Hardware Manufacturers Making PC Gaming Too Elite?

Thanks to AVault for its editorial discussing whether PC hardware/graphics card manufacturers are fragmenting PC gaming too much with constant hardware upgrades, thereby "making it a sport for only the serious few." The author argues: "With the impending release of Valve's Half-Life 2 and id's Doom 3, we're looking at the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history... the reported minimum requirements for these two heavy hitting titles include fully DirectX9 compatible video cards. This demand excludes all low-end and many medium-level computers out there today." He discusses the "partnership" of "hardware manufacturers turning over reference equipment that won't see the retail market for some time to software developers to use in the creation of their games", and queries the "expensive process of habitual upgrades" by suggesting: "If everybody turns to an Xbox or a PlayStation for entertainment, who's going to need new PC equipment?"

Comments

The effect

[dtfinch]

I typically buy games 3-4 years after they are released, when they are usually on sale for $2-$10 a piece. Even my new PC's won't run new games, as I tend to buy the cheapest systems and max out the ram and hard disk. Plus my newest PC lacks an M$ operating system, ruling out the chance of me ever buying a new game that requires DirectX.

If game developers don't want my money, it's their loss. If you limit yourself to 1% of the market, so do you limit your profit potential to that 1%.

Re:What?

[danila]

Games made for a 486 will always work for them. I don't understand your point. As for the PCs, these are not gaming machines, get over it. PCs have a quality display included, they include interfaces with peripherals (printers, scanners, cameras and pretty much anything else), they also have hard disks so that you can store stuff and they have lots of other things as well, because PCs are computers, i.e. multipurpose computing devices as opposed to purely gaming machines. I don't use my $1000+ PC for gaming, I use it for computing. That includes gaming and I am happy that I paid that extra 150$ to be able to run FarCry (and HL2/D3/Stalker when they are finally out). Can you control projector lights over Dublin from 3000 km awyy with your PlayStation or XBox? Thought so!

P.S. The article is total crap and the author is full of shit. Even a random post on Slashdot has more value and is more worth commenting on. :)