, here's some of the interesting points:

A) Academics are looking for the DoD to fund studies of some of the social principles behind MMOGs. The ADL, I think, is a government-academic-corporate initiative to apply "new learning techniques" to the military.
B) As many of us know, militaries are always eager to increase training time, and to inculcate the "military mindset" into soldiers 24/7. That's just common sense: the more the rank and file sees the world in the same way and understands events similarly ("Is on the same page"), the less friction there is.
C) MMOGs have some interesting phenomena: they are world-wide distributed environments where new players are socialized and "taught the ropes" by the old hands. Any environment where leaders naturally emerge, and people willingly provide training in complex activities automatically generates interest for the military.
D) Online shopping mall-cum-anemically performing-MMOG there has managed to team up with the army to build some sort of training environment. Expect hoverboard-riding soldiers wearing custom-designed hawaiian shirts to invade a country near you.

On the other hand, there are some problems with the scope and conception of the project.
First, the study focuses on MMORPGs. Massively multiplayer online simulations, such as the flight simulator Aces High and military-style "MMORPG"s, such as the persistent combined-arms battlefield World War II Online, or even the science-fiction combat game planetside, while certainly not as popular as the "big boys", have tasks that are, relatively speaking, much more sophisticated technically, and have evolved social structures around achieving those tasks. Something like the AAR effectiveness experiment they propose would be much better suited to an environment like that then to say a mission in City of Heroes. In addition, the rhetorical gap between the reality to be described and the narrative the DoD would fund is much narrower. For that matter, the gap between the description of MMOG and the military's use of computer games would be narrower too.

Another issue skirted in the paper is the failure rate of individual subscribers. While certainly, MMOGs are very popular; I'd say a relatively minor percentage of players play any given MMOG for more than a few months. And many last shorter than that, and that is often precisely because of the social environment they create. The article mentions the Sims online as not being popular; There is another example: Their beta lasted the least amount of time of any game on my hard drive: I logged on to some stupid technicolor world, and as I tried to sort the counterintuitive interface, I discovered the place to be populated by poorly socialized adolescents. Given the choice between learning the interface and deleting the software, I chose the latter. The fact that these communities are self-selecting, and that some of these communities have broad reach, while others do not, separates them from military applications. Would a MMORPG used for military training work? Or would it be dominated by those guys who can't even scrub a latrine right?

Finally, I'm just not sure MMOGs should be considered independently of the current gaming environment as a whole; the article suggests this, but I think we can go further, and suggest that the social division between MMORPGs and regular games with significant online components is indeed an artificial division. If you look at the communities for online games that have direct applications as training tools, such as the R6/GR series, the mods to Falcon 4.0, Battlefront's whole product line and, of course, a href=www.flashpoint1985.com>Operation Flashpoint, and its military twin,

For turn based stuff, the Combat Mission series from Battlefront is an awesome WWII squad level game. It's a combination of turn-based and realtime, where each player puts in orders for the various units, and they get executed simultaneously (using a tactical AI to resolve things that happen on time scales less than a minute) and displayed as movies that each player can view from different angles. It uses keyboard and mouse, but doesn't require any sort of high speed coordination of commands.

Which small publishers?

Yes, I still play Combat Mission PBEM every day. Fantastic game. http://www.battlefront.com/

This game is prefectly designed for PBM and it still plays well directly connected.
The grahics are a bit dated compared todays standards, but it's got the best gameplay and realistic ballistics I've ever seen in a game.

If you want a true WWII wargaming experience, check this game out, it's great.

Actually, I cannot play my favorite Mac game in OS X, because Apple dropped support for RAVE 3D. And it doesn't work in classic. So I've got to reboot into OS 9 when I want to play. Sucks.

As for your comment about XBox 2 being more powerful than the most powerful Mac for at least a year and a half. . . yeah, you can follow history, but you'd be ignoring the present situation, which is that IBM is supplying G5 chips for the next gen XBox.

Same deal with Combat Missions: Beyond Overlord, which is a really great turn based 3D squad level World War 2 game. Unfortunately, it's based on RAVE 3D, and Apple dropped support of that API in OS X. Possibly Curse of Monkey Island 3 is also based on RAVE 3D.

People playing Combat Mission have been doing this for years, probably more accurately than the Total War engine could ever hope to achive.

Graphics might be good to look at but if there's no gameplay what's the point of putting down $50? If it's no fun, no matter how life like it looks I'm not going to spend my hard earned money on it.

Or you can try to bring them over to the dark side...

It's actually pretty fun. Combat Mission does exactly what you describe.

The fact is, games are expensive. I'm not just going to blindly buy a video game. For console games I'll rent them before I buy them and for computer games I get a demo first. It's how it is. I'm not going to throw my hard earned money away on crap.

As another poster mentioned, the Close Combat games are great RTS games, highly recommended. No mining or tree cutting, just WW2 combat with fairly smart units, i.e. they'll seek cover on their own instead of standing around and getting butchered.

Another really interesting series is Combat Mission. It's a not quite real time game, with a pretty decent 3D engine. The 3D engine makes terrain hugely important when fighting. The steppe looks flat, but in reality it's a gently rolling plain, with lots of places for men and even tanks to hide. There's a demo, do yourself a favor and check it out.

As another poster mentioned, the Close Combat games are great RTS games, highly recommended. No mining or tree cutting, just WW2 combat with fairly smart units, i.e. they'll seek cover on their own instead of standing around and getting butchered.

Another really interesting series is Combat Mission. It's a not quite real time game, with a pretty decent 3D engine. The 3D engine makes terrain hugely important when fighting. The steppe looks flat, but in reality it's a gently rolling plain, with lots of places for men and even tanks to hide. There's a demo, do yourself a favor and check it out.

I recommend you at least download the demo if you are into turn based strategy games. I promise you it'll be one of the best you've ever played.

psst, they released Combat Mission:Barbarossa to Berlin too.
Even better than the original.
Combat Mission

Ah, I see. Well, risk-taking games appear once in a blue moon, and they're often cloned to death. The notion that Japanese developers as a whole are more innovative is an unproven illusion.

I play games from Japanese, American, European, Australian, and other companies, and it seems to me that the creativity factor is average across the globe. It is understandable that some people confuse cultural oddity (from their perspective) with innovation, and it is very easy to fall in love with one particular society, but taken too far it will only deprive you of great experiences from elsewhere.

In fact, you've really got to keep your eyes wide open, or else you'll miss some real gems. Stuff like Combat Mission, Moonbase Commander, and Natural Selection, right off the top of my head.

Actually, you could even say that Japan's slow adoption of the PC platform has put them in last place when it comes to innovation, since tons of innovation comes from independent and small-time developers. After all, it takes a huge budget to put a console game on the market, but anyone with a little skill and a dream can make their own PC game and put it out on the Internet. Those three games I listed above would never have seen the light of day on a console, for instance.

You just have to look a little harder. Games like Uplink, Pontifex and Combat Mission are available, successful on their own scale, and pretty durned innovative! I would love to see more games like Pontifex that educate while they entertain.

The indie film was a good example, but I think we have to look no further than the Linux desktops. Developing such a desktop takes more than just talented programmers. It takes someone to manage projects on this scale, it takes talented graphic artists (because there aren't that many developers with artistic talent :-) ), etc. Yet several have been built with an intial budget of 0$, and without the expectation of a big profits in the end (my thanks to all those involved in the KDE project, btw).

Talent and breaks are important, but so is passion. Most games that eventually developed into gendre-defining titles were written by guys in a garage who simply wanted a fun game to play. Doom is a good example. So are the Blizzard titles. And so are a lot of the high-quality mods available for free.

Even today, independant developers and publishers are still producing very high quality titles. Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord and Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin are very good examples. These were developed by small development teams, with very little budget, because these guys decided that there were no wargames they really liked. So they built it themselves. And their passion and need for such a game has shown itself in their success: both games have won almost every award there is for computer and strategy-based wargaming (www.battlefront.com

Norm Koger (sp?) is another good example. He's the guy that designed and coded The Operational Art of War, another highly acclaimed wargame. If I recall correctly, he did most of the work himself, design, code, art, docs, etc. The publisher only played a minor role in manufacturing and editing.

I respect Mr. Molyneux as a designer, but in this case, I believe he's completely wrong.

Phemur

Not entirely so. There is a back catalogue of decades of software that runs on my PC. Not to mention emulation.

Not every PC gamer is interested in the most recent and latest - consider the plethora of abandonware sites on the internet. I myself, enjoy computer gaming but do not like the warcraft-style games and have mixed feelings about the quake model, and so get along nicely with gaming on a P3 notebook with an 8MB 3d card. Admittedly, I am planning to replace my desktop soon - but my desktop is a slow PII :-)

Look, there are two things I have to point out:

I only need one machine for all these generations of software; my house isn't littered with past machines.

Consoles are progressively looking more like PCs - not the other way around.

And for a great game that doesn't need any 3D acceleration and was released this year? Try this.

Some independence exists in more niche-like markets, like the market for military strategy games. See www.battlefront.com for a thoughtful turn-based "think-em-up" with pretty good 3D graphics. The original version was written by just two guys.

Combat Mission = "Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord", distributed by Battlefront.com. It's over a year old (maybe two, don't recall) and the East Front (CM:Barbarossa to Berlin) version is expected for later this year with some engine updates as well.

It's a purely tactical (no campaigns, for instance; closest thing is a multi-battle operation) WWII game, set entirely in NW Europe post-Normandy, with a heavy emphasis on accuracy (e.g. historical TO&Es and units, down to variations e.g. PzIVG, PzIVH, PzIVJ, if memory serves; numerous Sherman types, et al. Armor is modeled via location, tanks carry multiple shell types, vehicles can get bogged down in bad ground conditions...). Typical actions are battalion-sized or smaller, with control down to the squad/team level for men and individual for vehicles.

It's not perfect -- for instance, spotting is absolute (IOW, if any of your units can see something, it's shown to the player regardless of radio contact et al) and will remain so until the engine is rewritten. It is, however, pretty darn good, netting highly favorable reviews and having a pretty fanatic user base.

It doesn't run on linux and you have to pay for it (hence I'm gonna get flamed) but it IS very, very good. It has a huge community (or here) following even though it is only available online and does not exactly have mainstream content.

Also a rare case of a developer working closely with their customers and allowing them to contribute to a product; the engine isn't open source but the graphics certainly are (to the extent where people are producing whole new enviroments that are totally outside the game's original scope).

There is a very active community around the game, making "mods" for better looking terrain and armor, and putting out reams of scenarios, for free. You will never run out of new scenarios.

CM is available for purchase only on the web, at the battlefront website. It's not in stores. There is also a demo available there, with two playable scenarios. Try it out and see if you are not amazed and terrified the first time you get shelled. I certainly was.

This is the computer game that is the rightful heir to Squad Leader. Don't miss it. (Note I am not affiliated with BTS or battlefront in any way other than being a satisfied customer.)

Some of these may be from this year, but since they're from smaller companies don't get that much publicity they're easy to overlook.

Malfador's Space Empires IV (Gold version due in February or so, but the original is darn good), published by Shrapnel. It's a 4X space game, and focuses very heavily on depth and customizability versus flash. Want to replace the tech tree wholesale? Customize your race to be lousy at combat, but rake in the resources and trade? Create a system type featuring unusually powerful black holes? You can, if you like. It's been out for a while, but the publisher and developer are still supporting it.

Illwinter's "Dominions" is a fantasy 4X, that some have compared to Master of Magic. Ritual magic, combat spells, item construction, combat formations, god customization, 14 very different (not mirror-image...) races to choose from... Also still in active development -- e.g. I've gotten helpful responses regarding bugs and questions sent via e-mail, and they're still patching to fix bugs and add features.

Battlefront's "Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord" is fairly old -- "CM: Barbarossa to Berlin" might be out sometime next year -- but still very good for 3D WWII tactical (up to Battalion-sized, say) warfare, with a nice WEGO system. It's very, very detailed, although you don't really have to memorize armor slopes... CMBO is not in active development anymore since they've been busy on the sequel, but the forum community is still active.

All three of the above support both solo- and multiple players (CMBO only two at a time, Dominions 14, SE4 not sure what the limit is if there is one).

There's also A-Sharp's "King of Dragon Pass", which seems intriguing. I can't comment on this too much since I've only seen the demo, but a (the?) dev has been spotted on USENET answering questions about it occasionally. It might be of interest to Runequest/Glorantha fans in particular.

The demo reminded me vaguely of the old Hammurabi decision-making game, if for some reason anybody remembers that (e.g. "101 BASIC Computer Games"). Of course, this one is FAR more complicated...

Check out TacOps.

I have been increasing unimpressed with the state of current strategy games. (I've never been any good at them--other than Total Annihilation, but I love to play them). A couple of months ago I went in search of a really good strategy game and came across Combat Mission. It is a WWII turn based game played in 3D.

The cool thing about it is that the turns happen simultaneously. And after the turn has been resolved it is played out in a 60 second movie using the 3D engine. While the graphics are not the best I've ever seen, the game is completely compelling and is the most realistic war game I have ever seen.

The CM community is quite amazing (some of the WWII strategy zealots have similar counterparts in the Open Source community). The game is completely themeable, and the addition graphics that have been made available by the community are very impressive.

If you are into strategy you should check it out.

For a game that's very realistic tactically, check out TacOps. It was conceived and coded by a retired Marine Major. Also, it is used by the Army and the Marines to help teach tactical operations. And the best part, it's only $20! It's so realistic that ther are scenarios for it out there pertaining to the Kandahar region in Afghanistan.

I play Combat Mission for hours. It has the best realism I have ever seen. The developers have taken great care in developing a real as possible. You can find the demo for Mac and Windows here. I'm only praying for them to post it to Mac OS X now.

I'd implement Combat Mission.

Fortunately, it's already been done for me.

I can think of 2 recent, excellent games that have been done in the so-called "basement" style. They are Combat Mission:Beyond Overlord by Big Time Software and Steel Beasts (don't remember the URL).

For those of you who don't know, Combat Mission is a WWII squad-combat simulator with what I consider a revolutionary AI and excellent gameplay, even for non-grognards like me. Steel Beasts is a tank simulator that was good enough for the US military to buy 1000 copies.

Combat Mission was put together by a small indie team, and Steel Beasts was done by one guy. So it can still be done.

Suprised nobody has pointed out
Combat Mission.

Turn based WWII tactical action, sold only via the web, amazingly well supported. They single-handedly dragged serious wargaming from the '70s into the '90s.

Now if only someone would notice that it's the 21st century...

There are some great 'independant' companies selling turn based games that are winning tons of awards:

Shrapnel Games

This company sells tons of award winning games, such as "steel beasts".

Another such company is "Battlefront games" at BattleFront Games with games such as "Combat Mission"..

There are lots of turn-based game companes out there.. many of them may not be "big names" but the companies listed above are getting lots of press and business thanks to the power of the internet community.

Who knows, companies such as this may become much larger in little time.. Fans of turn based games won't be left out =)

Turn based games have fallen in popularity for 1 main reason: A real opponent is more interesting / challenging than a computer AI. When you add to this the fact that MOST turn based multiplayer games require one player to act while everyone else sits around, you see why turn based games aren't popular. In their old "I go, then you go" form, they take too long to hold the interest of any but the most hard core gamer.

If turn based games are going to make a resurgance, they will need to speed up the time between turns and let the players feel like they can always interact with one another and not waste their time. Games like Combat Mission have the right idea... Instead of an "I go, you go" format, they do a "we go" format, where both sides enter orders at the same time, then see the results of those orders, repeat. This way the games move along at a decent clip and you can always talk to the other players or tell them to hurry up. ;)

Anyways, turn based games remain a niche market from their lack of engrossing multi-player. No one wants to spend 8 hours to play one game of heroes of might and magic.

I would disagree with the entire article. There is innovation occurring at a fantastic rate in the PC Gaming industry -- you just have to look for it. I mean, you can count the really great PC games in the last ten years on your fingers. Its always been like this, but since there is a lot more money involved now, the wait between the games seems much longer.

I like Diablo II sometimes, and I like Combat Mission sometimes -- it depends on my mood. I would like to see a lot more innovation rather than putting out games that are guaranteed to make money because they are basically identical to a previous game with a few twists, and that is happening.

Specifically, I would disagree entirely with the death of the War Game genre. The meteoric rise of Combat Mission makes this out for the lie it is. CM has a huge and rapidly growing fan base -- they've sold so many games they were out of stock a couple weeks ago. It just goes to show that it depends entirely on the gameplay, and not flashy graphics. Let's play!