Slashdot Mirror
PC Game Sales Dropped In 2005
Gamasutra reports on the not-terribly-surprising news that PC game sales were down in 2005. From the article: "Also doing excellently was EA's The Sims 2 and its two associated expansions, and The Sims franchise collectively took up four of the top ten spots. The rest of the top ten is made up of a mixture of the mass-market accessible games, such as Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, with the more 'hardcore' shooter and MMO titles such as Guild Wars and Battlefield 2."
I'm sorry, this year I couldn't even be bothered to steal games for the PC; nothing is interesting of fun anymore. First Person Shooters have become tech-demos built on top of a standard game (you could honestly re-release Half-Life with prettier graphics and be producing the same game), RTS games have evolved little since Dune 2, there were no major RPGs released, and little inovation in turn based strategy; the only games worth playing this year were MMO games which require you to purchase the game.
Stealing games has always existed and has not risen in populatity; much like the moive and music industry people are just tired of the same pice of crap being released over and over again with only the names changing. This is the reason that no one should be surprised that the Nintendo DS is so successful in Japan (and North America for that matter); people are tired of the same, if something new isn't produced people will give up on gaming and move to the next medium (ie. the industry will crash).
I would say MMORPG's are definitely the reason game sales are down, but not because they are disliked, but because they are too successful.
To play WoW, I buy the game for $60 and pay $15/month.
Assuming the game is fun to me for two years, that's $420. Where I might have bought seven $60 games over that two-year stretch, I bought one.
Using myself as anecdotal evidence of my point... I used to buy a ton of RTS and FPS games, but when Everquest came out, it was the just about only PC game I played for almost three years. When I finally got bored with it, I started buying games again, such as Diablo II, Neverwinter Nights, and a handful of newer FPS games... City of Heroes came out, that was it again for another year or so. World of Warcraft came out for the Mac, and I scrapped my game PC entirely.
The reason for this lock-in is the subscription. If I'm paying a monthly fee to play a game, I'm damn well going to play that game whenever I'm in the mood for gaming, or else I won't feel that I'm getting my moneys worth. As long as the game is enough fun that I would rather pay this months $15 than spend $60 to try something new, nobody else is likely to sell me anything else.
To get me to cancel my WoW account and buy something else, the game companies really need to come up with something a hell of a lot better than Yet Another FPS. I've played Quake, thanks. If you want my three pictures of President Jackson, you need to come up with something new.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I bought a couple games based on the required and suggested hardware levels and discovered something shocking. They lied. I'm sticking with the last generation of games (hl2, WC3, civ3, aoe2, wow) because they are fun and run acceptably on my hardware. I don't care how incredible AoE3, Civ4, F.E.A.R, etc are - I have to turn all the graphics and effects down to almost nothing to get acceptable framerates.
This probably also explains how consoles are picking up. People are just plain tired of the upgrade treadmill for PC games. If the graphics and effects levels degraded acceptably it would be one thing, but the vast majority of games do not, these games are designed around graphics and effects that run very poorly with the 'suggested' hardware from the box.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]