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Half Life 2 Retail Sales Hit 1.7 Million
blueZhift writes "It looks like PC gaming is not dead yet! GamesIndustry.biz reports that retail sales of Valve's Half Life 2 have topped 1.7 million. There aren't any numbers available for online sales via Steam, but these are impressive numbers for any platform, console or PC."
How many times is this FUD example going to come up? Yes, it is possible this will happen. But I have a feeling if this type of situation arose, Valve would release a non-steam patch before totally going out of business. Yes Steam authenication sucks, and I hope someone does sue them to prove that I did, in fact, buy that game, not just a license to play by their rules. But I would bet cash that if there was a steam doomsday, there would be a non-steam patch release.
I also purchased via steam (went with the cheapo $50 version).
I don't think HL2 was worth the money or the hype that surrounds it. Honestly, the game just isn't that much fun. The story line was flat. The weapons (excepting the gravity gun) were nothing special. The game feels unfinished. And the ending was boring.
I had a much better time playing Far Cry. The first time I played it I thought it was never going to end. It's much longer than HL2 and cost me the same amount.
I still liked HL2, but Far Cry is a much better value. I should learn my lesson... hyped games always disappoint me while the sleepers are great. (I never heard much about Far Cry but maybe I missed it.)
Here before all but 8486 of you.
This year I played console games online on the PS2 for the first time. With no graphic problems, no major tweaking needed. It just worked out-of-box.
Today I play as much games online on my PS2 as my PC. That's something I never thought would be possible for me anyways.
If they shipped the next consoles with a mouse, keyboard, hard drive, I'd say PC gaming is toast. A game like HL2 can easily be done on a PS3 and xbox2.
It's funny how drastically different reactions people have to games. My experiences were almost exactly the opposite. I found Half-Life 2 to be one of the best games ever, almost certainly the best FPS ever. Far Cry on the other hand, I thought was just awful. I'd rank it as one of the worst FPS ever.
Different strokes for different folks, eh? :-)
But if you tried to play something like the PC version of UT with a joypad like you had on an X-Box, vs. guys with keyboard and mouse, you'd get pwn3d quick. It's just that the PC version makes it important to be able to aim precisely, something the joypad just isn't good at.
Probably a number similar to the number of console games that are `copy-cat' games. The vast majority of games out there, PC and console, are copies of other games, with some tweaking or new features. Few are revolutionary rather than evolutionary.The grandparent post of this post was claiming that `Exclusive PC titles are a rare breed these days' -- which couldn't be further from the truth. And I pointed out why. (Though I guess if you restrict yourself to `big budget, blockbuster titles', then maybe that statement is becoming true.)
Ok, I won't argue too much about that -- I really can't claim to know too much about what your average console player wants.But since there will always be `extra'-ordinary games, PC games will *never* die, at least until the consoles can cater to them a little better.
Nothing new about PC games being outsold by their console counterparts. It's been a long time since any PC game held a long term sales record (Myst). All that matters is that PC games are still profitable, and as consoles become more and more similar to your home PC development for both (or I guess I should say "all") platforms will become even more common than it is now.
Yes, and it looks like ass. However, notice that I held up GTA:SA as an example of expanded environments compared to previous iterations in this console generation, and not as a paragon of graphical goodness.
Nope, but then I'm not really interested in RE4, which is beside the point.
My TV is about a year too old to have a DVI input, and it only supports 480p and 1080i (no 720p), but for all that it's well-calibrated and looks good. I've not hooked a PC up to it, but my XBox (and to a lesser extent, GameCube) looks good running on the TV in 480p or 1080i.
The PS2 renders with "very low quality" textures because it doesn't have the VRAM for better. The XBox, assuming you're playing a game built for the XBox and not a PS2 port (ie, skip anything from EA), can do much higher texture resolutions than either the PS2 or Gamecube, and while it's not on par with the current bleeding edge of PC hardware, it's pretty damned good for four year old hardware.
It seems you've misunderstood my "stability" argument. I was not talking about lack of crashes, but instead the stability of the platform itself. The point here is that games designed for a console have a single, stable hardware target (as in the target doesn't change, not that the hardware doesn't crash), be it a PS2, Gamecube, or XBox. A GPU upgrade would destabilize this situation by adding another component that not everyone may have. If you're a PC game developer, you don't have the luxury of a single target. You have to build a test matrix of different CPUs, video cards, memory configurations, operating systems, etc. That's also a major reason why console games typically have much better QA than PC gamess (no, it's not because PC games are more easily patched), because the test requirements are increased exponentially.
From a development perspective, more time spent with the same hardware breeds familiarity. Because the hardware will not change from underneath you, you can learn the tricks of the hardware, and write to it directly without having to deal with an abstraction layer because you have to support both nVidia and ATI video cards, or Intel and AMD CPUs, or Pentium 3s and Pentium 4s. While there is less raw power in the hardware than with a PC, there is far more power to finesse a solution, because you don't have to worry about oddball hardware in 239047293879877892 different configurations.