Microsoft and Nvidia Abandon PC Gaming Alliance

An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority: "Ever since Microsoft turned its back on Windows gaming in favor of the closed Xbox ecosystem, the platform has been crying out for a champion. The company occasionally gives nods toward a revived focus upon PC gaming, most recently with yet another relaunch on Games for Windows Live and a trio of upcoming PC games, but when it comes to throwing cash around the Xbox is the beneficiary. What can definitely be said is that the one group that should be championing the PC, the PC Gaming Alliance, is going backwards. In 2009 the group lost the biggest PC game developer/publisher, Activision-Blizzard, and now it seems that both Microsoft and Nvidia have bid the alliance farewell."

Comments

No surprise

[Sir_Sri]

the alliance doesn't seem to have done anything. Good idea, non-existant execution. The PC gaming alliance is called Steam, Gamersgate, Impulse, Direct2Drive, and for better or worse, The Pirate Bay.

Steam, with it's billion dollars a year in sales knows what's causing problems, what you're playing (and how much), what you're buying, and has a fairly good sense of what developers should be building for. That doesn't mean steams data is applicable to every single user, or every scenario, or even that it is necessarily the best service out there, especially without WoW or starcraft the data isn't perfect. But it's more likely to be successful to have people motivated by support costs and sales than a hodgepodge alliance of people who mean well, but have no real money or clear direction to back up their goals.

Re:No surprise

[Machtyn]

I'd venture to say that those who are playing WoW are also likely to know about Steam and have it installed on their system. And, if the person is resourceful enough, they can even launch WoW, and other non-Steam games, from the Steam client. (Like adding a shortcut to the desktop.) I don't know if Steam collects usage stats from those types of games, but they'd be silly not to do that.

Re:No surprise

[Anthony Mouse]

the alliance doesn't seem to have done anything.

Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it. The 360 is six years old now anyway. And using the same processors as are used in PCs would make porting easier for developers who optimize for specific processor architectures. Right now the major consoles are PowerPC with weird SPEs that take special attention, which is just an invitation to write architecture-specific code and ignore the PC.

I suspect if they went and talked to AMD they could come up with some kind of Fusion-based console that would clean the clock of all this ancient cruft and do it on the cheap, and then maybe we could get some new games that take advantage of more than six year old technology.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone make an effort to launch a non-Steam game under Steam? Not being sarcastic, just never used it.

Re:No surprise

[Sir_Sri]

Well because it's opt in for non steam games you're skewing your data. Like I say, it's not perfect. That's not the same as useless, but it's not perfect. The handly little chart of how many people are logged in seems to peak around 3 million on steam. I'm sure there are a lot more PC gamers out there than 3 million, but that gives a pretty good average of what their computers are, how much they play etc.

My suspicion is that there's a lot of stuff on steam that's bought, and never played. I know I have a lot of that. Except I'm buying it on steam, in many cases because I intended to play it, and didn't get around to it, or I had it in another format years ago, and would like to come back to it (and have it work) at some point in the future, and saw it on sale. Not the most effective use of my money I'll grant you. Things like that probably really mess with statistics for some games statistics though.

Re:No surprise

[monkyyy]

has it srsly been 6 years?

but i would agree that a "fusion" of amd and x64 would be nice and probably work wonders in a highly standardized and predictable system(maybe get a HD gaming sys for the price the wii is going for now, and even more insane controller designs that everyone hates after a week), i dont think the people controlling them would play nice; maybe some 3rd party group could pull it off by making their own motherboards with one possessor from each

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I have steam installed on my system but hardly ever start it up. I Mostly just run World of Warcraft from it's launcher.

Re:No surprise

[artor3]

Why would anyone make an effort to launch a non-Steam game under Steam? Not being sarcastic, just never used it.

• Digital distribution, with easy and non-intrusive copy protection -- you need an internet connection to install, but that's it unless the publisher (e.g. Ubisoft) insists on more.
• A digital storefront that millions of gamers see every time they play any Steam game, making impulse buys more likely.
• A friends list that lets people see what their friends are playing, essentially giving free word-of-mouth advertising without even needing your customers to talk about the game.

Re:No surprise

[Sir_Sri]

I'd venture that if microsoft sold something that could be reasonably described as a PC they'd be in legal trouble, fast. PS3 was almost certainly intentionally engineered to be hard to code for. Sony assumed they would dominate again, and wanted to make it hard to port their code to other systems. IMO they could have accomplished that by putting 1 gig of ram in their machine for a lot less headache. But I've done enough with the Cell (astrophysics cluster at and I taught game engines last year) I can appreciate that it's good for certain things.

I don't think the console specific stuff is quite because they wrote for PPC's. Games (even PS3 games) are still largely made on windows, in visual studio. The issue is support 8000 different hardware configurations, and dealing with piracy/DRM (you don't have DRM, most publishers won't talk to you, but it does nothing but piss off your customers and drive them to piracy, a lose lose). Smaller publishers or niche publishers that will do without DRM can't fund the big projects that would be cross platform anyway. Most of the console games will run, with virtually no effort, on a a set of PC configurations, it's just a very small set. Too many GPU's sound cards and 3rd party programs for a lot of people.

Of course some of this is changing, without the PC gaming alliance, and because of Steam. Real time sales tracking is enormously valuable. I talked to one guy who was trying to get his game on shelves in the UK. They wanted about 40 copies. For the whole country. So he whipped out his steam page and said 'in the time it took to have this meeting, I've sold more than 40 copies already'. That, combined with better insight into the hardware gamers actually have (rather than could have) helps a lot. And lets face it, Nvidia and AMD do a much better job with their drivers today than they did 5 years ago, that helps a lot ( and directx/opengl are better too).

Re:No surprise

[0123456]

Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it.

If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they wouldn't be trying to move people onto consoles.

Their problem is that they've been successful enough at doing so to reduce most people's need for a new Windows PC -- gaming is about the only thing Joe Sixpack does which could stress a modern system -- without making any money from consoles.

Re:No surprise

[Cwix]

A fusion of amd and x64

Umm are you sure about that? AMD procs were x64 compliant before Intel's were IIRC.

What I think you mean is a fusion of PowerPC and x64, which are two completely different architectures. You'll never see it.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

On the top side, it has good organizational features which is nice if you have many games, but more importantly..

While playing, the steam friends network and communities (one-to-one and many-to-many communication networks) is usable in-game (overlay.) A quick sample of this is the Quake Community for those old schoolers, or you might like to find some people up for some Homeworld 2, and this is but one of the numerous private world of warcraft servers with a steam community. Hell there is even a German NetHack community.

Re:No surprise

[yeshuawatso]

I would beg to differ. Gaming on a PC is becoming more cumbersome every day with useless DRM, and less relevant every day with half-ass console ports. The gaming industry has always been a niche market, and PC gaming is even a smaller niche. While some companies have been very successful in this market, the future of it is dead. Apple was left out of the PC gaming market almost entirely and they did the best thing they could do: help reinvent gaming on the next generation of platform: mobile. Google's Android strategy is where we will see flourish in variable degrees of game quality, and the hardware requirements are already starting to mirror the PC gaming market. NVidia has adopted a mobile strategy that's starting to unfold, AMD has no clear mobile strategy, Intel has a strategy but forgot the execution part of it, and Samsung may become the largest chip manufacture of ARM based processors.

I understand Microsoft's abandonment of PC gaming. In the next 5 years, it won't exist. They can pump out another console, slap on another "natural motion" control system, and make out like bandits. The only investment they need in gaming is the tools to develop for the Xbox. Eventually, NVidia will pull out of the after-market gaming graphics market, leave AMD to fizzle out and Intel will still pump out chips for PCs, laptops, and servers (they're not going anywhere).

People are going to change their computing habits to be more mobile, and anyone still holding on to that old "PC gaming" market won't last much longer. So good riddance, PC gaming. It was nice knowing you for most of my entire teenage and adult life. You brought me many hours of time wasting and excitement. Unfortunately, your master Microsoft let Apple and Google pound the nails into your coffin.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand Microsoft's abandonment of PC gaming. In the next 5 years, it won't exist. They can pump out another console, slap on another "natural motion" control system, and make out like bandits.

LOL. Who's going to build the console if the lack of a PC gaming market has killed the CPU and GPU market?

Re:No surprise

[scdeimos]

Digital distribution, with easy and non-intrusive copy protection -- you need an internet connection to install, but that's it unless the publisher (e.g. Ubisoft) insists on more.

Last time I checked you absolutely had to login to the Steam application before you could play any games. Even if you start the game directly from its own executable (as opposed to the desktop shortcuts that launch the game via the Steam application) you still get the Steam application starting and prompting for username/password details before you can start to play. If there's particular games that don't do this I'd like to know which.

Re:No surprise

[Omestes]

I don't think you read the comment.

He meant "why would you add a game not installed via Steam to your Steam Library?", such as sticking a "link" to World of Warcraft in Steam, next to all your Steam purchases.

I do, but mostly because Steam games don't play well with Windows Start Menu (they never pop up in the most opened program list, since they aren't real shortcuts). All my games should be somewhere, the Start Menu is where they should be, but barring that Steam works. Its annoying, they used to work, but since the last version they stopped, since they are now all links to steam.exe with some augments.*

* I'm wrong, they actually are links to a service... ala "steam://rungameid/XXXXX"

Re:No surprise

[judeancodersfront]

Problem is that games without DRM get pirated just as bad. The main motivation for pirates is to avoid payment.
I think the only solution is to move more of the game online. Publishers seem to agree as seen by all the MMOs that are being funded.

Re:No surprise

[judeancodersfront]

Engineers. PC gaming has encouraged competition between NVida and AMD/ATI but it isn't need to keep gaming going.

Re:No surprise

[raving griff]

Virtually any game can be played in offline mode provided that 1) it has been launched with an active Internet application and 2) your Steam client is updated.

The login prompt should not appear for games that cannot be played offline--instead, you should receive the message "This Game Cannot Be Started in Offline Mode." What it sounds like is happening to you is that Steam is not running before you start a game. The option to launch Steam in offline mode only appears after login has failed.

Re:No surprise

[DudemanX]

Having short cuts to all your games in one place.

Access to the Steam Overlay. Let's you press shift-tab in a game to overlay your friends list, any messages from said friends, and a webkit browser over the game being played.

It announces to your friends what you are playing or what you want them to think you are playing. When adding a shortcut to a non-steam game you get to name it whatever you want. So when I run WoW through Steam my friends see "Dudeman is playing non-Steam game 'Nick has full blown AIDS' " or any jacked up message I want everyone on my friends list to see.

Re:No surprise

[Seumas]

You don't have to deal with navigating the stupid OS menus to find where your game is and launch it or deal with a quickbar full of shortcuts. You look at your tiny steam window and select the game you want to play under the section in which you've categorized it. Plus, it tracks that you've played it and for how long, if you like knowing how your game play time breaks down.

I have all of my almost 400 Steam games installed right now, plus the few non-steam games (Star Craft, EVE, etc) launching through the interface. Can you imagine how ridiculously messy it would be to pick through nearly 400 games using the standard shitty Windows menu system?

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure it was never planned for any single person to have 400 games, let alone 100 or even 50 on a single PC.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC gaming alliance is called Steam, Gamersgate, Impulse, Direct2Drive, and for better or worse, The Pirate Bay.

Add GOG.com to that list. They don't sell anything less than five years old - but that's still several decades of gaming history to work through. I'm not sure that we need so much effort to go into creating new games.

Re:No surprise

[bipbop]

Add Winamp (or some other program you always have open) to your Steam games list, then rename it in Steam. Now you'll always show up to your friends as playing some game you made up ;-) Well, that's the only reason I can think of to do it, anyway.

Re:No surprise

[adolf]

With Windows 7 (and probably Vista) start menu, there is a little arrow to the right of the Steam client in the most-opened program list.

And when I click or hover on that arrow, a menu of frequently-played Steam titles folds out, right there in the start menu. Launching Fallout:NV with Steam takes exactly two clicks for me using this method.

I can also pin the Steam client to the taskbar, and then right-click on it to bring up the same thing.

I guess this isn't technically playing nice with the start menu, though I personally think it's better.

Back to the original topic: If I were to add WoW to Steam's list, I presume that it would also show up in the same Steam menu (despite not being a proper Steam title), which might be useful in that all oft-played games would show up in the same place.

Re:No surprise

[Totenglocke]

Well in Windows 7 the "Games" folder auto-detects games and adds icons, so you simply open the Games folder and *bam* all of your game shortcuts. Or if you're Amish and still using XP, you can always just make a folder with all your game shortcuts yourself.

Really, using that as a benefit to using Steam is like complaining about having to put the disc in. Is it a nice bonus to not need a disk? Sure, which is why I registered my Blizzard games so I can use the no-disk downloads, but it's not something to complain about.

Re:No surprise

[Totenglocke]

but i would agree that a "fusion" of amd and x64 would be nice and probably work wonders

I'm assuming you haven't kept up with AMD's tech. Fusion is the actual name of a new line of AMD processors that are a combination of CPU and GPU on one chip (hence the Fusion name). So far I've only seen one system using them (they just came out recently) and it was a laptop that not only blew away benchmark numbers, but also had incredible battery life as well. I agree with the GP, if they made an XBOX-720 with an AMD Fusion processor, they could probably have an incredible system where games could be ported to Windows in about two seconds due to having the same CPU and GPU.

Re:No surprise

[Totenglocke]

Not what he's talking about. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion for more information.

Re:No surprise

[hairyfeet]

Oh please console boy, your lame troll is lame. Today we have unprecedented choices, from Steam to Good Old Games to drop it on your doorstep like Amazon, and thanks to the consoles slowing things down PC gaming has never been cheaper or easier to get into.

When I started PC gaming it took a $200 GPU every year and a half and a new PC every three years just to have games that weren't a slideshow. Today I am often building sub $400 PCs for customers that make damned good gaming PCs even when hooked up to their new 1080p TV. I've personally been gaming just fine on an HD4650 that cost me a whole $60 two years ago and when it is replaced at the end of the week by my new GPU (my GF refuses to tell me which one she got me dammit) I have NO doubt I'll get another 2+ years out of it, and from the looks of things I'll easily get 5-7 years out of this AMD quad system, possibly more if I yank the HDD and go SSD.

So while you and your frat buddies may enjoy your Madden or Halo deathmatches on your X360 frankly we PC gamers have never had it so good. If anything we are experiencing gaming overload, with such low prices and such a wealth of titles I personally probably have a good dozen games I haven't even had a chance to fire up yet thanks to splurging on sales. Where else are you gonna have 1 day sales like Batman:AA for $3 or Bioshock 2 for $1.99?

And this of course doesn't count the fact that when I'm not gaming with it my quadcore gaming PC gives me all sorts of other advantages, like a nice DVR for my cable (thanks to the $20 USB TV Tuner I picked up off of Woot!) and drag and drop GPU transcoding built into all 4xxx and newer ATI chips. This is why I'm having more and more customers pick up these cheap triple and quad AMD gaming PCs and have me hook them into their new widescreen TVs, because with it they have a "one stop shop" that allows them to have everything from all their audio/video to gaming to checking their FB all from the comfort of their couch with a wireless KB/Mouse combo. Add in the excellent 10 foot UI of Windows Media Center and built in support for Netflix it is just a no brainer.

Re:No surprise

[cibyr]

Problem is that games without DRM get pirated just as bad.

How is that an argument for DRM? You basically said

The guys who aren't wasting money pissing off their customers in the name of preventing piracy also have problems with piracy!

Well duh, but they have happier customers, which can't be a bad thing.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy fuck, excellent suggestion.

ren c:\program files\clamwin\bin\clamwin.exe skyrim.exe

Trolololol.

Re:No surprise

[Dog-Cow]

I know half a dozen people who play WoW. To my knowledge none of them have Steam installed. I'd also venture to say that you don't realize how many older people play WoW.

Re:No surprise

[JonySuede]

No, I think he meant AMD(ATI) FUSION GPU on CPU.

Re:No surprise

[JonySuede]

with steam, gamersgate, direct2drive and big fish (my wife favorite game store) pc gaming never been better. I don't why you says it is dying but there were never as many fun games available for sale as now. With episodic titles like sam and max, back to the future and cie the adventure genre is fully back. With games like ARES, BladeKitten and BionicCommando Rearmed the plat-former genre is back in full glory. You have a boatload of strategy game like c,and the total war series.

I could go on and on but I think that you got my point : pc gaming as not died, it changed and now it is blooming.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

* Some_Guy is now playing 3D Custom Girl
* Some_Other_Guy is now playing Custom Maid 3D

Re:No surprise

[Shikaku]

You've never met a collector then.

Re:No surprise

[Schadrach]

Also, if you link a non-Steam game in Steam, it will also work with the Steam overlay, on the offchance you use Steam's IM client.

Re:No surprise

[Schadrach]

Or they have a "complete Collection" for some publisher at a ridiculous discount, but not any of the games individually discounted, so you grab "everything ever made by XXX" despite already having 4 of them and only wanting 2 of them, because the collection of 42 games was cheaper than buying those two at full price, and the extra 36 games you don't care about may end up having some gems in it. =p

Re:No surprise

[drinkypoo]

Why would I want to launch non-steam games from the steam client? I don't even launch it unless I want to play HL2 (the only steam game I was dumb enough to buy.) The Steam client is horribly abusive. It has an agonizingly long startup and refuses to remember that I don't want to see adverts on launch.

Re:No surprise

[Hatta]

It may be possible to play most games in Steam offline. If it requires a voodoo incantation to get it to work, that's a problem. Offline games should just work. Period.

Re:No surprise

[Arccot]

Problem is that games without DRM get pirated just as bad. The main motivation for pirates is to avoid payment. I think the only solution is to move more of the game online. Publishers seem to agree as seen by all the MMOs that are being funded.

Single player games are still essentially always cracked, even with an online component. Developers need to add a value in connecting to the server that makes it much less entertaining to play without, otherwise you end up pissing off your customers by making it harder for them to play than the pirates.

Re:No surprise

[Desler]

Yeah, it's as hard as telling it to go in offline mode and then launching the game. zOMG so complicated!

Re:No surprise

[XxtraLarGe]

I just downloaded Civ V this past weekend. Then we had an ice storm and lost our internet connection for a couple of days. When I launched Civ V, after a couple of minutes I was given the option of launching Steam in offline mode and I was able to play fine.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be afraid to have that many Steam games on one account. What happens if for some reason VAC decided that a memory glitch was an active hack, there was a "suspicious" (to the VAC program) file on the hard disk somewhere, or the debugger you had running for a project wasn't killed before firing up a multiplayer game.

*bam* kiss your multiplayer access to 400 games goodbye.

I love Steam, but because of the complaints about how VAC can drop the banhammer at any time, with no warning, for anything (be it something in memory, a file on the HDD, or something else present), combined with the presumption of guilt and Valve's "Talk to the hand" support, I refuse to buy games under it.

Re:No surprise

[mlts]

There are always ways around anything. If there is really want for it, even MMOs can have emulator servers built with the same or similar mechanics as the original game.

Granted, this is something more on the edges as opposed to mainstream use, but if single player games start having their content dribbled to users level by level, someone will cache it, and then make a server emulator so people can play without having to have 24/7 access to the "mother ship".

Re:No surprise

[weirdcrashingnoises]

AFAIK the only games NOT playable in Steam offline (assuming your games & steam were up to date the last time you were connected to the internet with steam running) are games that have their own DRM protections that require internet even during single player. i think it was ubisoft that did this with a bunch of their games. I don't remember now, i never bothered to even look at them because of their douchebaggery.

Also steam warns you that these games use their own protection and may require an internet connection, which is good of them to do.

games that were patching during your last connection and did not finish will not run in offline mode

steam also used to require that you go into offline mode manually before starting up in offline mode, but they no longer require this. if no internet connection is found, it will automatically go into offline mode (after a warning "you are in offline mode" message)

Re:No surprise

[djnforce9]

Yes, Steam makes it simple to launch non-steam games and as an added bonus, it attempts to apply the Steam Overlay when you're in your NON-STEAM game. Unfortunately, this may break said game in certain circumstances but it's a nice touch when it works. I don't run WoW through Steam though.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

anon is now playing Firefox

Re:No surprise

[Cwix]

That's not what hes talking about.. why would he suggest this?

maybe some 3rd party group could pull it off by making their own motherboards with one possessor from each

That quote makes no sense if he was talking about a cpd/gpu combo. He is obviously talking about two different processors on the same motherboard.
If it was what he was talking about, he should have at least capitalized the name "Fusion".

Re:No surprise

[Cwix]

See my reply to the other commenter, I dont think thats what he was talking about at all.

Re:No surprise

[Shompol]

The gaming industry has always been a niche market, and PC gaming is even a smaller niche.

A total of $35 billion revenue generated by gaming market, of them PC gaming "smaller niche" is 62% and projected to grow: http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/04/19/hear-that-knocking-sound-its-pc-gaming/

Re:No surprise

[chriso11]

Actually, I think that you may have missed the point. Because it seems to me that there is stagnation in CPU & graphics requirements now. Instead of truly pushing the capabilities of modern hardware, graphics are stuck at this meh level. Why aren't monitors pushing beyond 1920x1080/1200? Because of HDTV standardization (I know 30inch monitors are higher res, but work with me). The reason that a 2year old GPU can handle modern games is because the modern games don't push the envelope. Why? Because the consoles are taking up a lot of developer mindshare.

Re:No surprise

[Sir_Sri]

I'm torn on putting GoG on that list. I like their stuff, and i certainly use it a lot. They're either the most important, or the least important company to something like the gaming alliance. And I'm not really sure which.

On one hand they are the ones who've been dealing with trying to fix all the messed up lack of standards crap that we had for years. That makes games as art hard because well, you need specialized programmers to fix any 5 year old title up enough that it will run on a modern system. All of the nuances of different hardware configurations, incompatible standards, market confusion, etc. all land on their lap. So they probably know the problems more intimately than anyone else, and in some sense are advocates for the long term future of the business by not screwing things up.

On the other hand, once people start buying digital, a service like GoG might not be all that relevant. A game tied to your steam account today will be tied to it 5 years from now (presuming the likely scenario that Valve is still in business). And I'm not sure how much actual business GoG does other than the Witcher. It's a great idea, but there's only so much money to be had on planescape torment and baldur's gate II. And we might be at a point where standards today are good enough that they can be ported/updated along and keep backwards compatibility that many of GoG's issues are going to only apply to that specific timeframe of 1996-2003 or so. (Glide 3DFx to directx 9). 5 years ago from this year is directx 9.0c and directx 10, how many games still have DX9 modes? Nearly all of them, the dragon age 2 demo released yesterday does.

So like I say, I'm not sure if they are the most relevant, or least relevant company to the future of PC gaming.

Re:No surprise

[bonch]

Slashdotters will never admit it, but piracy was the final nail in the coffin of PC gaming.

Re:No surprise

[genner]

Digital distribution, with easy and non-intrusive copy protection -- you need an internet connection to install, but that's it unless the publisher (e.g. Ubisoft) insists on more.

Last time I checked you absolutely had to login to the Steam application before you could play any games. Even if you start the game directly from its own executable (as opposed to the desktop shortcuts that launch the game via the Steam application) you still get the Steam application starting and prompting for username/password details before you can start to play. If there's particular games that don't do this I'd like to know which.

Simply click "Go offline" and this problem goes away.

Re:No surprise

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

PS3 was almost certainly intentionally engineered to be hard to code for. Sony assumed they would dominate again, and wanted to make it hard to port their code to other systems.

I disagree.

The PS3 is the result of the history of the console as a platform. Every console would have a different CPU architecture and that was considered "normal."

The only reason why it got easy was because of the original Xbox. it was an x86 CPU that ran a variant of DirectX making ports pretty dead simple. IIRC, the Xbox 360's SDK is pretty similar, even though it's running on a different CPU architecture.

Re:No surprise

[Daniel Phillips]

If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it.

If Microsoft truly wanted to improve the status of PC gaming it would just go away and die immediately. Of course Microsoft has no intention of doing that so its dead hand on the gaming industry will continue to hold things back for some time yet. Fortunately, there is no longer anything Microsoft can do to prevent the emergence of an independent content creation industry on platforms it does not control. See my upcoming talk at Scale 9x

Re:No surprise

[Sable Drakon]

I make the effort mostly for the Community Overlay. When I'm in WoW, I just take a taxi, bring up the overlay and surf without having to Alt-Tab out of the game. Pretty handy stuff.

Re:No surprise

[Daniel Phillips]

Gaming on a PC is becoming more cumbersome every day with useless DRM, and less relevant every day with half-ass console ports. The gaming industry has always been a niche market, and PC gaming is even a smaller niche. While some companies have been very successful in this market, the future of it is dead.

Insightful, but not quite right. It is true as you say that Microsoft's PC gaming hegemony has no future, however Microsoft has inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of a viable open content creation industry. See my upcoming talk at Scale 9x, and see Sintel.

Re:No surprise

[cOldhandle]

I don't think he's referring to a product release "launch", but actually running an existing non-Steam game from within the Steam application. The only reasons for this are:

• to show off to your friends on Steam what non-Steam game you're playing
• to chat to friends on Steam within the non-Steam game (Steam hooks non-Steam applications so that shift+tab still works)
• maybe to have the game in your list of Steam games so you don't forget about it?

Re:No surprise

[Sable Drakon]

Not all games are detected however, thus forcing you to do it manually. If I'm going to be forced to add in a game manually, I'd at least want perks for doing so and Steam offers them.

Re:No surprise

[yeshuawatso]

I think you need to look at those statistics once more. Intel is comparing install base of PCs CAPABLE of gaming to game consoles DEDICATED to gaming. Furthermore, most PCs and laptops being sold are capable of playing games that are designed for consoles and ported to PCs, especially since the consoles are over 5 years old. If you're going to spew stats, spew pc gaming industry sales and their growth rates compared to console gaming and their growth rates.

Re:No surprise

[yeshuawatso]

You're sighting exceptions to the norm. sintel took over $3 million to create and didn't use open content creation until after it was released. While I'm sure more content will come about this way, it's not enough to keep an entire market segment that is swaying to mobile and dedicated devices at a rapid pace.

Re:No surprise

[hairyfeet]

I didn't miss the point, what you are talking about has NOTHING to do with consoles and everything to do with standardization of LCD manufacture. If a new consoles came out that did native 2650x1950 resolution do you think LCD manufacturers are all gonna jump to crank out screens with those dimensions? Nope because they have found the sweet spots as far as yield and customer satisfaction and they ain't going nowhere.

I've found you can divide the LCD manufacturers into three resolutions and pretty much cover the market, there is 720p, there is 1600x900 (which is the #1 size for monitors by a long shot ATM) and there is 1080p. Not a single one of those has anything to do with the limitations of consoles and everything to do with yields and standardization around video resolution.

So while the modern GPU can handle these resolutions well it has nothing to do with the consoles and everything to do with the combination of "buzzword bingo" and the ability to crank out certain sizes quite cheaply with high yields. same as I figure 720p is gonna be gone next, as people are coming to me asking for 1080p monitors and TVs. They don't actually know what that means but they have heard it enough times to know "it is good" so that is what they want.

When it comes to monitors 1600x900 at 19-22 inch seems to be the sweet spot when it comes to price so that is what is selling around 4 to 1 last I checked. Again nothing to do with consoles and everything to do with yields and pricing.

But you won't be seeing those crazy high resolutions any time soon simply because the tolerances are too tight and you end up with low yields and high prices. Sadly most people can't really tell once you get past around 1280x720 so for the mass consumer the above resolutions are "good enough" and then it becomes about price. I'd say the next big shift will be 120hz for 3D, which IIRC most consoles can't even run, just because folks have seen Avatar and want that at home. this of course gives another advantage to PCs in the living room as they can do 120hz no problem, but trying to blame consoles and PCs for LCD yields is a little far fetched IMHO.

Re:No surprise

[yeshuawatso]

This is the reality that true gaming enthusiast are failing to see. Games are dirt cheap now, but that's an indication that the market is bottoming out, not growing. Developers and publishers are getting whatever they can for they're existing assets while focusing on consoles and mobile where price drops are less likely and digital distribution is increasing their contribution margins exponentially, driving their support cost down, and reducing their staff requirements. It's nothing personal, it's business.

Re:No surprise

[yeshuawatso]

You just proved my point at PC gaming ISN'T growing. If you can hold on to old hardware and still play the same games being ported from consoles now, then innovation isn't occurring on your platform, especially considering that the platform can actually be upgraded on a whim.

FYI, I own a Wii as my only console (for my kids). My preferred gaming machine is a Sun Ultra 40 with 2x dual core opteron cpus @ 2.4 GHz a core, 8GB of RAM, 3x 500GB hard drives and a Nvidia GTS 250 over clocked with 1GB of VRAM and a NVidia Quadro FX 3500; however, i'm not too naive to think my 2006 (exception graphics card) gaming rig will continue to be the gaming platform of the future. Not until another round of consoles come pouring in.

Re:No surprise

[Totenglocke]

I've installed plenty of games (even old Win 95 games) and it detects them just fine.

Re:No surprise

[Totenglocke]

I mis-read how the comments were nested. The original poster who mentioned Fusion said

I suspect if they went and talked to AMD they could come up with some kind of Fusion-based console

I thought you responded to him. However, the person you responded to has never heard of Fusion and thought he was talking about a hybrid PowerPC / x64 system.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't monitors pushing beyond 1920x1080/1200?

I don't think you can rightly use that yet as a criticism of PCs in a PC-vs-console threat; consoles don't *really* use all those pixels, whereas PC games do if you have the hardware for it. And there are higher resolution monitors - they're just not *cheap* yet. You can get up to 2560x1600, if you're willing to pay $1k or more. Also, it's been years since nvidia or AMD have made graphics cards that don't support at least two monitors, and that's another thing that PC games can take advantage of that consoles currently don't/can't.

Re:developer mindshare, they problem isn't PC-vs-console, but something more complex. First, the budget requirements of the console games has killed off mid-level gaming houses; there are small shops doing small games and big shops doing big games, and not much in between is successful. Second, it's more like PC-vs-low end PC/laptop-vs-console-vs-handhelds-vs-smartphones/iDevices. There have been plenty of articles about both these issues; gamers and the gaming industry have been aware for this entire console generation and part of the previous one.

Re:No surprise

[Daniel Phillips]

You're sighting exceptions to the norm. sintel took over $3 million to create and didn't use open content creation until after it was released. While I'm sure more content will come about this way, it's not enough to keep an entire market segment that is swaying to mobile and dedicated devices at a rapid pace.

I am citing what will become the new norm, just as the new norm in embedded operating systems is open source Linux. Sintel was created with an open toolchain and much of the content is open, as is the end product. By the way, could you please provide a pointer to the $3 million figure. If it really was that much (which I doubt) that would just be a convincing testament to the power of the open model.

Re:No surprise

[chriso11]

OK, by mentioning screen resolutions I totally threw you off the track. However, games are not incorporating significantly higher complexity than in the past. Why don't games have massively deformable terrain? Why not have deep physics emulation? AI has improved, but I haven't seen any improvement that scales with CPU improvements over the last few years. Why not load up 4 cores for AI? There are 6 core CPUs now available, and still games don't really need more than 2 cores, even though quad cores have been out for 3 years. There is a significant amount of CPU & GPU power available in the newest systems that aren't being tapped in games, which were the traditional driver for PC development for more than 15 years. This untapped performance in unusual, and must have some reason.

I believe that the main factor is developer focus on consoles.
   

Re:No surprise

[hairyfeet]

Again that has NOTHING to do with consoles, it has to do with something that has been quite well known for sometime, that parallelization is EXTREMELY hard!.

While it is true we have just begun to scratch multicores (BTW L4D I&II run best on TRIPLE cores FYI, and there are others than run best on duals) the problem with your usages becomes timing and race conditions. A classic example is The Dining philosophers problem which was first wrote about in 1965 long before there ever was an Xbox.

But in a way this just gives us another easy example of why PCs are a superior platform. One of my favorite "Holy Crap!" demos I do for prospective customers is to fire up my browser to a Youtube video WHILE having a tune play in WMP 12 AND have a game of Bioshock fired up in a window. This lets them see the true value of multicore is that I can do several tasks at the same time which is frankly impossible both on single cores and on consoles by design.

The problem is you and others think the PC and its performance should be based around games because that is where the performance boosts came from in the past but I would argue that the "new hotness" isn't JUST games, it is games PLUS the incredible amount of multimedia features that allow one unprecedented control. It is THAT which will drive the new GPUs, excellent features like Eyefinity and the ability to do high def PiP, not simply gaming.

For an example I just got done setting up a new quad core PC in a customers home. For just $550 he got an AMD Phenom Black Edition, 4Gb of DDR2 800Mhz RAM, a 1Tb HDD, 5.1 surround sound setup and an HD4830 to round things out. Now from the comfort of his living room chair he has his 20 years worth of CDs, all nicely ripped and sorted in WMP 12, he is now learning how to rip all his DVDs so they too will be instantly accessible, from this one spot his family can play games, enjoy all their audio/video,watch Netflix and even surf the web, all from the comfort of their living room with their nice 37 inch 1080p TV.

So honestly I'd say the future has never been brighter for PC gaming, all the consoles have done is made PC gaming even more affordable for the masses. We have the choice of literally thousands of games instantly with direct services like Steam and Good Old Games, we can have thousands of top notch titles for a little of nothing especially when compared to console prices (I just picked up the ENTIRE Prince Of Persia Sands of Time series for my oldest for $6 brand new how can you beat that?) and thanks to the rise of multicore CPUs at seriously cheap prices (Thanks AMD you rock!!) and frankly insane amounts of GPU power for under $100 we can have incredible graphics and all at a price even the common man can easily afford.

So I ask you, where is the bad here? The games that focus on how big an ePeen your system is frankly suck (I'm looking at YOU Crysis!) and the graphics got so damned good in 2005 that honestly they have been extreme overkill on pretty ever since. Hell you should try "Just Cause 2" and see the incredible shit you can pull, we are talking flying low in a stolen car while pieces of it are blown off by the military, complete with sparks where the rims hit the pavement, firing a cable into the front of a jeep and then into the ground causing the vehicle to pull a Terminator 3 and go flipping over in a HUGE fireball, and then at the last minute parachuting out of your about to explode car off a bridge into a beautifully rendered jungle before escaping by snatching a boat below.

Frankly as someone who started gaming on an Atari and who would have frankly told you that you were full of shit if you told me even 10 years ago we would have this level of realism and Hollywood style destruction, all in a PC that ANY person can EASILY afford? Frankly we are living in damned good times when it comes to gaming on the PC my friend, I suggest we leave the fratboys to their Halo teabagging sessions and just kick back and enjoy the goodness.

Re:No surprise

[chriso11]

First off, I don't see how multimedia poses any significant loading to a modern system, unless you are talking about recoding HD videos.And while parallelization is difficult, I can assure you that a huge number of other hard problems have been already addressed in modern computers (try making a transistor that is only 32nm from scratch). And while Just Cause 2 is pretty nice, it runs on an Xbox360. A lot more can be done on a modern PC, but really isn't.

Re:No surprise

[hairyfeet]

Have you TRIED it on an x360? That is like pointing out there is a version of Halo for the Atari 2600 (there is BTW) but comparing the two isn't really fair. The PC version supports DX10 and the level of detail and realism is frankly so incredible that the first time I played it I died about a dozen times just because I got mesmerized by the pretty and couldn't focus on the actual game. Some of my customers after watching me play it have begun picking it up themselves just so they can show off their new PCs to their console playing friends because it makes the consoles look like shit in comparison.

And if the problem had been "solved" as you put it when it comes to multicores then frankly nearly all PC software wouldn't be single core only nor would both Intel and AMD be spending incredible amounts on R&D trying to find a way to make easy support for multicores. The simple fact is dealing with timings and race conditions is EXTREMELY difficult and have plagued companies like IBM for decades. You think IBM doesn't have good coders?

The problem is trying to predict with absolute certainty when multiple cores will complete a job and ensuring that they all meet up at the correct point in time so they don't stall. Hell this is one of the things that killed Intel's Netburst, as the huge pipelines made the CPU crazy scalable but a single branch mis-prediction could choke the whole thing.

In the end I'm sure this is a problem that will be solved, but frankly I doubt it will have anything to do with gaming, whether the consoles existed or not. Currently the big leaders in using multicore effectively is video processing and GP-GPU which as more coders become exposed to the intricacies of programming for multiple cores I'm sure someone will trip over the next big "Ah ha!" moment that will really kick up the race with regards to multicores.

But frankly I wouldn't really expect to see new techniques really come to the fore until XP is EOL, because frankly it is still the number 1 OS by a HUGE margin and I just don't see that going away until it is EOL in 2014. For many the PC is just the thing that lets them work and get on the net, and "gaming" is playing Farmville, and as long as XP holds over 70% of the market (something like 300 million plus last I checked) trying to optimize code for multicores simply isn't really cost effective since at its heart XP is a single core OS. Sure it'll run on multicores but it really isn't optimized for it, and anything over a dual is just wasted on it.

So until that changes and multicores are the standard in all or even most homes (I'd say late model P4s outnumber multicores by about 4 to 1 in the number of installed units) I doubt we'll be seeing any new major shifts, and again it isn't the consoles holding everyone back. let the fratboys have their teabagging, the rest of us will be enjoying the new hotness that frankly makes them look like an Atari.

Re:No surprise

[yeshuawatso]

Just to follow up with your question about Sintel's cost, I went straight to the source, Ton, and asked how much it cost. That 12 minute film including labor, equipment, actors, and distribution cost over $400,000! Not bad, but definitely quite a bit. Either way, it's much farther than my cite of $3 mil that I believe I must have picked up from some forum.

Thanks for calling me out as it made me do some actual research.

Re:No surprise

[Shompol]

You are right, but the revenue statistics you are asking for are right there, in the same article:

Today, PC gaming generates 43% of the total gaming revenue. The next closest platform is the Wii, which generated 24% of the total gaming revenue in 2009. And the PC share is growing – by 2013, the forecast is that PC gaming will represent 56% of the total pie.

...which still suggests that your claims of "smaller niche" and "the future of it is dead" are far-fetched. More than that, this statistics covers dollar sales, but neglects a tremendous share of free and pirated games on PCs that dollar sales do not account for. Absolute majority of gaming is happening on PCs, the and those who figure out how to milk this phenomenon will be most successful. And the proof to that is right there in the article:

It’s interesting to see that the growth in PC gaming revenue is predicted to come from the newer business models – subscription and online transactions.

I don't even want to know what those are, but WOW did make Blizzard filthy rich.

Re:No surprise

[yeshuawatso]

Revenue and Profit are too distinct areas of an income statement. Just because you generate the most revenue, doesn't mean you generate the most profit.

Champion

[mehrotra.akash]

"the platform has been crying out for a champion" Thats what Steam is for!!!

Re:Champion

[Coolhand2120]

Steam is unnecessary bloatware. What small good steam does it is by far outweighed by the many annoyances.

Bombardment with ads! Who the hell wants to see an ad just because you want to play a game?

Some games require steam!? What the hell! Take a platform (PC) and break it into two platforms (PC/PC+Steam). What better way to drive people to piracy?

Always running. WTF? Why does this program want to run all the time, I mean, I'm not playing games all the time (unfortunately).

Centrally owned. Why not just use the internet? Isn't www.steam.com just as good as the steam app? If you want to offer all the update features add a browser add-on.

I won't even install steam because I can't stand ads on a piece of software I own. I find the practice repugnant and because I stand on my principles I can't play some games. So don't tell me steam is good. It's a redundant tool at best, at worst it's a closed ad platform for valve that treats people like tools.

Re:Champion

[Seumas]

Steam is merely a distribution system, however. It doesn't resolve the issues with developers attitudes toward PC gaming. I recently saw an interview with a developer who is creating a new engine who said that graphics are no longer important (nor AI or anything else, presumably, since the following is the only item he stressed importance of) -- only the ease of use of the development tools was. His reasoning was that we've basically reached the limits of the current console generation.

It used to be that PC gaming drove the industry, so you made your game as amazing for the PC as you could. Then you did your best to replicate as much of that experience on the console. It would seem that, but for a few exceptions such as Blizzard, the focus is now on pumping new franchise titles out as fast as possible with efficient tools that make the most of the consoles and then dumping whatever that comes out to be over onto the PC. Sort of like saying "we develop our content for the iPod viewing experience", but then also distributing the content to iMax theaters, because hey -- it's an extra potential buck, even if it's just an afterthought.

OF course, Steam also has it's own slew of problems. There's often external registrations and restrictions that apply to games through Steam. Games are often unbelievably buggy to the point of being unusable (go read the forums for people's experiences with Fallout 3 that continue even to this day and then a whole slew of similar problems with Fallout: New Vegas). Then there's the issue of games not being maintained so that their patching is out of sync with the real product (and then Steam puts the onus for it on the developers/publishers and the developers/publishers put it back on Steam and nothing is ever accomplished). Or worse, the lack of maintenance extends to some games no longer working on newer operating systems (seemingly sensible, until you remember that most titles on GoG are a decade or three old and run on modern operating systems -- all for about five bucks). Then there's the endless DLC and the rip-off multi-versions that come out for a year or two and the stupid participation in "custom DLC for retail outlets for pre-orders".

I love Steam. I have almost 400 titles on Steam. . . But it feels very much like the best of breed. That is, the best of a dying breed. It's only of value so long as the wealth of content for the PC is enormous and offers something consoles can't (other than just a venue for countless little indie games, spreading dual stick shooters like a plague).

Re:Champion

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that if you go into Properties, you can turn off the launch on startup as well as the popup dialog that shows steam ads and sales. Steam itself does not have an in-game ad system, so any ads you may see inside of games are done solely by the developer / publisher.

Re:Champion

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent down, for talking out his ass among other things.

Re:Champion

[ToasterMonkey]

a developer who is creating a new engine who said that graphics are no longer important (nor AI or anything else, presumably, since the following is the only item he stressed importance of) -- only the ease of use of the development tools was.

No, that was over years ago, even before Doom III and it's look how pretty I can make Doom I gameplay mechanics engine. The PC gaming industry has shown that shoving more crap into the same or lower average framerate does not a more fun game make.

only the ease of use of the development tools was

That's very biased and developer centric. If the technology is not really a concern, then what's next is designing good, fun, balanced gameplay. Go find a developer who will tell you that's in the bag.

*gasp*a filmmaker says his prime concern is doing awesome stuff more quickly. Doesn't really address the good effects vs. good movie issue does it?

Re:Champion

[artor3]

Steam is fantastic.

"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.

"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby (it beats GFWL and GameSpy) or because they use it as copy protection (it beats SafeDisc/Starforce/whatever else is around these days)

"Always running" - File > Settings > Interface > Run Steam when my computer starts. Uncheck it if it bothers you that much. Lots of programs do the same thing.

"Centrally owned" - If you refuse to use any software that's owned by a private organization, you're gonna have some trouble playing games.

"Why not just use the internet?" - Because, as I mentioned above, Steam supplies multiplayer functions and copy protection. Plus they probably don't want to make it support IE6.

Steam also syncs saved games and settings across platforms, provides in game text & voice chat, a very helpful friends list through which you can jump directly into a friends server, and tons of other nice features. Yes, you could get the same functionality by combining Direct2Drive, SafeDisc, Ventrilo, AIM, Games for Windows Live, and probably a few other programs. But that doesn't make Steam redundant. It makes all those other programs redundant.

Re:Champion

[ArundelCastle]

I won't even install steam because I can't stand ads on a piece of software I own. I find the practice repugnant and because I stand on my principles I can't^H^H^H^Hwon't play some games.

Wow, do people still believe that they own software they didn't write? When they download it for free and blithely accept the clickwrap? That's so 2006.
You're conveniently ignoring the features Steam has beyond being a sales platform: an IM and friends list client, quick links to support forums, community groups, cloud saves, distributed downloader/preloader/autopatcher, all of which are huge conveniences compared to 10-15 years ago. Much of the last 60 years of civilization is predicated around paying for conveniences.
Besides, you're confusing the launcher with applications, which you don't need the launcher to run and sorry, you also don't own. I mean, you can sell your license keys to anyone you want I suppose. But that buck stops shorter and shorter these days, through no fault of Valve's.

Regardless of your principles, which BTW I do applaud even though I disagree, the PC gaming market would be a smoking crater of piracy without Steam and other (some even DRM free) sites like Direct2Drive, GoG, etc. making it EASY and oftentimes cheap to purchase games. The vast majority of PC gamers do want game developers to get a paycheque. We just hate how complicated everything has to be, so the more publishers fight pirates by harming consumers, the more they ultimately harm themselves. But that's hardly Valve's fault.

The Steam launcher has always been far, far, less intrusive and ad filled than going to a website like Gamershell or FilePlanet that wants you to pony up for faster download servers. I trust that you rail equally hard on the Mac App Store, iOS Store, Android market, iTunes store, Games for Windows LIVE store... etc. etc. Or do you just distill it down to those that require a launcher application? Is that the principle? What about when Opera had in-browser ads, is that the same thing?

Re:Champion

[Seumas]

That isn't what they're doing, though. They're not saying "let's make the most awesome fun game possible with the available tools and platforms". They're saying "let's make the most awesome fun game possible that runs on 2005's hardware and then stuff it on the PC for a few extra sales". It's fine to want to make more fun and more awesome stuff more efficiently. More computing power (not only graphically) definitely contributes to that. Especially on the concurrent complexity in what you're seeing on the screen and the way what you see on screen is behaving (from realistic and complex movement to better audio and more players at a time in multi-player and more in-depth AI). Instead of taking advantage of that on the PC to push things forward, they're saying "We've maxed out performance on CONSOLES, so the only important thing now is ease of development".

It's more like a developer saying "we've maxed out the performance of games on a Nokia phone from 2002, so rather than pushing things forward by developing more involved and complex games for smart phones in 2011, we just need to make it easier to develop games for that old Nokia".

Granted, consoles are where all the sales are at, so that's why the focus is on maxing out their performance and not bothering to exceed that capacity on PCs (in fact, I've seen some developers suggest that they don't want their game to appear too much better on the PC, because it might deter console owners from the title - so they want something closer to parity between the two). But then, that's the point really. The PC is treated as nothing much more than just another console with a different interface. Sure, it might have 2011 hardware, but the game was probably designed with the sole focus being on the 2005 console hardware. Unless you're talking about games from Blizzard and maybe Valve among a few others (and excluding MMOs, obviously).

Re:Champion

[rainmouse]

Not to mention that steam will automatically update your graphics drivers should you so choose as well as automatically keeping your games up to date, even old dos games can be installed and loaded with a single click. Steam fixes a lot of what drove people to consoles, ie fiddly installs that require computer know how.

Re:Champion

[Mike Mentalist]

It used to be that PC gaming drove the industry, so you made your game as amazing for the PC as you could.

I don't ever remember the PC driving the industry. It may have had the best graphics but that is not the same thing at all.

Re:Champion

[Totenglocke]

You're conveniently ignoring the features Steam has beyond being a sales platform:

You also forgot the features of Valve having ability to delete games without compensation and that if they go out of business, they're not obligated to provide you with non-Steam versions of your games. I for one know that I always love the feature of being robbed of my money / property!

Note: The last part was a joke. The rest wasn't, you can look it up in Steam's TOS if you don't believe me.

Re:Champion

[pinkushun]

Wow lots of Steam fanboys here. I'm not.

It really made it hard for me not having a fixed internet connection, for all those updates, and to decrypt game data.

I payed you money, Steam, for a game I only played once. Thanks, but I'd rather buy DRM-free and non platform-locked Indie games now.

My gift to you, Steam, is popularizing your competitors. :-)

Re:Champion

[hairyfeet]

That is why I believe what will drive the next generation of GPU and PC will NOT be strictly gaming, although they will game with frankly insane graphics and framerate, it is the ease at which new Windows PCs tie everything together and give the customer a "one stop shop" for their entire multimedia experience.

I just finished up and installed a $500 quad core PC into a customer's living room just yesterday. Being able to show the customer that thanks to drag and drop transcoding on the new ATI GPUs converting videos to his PMP was literally "4, 3,2,1,done" and being able to rip their entire audio/video collection and have it all instantly accessible along with Netflix via the 10 foot UI of Windows Media Center? Easy sell.

The fact that he can instantly buy and have a huge library of games all right there at the click of his wireless mouse makes PC gaming just one attractive piece of the larger puzzle. Folks like simple, they like easy, they like not having to deal with discs and having all their media all wired up nice and neat with their new 7.1 surround sound systems. Thanks to GP-GPU and the sharing ability built into Windows 7 having a PC built into the entertainment center has never been easier, and thanks to the consoles being the target platform it has never been cheaper.

When I started anything less than $1500 and I hope you liked having low framerates and degraded picture, and you better be ready to buy a new GPU every year or so and a new PC every two. Now you can buy really nice triples and quads for less than $550 fully loaded with RAM and huge HDDs and it'll crank out the framerate and look better than anything the consoles can do, and do so for years to come with ZERO need for upgrades.

So I'd say from listening to my customers PC gaming has never been better. They love how they have endless choices from Steam to GOG to D2D, all MUCH cheaper than the consoles, how they can just HDMI right into their new widescreen and do everything from game to check their email from the comfort of their couch, and how they have access to anything and everything all right there at their fingertips. In the end the console can do gaming and Netflix and that is about it. With the PC you have nearly infinite jobs it can do and it will do them all well and cheaply to boot. I believe with the rise of super cheap widescreen TVs the future will be networked everything with a PC in the living room controlling it all. Gaming is just the nice icing on top of the delicious cake.

Re:Champion

[GoochOwnsYou]

OK, here's a basic education in what Steam actually is:

Its a distribution platform first and foremost, eliminating the need for optical media, changing discs but it plays another role. It ensures if your hardware is up to snuff your game will play. It will install anything neccesary to make sure the game runs. If you get an old game that doesnt run well on DirectX 10? It will install DirectX6 or whatever is optimal for that game side by side. It also puts save files in the cloud if you so wish.

Now: Ads are on the "Store" front page. Just dont go to the Store front page then. It lists top selling titles, specials going on at any given time plus top 10 selling lists, etc.
The requirement of Steam? Starcraft II requires Battle.Net, Xbox 360 titles require Xbox Live to play online.
Always running? Then set your settings so it doesnt always run.
Why not just use the Internet? What do you think it is? You think a web browser? Giving a browser the ability to install and update applications is safe? Have we not learned from ActiveX?

Re:Champion

[lazybeam]

I remember DOS gaming and half the fun of installing it was getting the right combination of conventional, EMS, XMS, DPMI, OMG, etc memory, along with various driver incompatibilities. My MS-DOS 6.22 config.sys and autoexec.bat files contained about 20 options for various required states for the various games and applications I had installed - and I only had 180MB of HDD space! Some hated certain drivers (such as sound card, CDROM, zip drive guest, mouse, packet drivers) installed, others required those drivers to be installed. Some games didn't even like DOS being "loaded high" (ie above 640KB).

Get off my lawn with your xbox!

Re:Champion

[Anonymous Coward]

VALVe has said in the past that they WILL give DRM-free versions of your games to you if they fail, and all developers on the Steam platform must adhere to this when they sign their contract to sell games on Steam.

Re:Champion

[fish waffle]

"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.

Why would I want that? That is not value-add, and the fact that I can fix it doesn't mean that they're selling something I want. I don't want to opt-out. I want you to opt-in to ads.

"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby

And I can't tell the difference easily ahead of time. This makes the whole thing suspicious, and more effort. Tales of bizarre and intrusive 'anti-cheat' programs do not help this; I call that spyware---perhaps mainly benign, at this point anyway, but I do not trust that to remain that way, and I do not want to give up control of my machine to steam. I did not buy the Fallout-3 expansion. I wanted to. But I don't want a steam account. I don't want to have to turn off half-a-dozen spam/ad/spyware "features" and I don't want to have to ask steam nicely when I want to play it, whether or not I've connected to steam recently. For pure multiplayer games I can see the need for an online presence---the problem is that the same techniques seem to be applied to single player games.

"Always running" - File > Settings > Interface > Run Steam when my computer starts. Uncheck it if it bothers you that much. Lots of programs do the same thing.

Yes, and I avoid those too. The nicer ones at least ask first. For the kinds of games I prefer (single-player, no online connections) I don't see what sort of value that provides to me---it is a major negative, only providing bloat and unknown monitoring/uploading facilities.

"Centrally owned" - If you refuse to use any software that's owned by a private organization, you're gonna have some trouble playing games.

Centrally owned and centrally managed. I can live with a single activation to protect their precioussss IP, but after that I want it to be my game to play when I want, without having to beg for permission from some remote entity. The need to repeatedly connect and re-validate, the need to use special offline modes, the fundamental dependency on them is the problem. They can make it as "easy" as they want, but remains unappealing---it's a gateway to privacy violation (used as such now or not), it's a further gateway to ads/spam/virus-injection (used as such now or not), and as many others have pointed out it's a remote dependency that renders the game useless once steam goes out of business. What benefit is that to me? "Leasing" the software to me and periodically coming around to inspect it to make sure I'm not using it "incorrectly" is not a business model I find appealing as a consumer.

"Why not just use the internet?" - Because, as I mentioned above, Steam supplies multiplayer functions and copy protection.

Neither of which interests me. Copy-protection provides no value-added to me as a consumer, and I prefer to play single-player games. For some reason these are all tossed into the same bucket and get the same treatment.

Steam also syncs saved games and settings across platforms, provides in game text & voice chat, a very helpful friends list through which you can jump directly into a friends server, and tons of other nice features.

None of which interest me. I'd prefer to keep my settings on the one machine I use, I see no reason for steam to own them, I don't want to chat with 14-year olds around the world, I don't want integration with IM or other online services. I just want the game.
I was content buying many games for the PC, spending quite a bit of money over the years. I now find it very difficult to even find new PC games---the local stores have all switched to only selling console versions, and the online downloads either come with mysterious activation and monitoring systems, or are mixed in with the same to the

Re:Champion

[Totenglocke]

No, the Valve TOS says that they MIGHT do that, but that there's no guarantee.

Re:Champion

[Mike Mentalist]

Your post is chock-full of exaggerations and false information. You seem to be looking for things to complain about Steam rather than actually looking at what it offers.

I understand steam has lots of appeal to a certain market and set of game genres. If you want all the online features, then it is perhaps not much additional effort and maybe worth the trade-off. But that does not apply to all games, and there is a still a large, and I suspect increasingly unhappy/unserved market of people like myself who would prefer to just buy a game and play it without having to sign up for different services or become forever beholden to some online service that may one day disappear, or change its TOS, or be sold to some larger company with a different agenda. I do not trust steam; I'm astounded that anyone does given the history of online companies. Perhaps that's more of a testament to the younger, more naive demographic that games, especially online games seem to attract.

This is just self-serving claptrap. I buy a game on Steam, it downloads and I play it. It downloaded, installed and patched Left 4 Dead 2 in about 15 minutes which is faster than I could install it from a DVD. I have the games installed on a second hard drive so if I have to format Windows all I need to do is reinstall Steam to the same location as before and I still have all my games, game saves and settings available.

Yes, Valve could suddenly decide to change the TOS so that I have to shove sharpened dildos up my arse every day but let's be realistic and pragmatic about things rather than doom mongering.

Re:Champion

[drinkypoo]

"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.

Doesn't work here; Steam often forgets which window I want to start with. Further, I get the "game updates" which are really ads every day I launch Steam.

"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby (it beats GFWL and GameSpy) or because they use it as copy protection (it beats SafeDisc/Starforce/whatever else is around these days)

False dichotomy, you can simply not use DRM. DRM has never been shown to help prevent piracy, and it has been shown to piss off potential customers.

"Always running" - File > Settings > Interface > Run Steam when my computer starts. Uncheck it if it bothers you that much. Lots of programs do the same thing.

it's also always running when I run a steam-powered game, which means that when it decides to unpause an update for no apparent reason (which it has done to me repeatedly) it starts downloading even when I'm playing whether I want it to or not.

"Centrally owned" - If you refuse to use any software that's owned by a private organization, you're gonna have some trouble playing games.

It's not about the software, but about the organization.

"Why not just use the internet?" - Because, as I mentioned above, Steam supplies multiplayer functions and copy protection. Plus they probably don't want to make it support IE6.

There are Steam games with additional DRM. They're using Steam because they're having problems with distribution otherwise, period, the end. Your IE6 non-sequitur is amusing but silly at best.

Steam also syncs saved games and settings across platforms, provides in game text & voice chat, a very helpful friends list through which you can jump directly into a friends server, and tons of other nice features. Yes, you could get the same functionality by combining Direct2Drive, SafeDisc, Ventrilo, AIM, Games for Windows Live, and probably a few other programs. But that doesn't make Steam redundant. It makes all those other programs redundant.

Steam is the redundant one because it provides a bunch of features I don't want and I can't turn them off/not install them, increasing potential attack surface and bug count.

Re:Champion

[Esvandiary]

It's actually better than that - you don't even need to reinstall Steam; just run Steam.exe and it should work perfectly. I installed Steam on my desktop exactly once, in March 2004 - I've just copied the directory ever since.

That said, I have encountered some third-party (mostly GfWL-encumbered) games that don't play by the rules and dump stuff in the user directory. But I guess if you're re-doing the machine, you're probably backing that up anyway!

Re:Champion

[Anonymous Coward]

OF course, Steam also has it's own slew of problems. There's often external registrations and restrictions that apply to games through Steam. Games are often unbelievably buggy to the point of being unusable (go read the forums for people's experiences with Fallout 3 that continue even to this day and then a whole slew of similar problems with Fallout: New Vegas). Then there's the issue of games not being maintained so that their patching is out of sync with the real product (and then Steam puts the onus for it on the developers/publishers and the developers/publishers put it back on Steam and nothing is ever accomplished). Or worse, the lack of maintenance extends to some games no longer working on newer operating systems (seemingly sensible, until you remember that most titles on GoG are a decade or three old and run on modern operating systems -- all for about five bucks). Then there's the endless DLC and the rip-off multi-versions that come out for a year or two and the stupid participation in "custom DLC for retail outlets for pre-orders".

You claim there's problems in Steam, and then you list a bunch of issues that have nothing to do with Steam.

Buggy games: Developers' fault.
Maintenance: Developers' fault. Steam definitely maintains hundreds of games correctly with no issues.
Lack of maintenance: Developers' fault.
DLCs: Developers' fault. Steam only allows this to work easily because that's what the dev companies want.

Re:Champion

[Schadrach]

So, in other words it's a specifically stated intended goal that should Steam go out of business that they will provide you access to a no-authentication-required version of your game library, however they can't promise to do that in perpetuity (since this would only come up in event of them going out of business) and for some particularly catastrophic versions of "out of business" they may not be able to do so at all, so the ToS only states that they *may* do so, without promising that they *will* do so.

I'm confused on the "deleting games without compensation" thing. Care to point that out in the license? Have they ever actually done this? Also, short of something like the Kindle/1984 scenario where Amazon was wrong to be selling it in the first place and was evading lawsuit, I can't think of even any similar scenario actually playing out from any company.

Re:Champion

[MogNuts]

I have a perfect example for you in why PC gaming is superior, won't die, and frankly, we can't let die:

Online multiplayer.

I don't own a PS3. I have a 360. And the problem is that there is no one to play on-line multiplayer. The whole draw of XBL is the online component. And something like BF:BC2, MoH, or CoD:BO are all about the multplayer. Except there is no one on! I own all three on both the PC and console. Example:

360:
BF:BC2: 0 (people online during off-peak hours) / 0 (during peak hours)

PC: 50,000 (off peak) / ? (never played during peak)

MoH 360: 2000 / 8000
PC: 2500 both

CoD:BO 360: 600,000/850,000
PC: 50,000

Here's the problem. Unless it's CoD:BO, *no one is playing any other online shooter*. Yea, CoD has a lot of people to play with, but what good is XBL if only one game in their entire library people are playing? As a side note, the matchmaking system is so poor that there could be 600,000 people on and I won't find anyone to play withj and have to wait 15 minutes. So what good is 800,000 if 10% of the time you can't find a match? And the only other two people are even playing are GoW2 or Halo:Reach. Halo only has 30,000 people playing. CS:Source, a 7 year old PC game, has 50,000

That's why you can't even bother with consoles, at least for online play. Only 1, maybe 2 games people are playing. And you're stuck with always having to buy those 2 new titles every time they come out just to get a game.

With the PC, you can buy a game and people will still play it, sometimes even years later. Forget even that, with PC, you can at least buy a game and play it online *at all*.

Re:Champion

[Mike Mentalist]

Now this I did not know. Thanks for the info.

Re:Champion

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the GP. I don't allow Steam on any of the household PCs I supervise. Yeah, you get periodic sales. I don't like DRM hypervisors running on my computers, and I still believe that all you suckers buying into it will be regretting that decision a few years from now... just like people who bought into the iTunes hype are starting to regret getting locked into that walled ecosystem now.

Re:Champion

[Burnhard]

There's no easier way of "just getting the game" than downloading it on Steam. I haven't been in a video game store for years. With respect to changing to a more malign TOS, this would be a legal minefield for Valve, so it isn't going to happen.

Re:Champion

[Totenglocke]

It's been like a year since I read it, but they explicitly state that if they ever remove a game from the store (for whatever reason) they MIGHT give you a refund or they MIGHT give you a non-Steam copy, but that'll be determined by them at the time. The same as how they MIGHT give you a non-Steam version if Steam ever shuts down. Nowhere did they ever say "We plan to do this, but we just might not be able to" like you're claiming.

But hey, apparently living in your mom's basement means she buys all your games for you and thus you don't care about flushing that money down the toilet. Those of us who actually work and pay our own bills care about getting value for our money.

Re:Champion

[Zerimar]

Fallout: New Vegas is a horrible example - it's a buggy piece of crap even on Xbox360, and the only game I've ever played that has managed to lock up my console. The game itself is good, but the bugs, especially the crash bugs, make it incredibly frustrating.

Re:Champion

[fish waffle]

Your post is chock-full of exaggerations and false information. You seem to be looking for things to complain about Steam rather than actually looking at what it offers.....I buy a game on Steam, it downloads and I play it. It downloaded, installed and patched Left 4 Dead 2 in about 15 minutes which is faster than I could install it from a DVD.

Whoosh. But ok, enjoy the kool-aid.

It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[Aerorae]

as the article says...Microsoft is far more interested in the lucrative console arena. It'll be interesting to see what Intel will do in response to this. The Wintel alliance is still on pretty strong

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[alvinrod]

Makes sense that they would throw more money at the Xbox. They get a fee for every game sold on the Xbox whereas they get absolutely nothing for almost everything sold on the PC. Linux gaming doesn't show any signs of catching on or taking off in a big way and even though Mac gaming is growing, it's nowhere near as popular as PC gaming and I suspect that a decent portion of Mac users boot into Windows to game anyways. Throwing money at the platform isn't going to get them anywhere. And Intel could care less what Microsoft does. As long as the hardware is using an Intel chip, they really don't care what operating system it runs or whose game it is. They just want to sell chips.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[0123456]

Makes sense that they would throw more money at the Xbox. They get a fee for every game sold on the Xbox whereas they get absolutely nothing for almost everything sold on the PC.

But, uh, they lose money on consoles and make money on almost every PC sold. If Joe Sixpack buys an iPad and an Xbox, Microsoft's profit streams just disappear.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[judeancodersfront]

They probably at least break even on console hardware sales at this point and with the xbox they also get xbox live, xbla games and movie rental revenue. Windows 7 OEM is pretty cheap and is only sold once while an xbox keeps on giving.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably at least break even on console hardware sales at this point and with the xbox they also get xbox live, xbla games and movie rental revenue.

The Xbox has cost them billions more than it's made. And now it's aging and needs a refresh, which will cost billions more.

Windows actually makes money.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[judeancodersfront]

Their entry to the market was no doubt expensive but it will payoff. The next xbox won't cost billions thanks to this gen being extended. They won't have to pay for expensive R&D since off the shelf hardware will provide enough of an advancement.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[neilt83]

You can see how interested MIcrosoft is in PC games with the Fable series. They didn't even release Fable 2 on the PC and Fable 3 was meant to have a simultaneous release on XBOX nad PC before xmas, but now we don't even have a projected release date for it on the PC.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[drinkypoo]

The PC is going away. Home users with desktop machines will be a tiny minority within a decade. It's going to be STBs (including PVRs and game consoles) and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Desktop machines will be all but restricted to 3D, CAD, Video, and the like. The next wave of tablets tend to have 1080p Mini-HDMI output, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, and USB 2.0 OTG. With that feature set there is no reason for the average user to have even a laptop, let alone a desktop.

It's not like the commodity parts to build your own PC will go away overnight, but the market WILL shrink. People are already less and less interested in a desktop PC. Notebooks already outsell desktops.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, I'm confused. Could Intel care less what Microsoft does, or do they really not care as long as it is using an Intel chip? If Intel could care less, in what areas could that care be reduced? Would they care more if it wasn't using an Intel chip.

Like I said, I'm confused. But I really couldn't care less about what the answer is... you see, I'm posting anonymously.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back here in ten years so we can ridicule you for your dumbfuck prediction.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[drinkypoo]

Come back here in ten years so we can ridicule you for your dumbfuck prediction.

I will probably still be here in ten years if slashdot is. If you had testicles enough to log in (or ovaries, as applicable) I would put a dollar on it.

Re:It really didn't do THAT much to begin with

[Rakarra]

The future you predict is horrific, but I think you're right.

It will take a lot longer than a decade, though.

And...

[amnesia_tc]

nothing of value was lost. Even if the whole of the PCGA dissolved, would anyone really care? The PCGA hasn't done anything for PC Gaming. There are more news stories about the PCGA getting a new president than there are stories about the PCGA doing something useful.

Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[judeancodersfront]

And perhaps switch to the PS3?

PC gaming piracy has gotten out of control. Not for casual stuff like Farmville and The Sims but games that require an aftermarket gpu. It's the 'hardcore' pirates that have made the situation go from bad to downright embarrassing.
http://www.binplay.com/2011/01/pc-gamers-and-their-lame-excuses-for.html

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[orphiuchus]

The only excuse from that article you linked which I buy is the "There was no demo" excuse. I have a 2 year old system and I'm not positive that "Bulletstorm" is going to run well enough to justify a purchase, and we all know that min/recommended specs are usually bullshit. Do I pirate it and then buy it if it runs well and is fun? I think I'm just not going to play it at all because I don't want it that bad, but that is a contributing factor.

I think that the truth of the matter is we won't get serious support until someone comes up with a form of DRM that actually works. I'm not just talking about not gimping your system, they don't care about that, I'm talking about actually stopping piracy. Everything thus far gets cracked eventually, and when you can choose between paying for a version that gimps your system or getting one that doesn't for free... well, that moral high ground really looks expensive.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Sir_Sri]

That would be the always on, online connection. Or similar. You're logged into steam, you can play anything on steam sort of thing (that's not how steam works, I'm just giving an example). I'm not a huge fan of that, but if you move your save games onto the cloud, and require an always on internet connection to play, with serial keys tied to an account it's a lot easier to deal with piracy. Then it's a matter of generating good keys, and regular ole network security. The key there will be to provide value to the customer. Onlive running the service for you is one option, but I think for everything onlive can do, there's always going to be a bit better something that can be done in your living room.

I'm guessing the online stuff will be achievements, in game chat linked across multiple games (imagine your WoW guild chat in world of goo, wow and minecraft, all at once), cloud based storage and re download of the games (for free), and maybe in game hints/tips/guides/manuals sort of stuff that's pulled from the web in a context sensitive way. Imagine you can't kill a particular boss, the game detects that, and then connects you with strategies from the developer, or other people who played and wrote up a blurb on how to do it. Think demon souls, with less misdirection.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[thegarbz]

No. Simple reason for it too. 13 year olds have nothing to gain by stopping piracy and everything to lose. Without a fully functioning moral compass the average 13year old feels no guilt (heck most people don't feel guilt about these things), and also sees no other alternative. Try telling someone who gets maybe $10 pocket money per week to save all their money for 6 weeks to get a game, rather than just downloading it off the net.

There's a lot of debate about pirates not doing it for the money, blah blah blah, but the reality is for a 13 year old... it's definitely about the money.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[monkyyy]

well that was a bit trollish and way to pro-closed gardens building towards apples level

i do pirate, but most of what i have is spent on games, and there are alot of games i pirate but dont enjoy enough to play for more then 10 minutes as the point i.e. the demo`s but even then the demos show to short a preview, the best, makes it easyer sometimes, something u can play tho in 5 minutes; that is not a good look into the final product, i wanta see the muti-player, the if the game is actually just mind numbing w/ one or two good parts

like ^anon i buy when i have money(but i dont even have 100, and i spent 50 last week), it goes to the ones i`d enjoyed not a blind shot

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[orphiuchus]

The problem is every time they try the persistent internet connection stuff someone eventually cracks it and then the only way to play if you have a connection that likes to crash on you is via the pirate version.

I have no idea how this could actually work. Maybe a USB key-card? Or a authenticator like MMOs are using now? The problem is that these solutions would probably eventually get cracked as well and then you've wasted a much bigger investment.

We need a giant leap forward in DRM before PC gaming can regain its lost ground.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[judeancodersfront]

It was a rhetorical question. There are plenty of 25 year old males with jobs that pirate everything on pc and rationalize their actions like a spoiled 13 year old.

Millions of pc pirates can afford a premium pc but not the software? I don't buy the excuses.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[judeancodersfront]

Most 'hardcore' pc gamers are not paying for the games, period. We should be past the point of calling anyone a troll for pointing out how bad the situation has become.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Vaphell]

it's not in the game industry interest to crack down on teens piracy too hard either. They are dirt poor now so you can't expect getting any money from them, but one day they will get a work and will have a disposable income. It's better not to take the risk of teens finding other hobbies in life and leaving gaming population permanently. Fueling addiction is important because once teens find out they can do perfectly well without games there will be no money to be made ever again.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[orphiuchus]

...

Millions of pc pirates can afford a premium pc but not the software? I don't buy the excuses.

Exactly. There is no excuse.

When it you get right down to it its just regular old stealing.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[gl4ss]

tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk, you're talking bull**** that was talked about already in '86, in '93 and in '99 and in '05 - between those years there was a tenfold increase in market and sales.

and you know something about all those great developers? they're getting paid better than they ever imagined.

it's just that now there's a bunch of people who have been educated to create mediocre games and they expect that it's a right for them that someone buys their mediocre games which interest nobody.

has gotten out of control implies that there's been some kind of change in the field, but that is bull, the warez situation is as it was always on pc and that is inherent from the openness of the pc.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[monkyyy]

i did say "a bit trollish" and its not as bad as people say, nor will it ever be if u heard ur facts form lobbyists or news, or people who live off generating attention

and as someone who would fit in that hardcore group, i dont know anyone who pirates everything, i do pirate more then my fair share, but i do put money in to the best of the art, not the mas-produced junk made by the people who complain most about pirates

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lack of DRM is not the problem. It is just an excuse not to develop games for the platform. The non-pc gaming market is bigger. It is that simple. Before the PC had more power so games had to use it. Now they just don't need it.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Omestes]

When it you get right down to it its just regular old stealing.

It may not be legal, or morally, good; but it is not "just regular old stealing". Language fails here, it seems. If every pirated copy was a lost sale, or lead directly to lost revenue, then it would be closer to stealing (or rather theft of service). Right now it is just like "regular old intellectual property infringement".

I'm not going into a moralistic argument about piracy, nor will I argue here about its effects; it just isn't, semantically, like stealing. Conflating it as such isn't good, nor would be treating it as such, since it isn't. Whatever it is, it is a bit lesser than stealing, but greater than borrowing or mere copying. I prefer piracy, though there still are some lurking ambiguity, it is a much more accepted term. Copyright infringement is pretty damn good, but does lack the ring.

(disclaimer: I'm not a fan of pirates nor the actions of publishers/government/lawyers, though I think the pirates might be the least distasteful and dangerous)

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[jmorris42]

> I think that the truth of the matter is we won't get serious support until someone comes up with a form of DRM that actually works.

I can tell you how to make a 'good enough' DRM.... but you won't like it.

Step one, USB dongle. With non-trivial stuff going on in it. Knock secret knock and it gives out key pieces of the executable or key data tables at various times during game play. If the dongle isn't there, no problem you get a demo version.

Step two, dongle is there but not right (i.e. cloned or emulated only 99.99% accurate) and you destroy the host machine. Nuke the recovery partition, flash the BIOS with zeros, the works. Think that couldn't happen? Look at the Xbox and PS3 where if they decide you have tampered they essentially render the hardware useless by banning its serial number. The dongle isn't a HID, Mass Storage or any other common type so random apps/drivers should do no more than enumerate it or otherwise read the top USB tables. So if you try very hard to probe the dongle it either shuts down, it does subtle malfunctions.

Step three, produce your own cracked copies that work for a month or two and seed them widely. If you were a little scared of the legal consequences of nuking hardware only have that 'feature' accessable in the cracked copies.

Do as many crackdowns as you like, enough people will keep downloading or sneakernetting because they aren't afraid of the law. Hell, murder doesn't get you much time for a first offense without added agrevating conditions. Make em fear something more tangible and it stops.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Omestes]

Most 'hardcore' pc gamers are not paying for the games, period. We should be past the point of calling anyone a troll for pointing out how bad the situation has become.

Citation Needed.

Really.

Browsing through some torrents, looking at their seed/leach rates, I have a very hard time buying that. Unless only a few thousand people play any given game. And somehow we should also completely ignore Steam, and the ungodly amount of money they make. I have an odd feeling that if you could deduce the total amount of unique seeders and leachers on Pirate Bay, pirating games, and compare that to the total number of unique Steam Users (much less World of Warcraft's 11 million active accounts) it would be very eye opening. I have a feeling Steam would win, handily.

Yes, my statement lacks empirical evidence... which... I suppose... makes it as valid a premise as yours.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Tei]

There has always been a lot of piracy in games. I remember people trading games with tapes, back in the 8 bits. If you don't want to pay for the games you play, you can, and this is true since 1981 and back.

Steam sells millions games every day. The whole PC market is a 14 billions business. But apparently is invisible to the likes of you, because the PC is evolving to something different to what you know and understand to become more.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only excuse from that article you linked which I buy is the "There was no demo" excuse. I have a 2 year old system and I'm not positive that "Bulletstorm" is going to run well enough to justify a purchase, and we all know that min/recommended specs are usually bullshit. Do I pirate it and then buy it if it runs well and is fun? I think I'm just not going to play it at all because I don't want it that bad, but that is a contributing factor.

Errr... they're currently working on the demo.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Anonymous Coward]

13 yr olds dont buy games anyways since they generally dont have the cash..Thats why pirating is just an excuse for not developing pc games.The bottem line is that its cheaper to develop for a single platform, xbox,which gives them (microsoft)a monopoly, and lots more profit!

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Hatta]

13 year olds aren't buying their own games anyway. So piracy isn't costing anyone anything. In fact, getting kids to pirate games today turns them into gamers. When they grow up, and get a job, they'll see that $40-60 for a game isn't really so much money. And now you have paying customers.

The ones that don't, were never paying customers anyway. Also, if you sue too many of them you'll turn them away from gaming entirely.

The only thing more immature than a 13 year old pirate is a game exec whining about 13 year old pirates.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with this post way too many of them are on xbox and it's quite irritating over voice chat, let's offload as much of them as possible to those Sony suck-ups

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[drinkypoo]

I haven't pirated a game in ages, but I haven't bought one, either. If I were illegally downloading and playing these games I would have precisely the same effect on the market. HTH, HAND.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Schadrach]

When I was a teenager I afforded a "premium" (meaning sufficient for the current generation of gaming at that time) PC by buying comparatively cheap "used" parts (usually only 1-2 steps behind actual top of the line) from a schoolmate who was constantly upgrading his machine. I only found out after the fact (well after the fact, as in a couple of years later) that my source of cheap used but still good enough to be "premium" parts was, in fact, a fairly skilled thief who was selling off his previously stolen parts when he replaced them with slightly more recent stolen parts.

Back then I did a lot of piracy. Now, I have disposable income, am fairly sure that I am not receiving stolen property when I buy hardware (barring consoles, which I usually grab used from a pawn shop so I have no idea what their history is), and I generally buy games. The only times I pirate software are if it's either I can't find a non-pirate copy (if no one is willing to sell it to me than to TPB and abandonware sites I go) or if I have no idea how it will run o if I'll even potentially like it and there's no demo. These companies really need to go back to the old model of providing a demo that provides a reasonably clear glimpse of the game play.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[judeancodersfront]

The pirated version of Black OPS PC had over 4 million downloads while there were less than 500k legit sales. It's not an excuse when only a minority of the customers are paying the bill.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[judeancodersfront]

It's a torrent website that provided the stats and they were showing completed downloads.
As I stated earlier the problem is with a subsection of games. MMOs and casual games are not pirated at the same level. It's the games that require a discreet gpu and can be played offline.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[judeancodersfront]

The link I posted showed that Black Ops pc broke a torrent record last year. Games in 99 did not have piracy ratios of over 90%.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Omestes]

But you had no evidence to back your claim. I have some to back mine, albeit extremely weak evidence. I posted mostly to highlight the lack of evidence.

I don't see why "hardcore" games would have higher rates of piracy. People who are hardcore are willing to shell out big money on the experience (I need a new processor, two new ultra-expensive GPUs crossfired, DDR3 with cooling fins, a 10 million jiggawatt power supply... etc...), so what would lead you to conclude that they would not pay for the games? If you can afford all that, I'm guessing you'd want to pay money for the actual product too (barring DRM getting in the way of performance).

Perhaps by "hardcore" you meant "insanely popular FPS titles that are neither casual nor MMOs", like CoD and Halo. I'm really not sure what "hardcore" means anymore.

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a fucking crybaby.
  "Baaaaawww, the market is suffering :("

Re:Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games?

[Draek]

Agreed, plus the PS3 is designed to play BluRays so you can pirate those alongside your games while you're at it ;)

re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And nothing of value was lost.

What was it for?

[Alex Belits]

I never understoof, WTF it was about. Was it to make hardware manufacturers in some way change its design or pricing (ex: abandon OpenGL, sell more low-end devices subsidized by Microsoft)? Was it to make Microsoft somehow assist them in making their hardware more compatible with Windows games? Was it to somehow hurt competitors (who are right there in the same "alliance")?

Re:What was it for?

[Anonymous Coward]

lmao @ abandon opengl..

And abandoning PC platform gaming will definetly ensure their failure and loss of the desktop platform gaming market altogether (what will be left of it), because gaming on windows is one thing besides office and internet browsing where windows used to be very strong in times before xbox.. so if web services eat up their office suite and tablets destroy the browsing experience windows won't have much else to hold on. This is called pissing against the wind approach.

captcha: "oh mmeter"?!

Re:What was it for?

[marcosdumay]

It seems MS is expecting that we replace out PCs by Xboxes on every activity we currently have. It seems like their management is thinking "Our Xbox division is actualy creative, they have a future, let's bet on them", despite it not making a lot of sense.

And, yet, they didn't release Office for the Xbox. Maybe it is on the pipeline, or it is just the right hand not knowing what the brain is doing.

How long..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. until they all get together and start the Cloud Alliance.

This PC Gaming Alliance nonsense was only ever some half-baked attempt at PR which never got off the ground. The next logical step is to heavily advertise your next direction.

OK, lets go!

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up pirating games. I still pirate games. But now that I'm old and have more than $100 in my checking account I buy games too.
I bought more games last year than I bought last millennium!
Also, whenever I meet game industry people I offer to buy them a drink. I meet quite a few of them and they love booze so it really adds up.

Re:OK, lets go!

[judeancodersfront]

Anecdotal evidence. You might pay and that is good but most 'hardcore' pc gamers are pirates. Torrent stats are public information.

Re:OK, lets go!

[Omestes]

Anecdotal evidence. You might pay and that is good but most 'hardcore' pc gamers are pirates. Torrent stats are public information.

In this case it is better than no evidence. Torrent stats mean nothing unless their compared to the total number of players and sales. Games make up a minority of torrents, thanks largely to their size, DRM, and pain of installing some pirated versions. A quick search of Pirate Bay reveals the that highest seeded game (CoD: Black Ops) has a "mere" 2390 seeders (1329 leaches), where the top seeded CD (some hiphop thing) has 5340 seeders and 400-odd leaches (not as fair, the amount of music out there far outweighs the number of PC games, splintering the market); the highest movie has 11114 seeders (15600 leaches), and the highest TV show sits at 13296 seeders (though Glee has 12430 leaches). Notice the trend? Also; Games might follow the same trend as music, where pirates spend more money on the whole than non-pirates. Who knows the truth of the matter, until there are decent, objective, statistics anecdotal is better than nothing.

Also the parent speaks some truth. While I still pirate some games (mostly as a demo), I pirate far less than when I was college age, where everything I had was basically pirated. I have disposable income now, I can can buy games and food at the same time, and do. And thanks to services like Steam, I even buy games on impulse (not through Impulse though.. heh heh), which used to be reserved for drunken nights on Pirate Bay. Some of it might be the hassle (okay, I can download, slowly, a 50Gb game that may or may not install, and may or may not run, or I can cough up a petty $50 for it?).

No I'm not rich, but I don't really have the desire to have EVERY game out there. I don't care about 90% of them. When I was younger I would pirate it, play it for three hours, then delete it out of lack of interest. Now I just abstain, and pretty much only buy games that look like they will, actually, hold my interest, and generally only after they have been around for a bit so I can read the reviews (who the hell thinks pre-ordering is a good idea?).

Piracy is never as big a deal as interested parties make out. Yes, it is a minor problem. No, it won't kill the industry (or at least won't kill it as fast as the publishers, EA I'm looking at you).

Re:OK, lets go!

[Seumas]

Yeah, I don't know who these "pirates" supposedly are. There may be a few mass copiers, but I think that almost everyone who copied games as a kid (when you have no resources of your own and therefore no way to acquire a game or other software) grew up to prefer paying for their software. Out of obligation to give value for value. Out of desire for a less risky, better performing, less hassle experience, and because the option was no longer "copy it or don't have it at all" but "copy it or buy it".

It seemed like everyone copied everything in the 90s, whether by 0day BBSes or by floppies from friends, or by renting software from Software Pipeline on floppies. In the last 10+ years, I don't think I've known anyone who does that. It's much more convenient to get the full game with nothing missing and no risks than deal with the copying hassle. And you know you're contributing back to seeing more great games down the road. (Even though you also get burned by paying retail for shitty games or dealing with even shittier DRM experiences and games that are so buggy so as to leaving you feeling ripped off).

I would find it almost impossible to believe that the percentage of players copying games in 2011 is anywhere near as high as the percentage that did so in the 90s.

Re:OK, lets go!

[Totenglocke]

I've actually been the opposite. I despise pirating and never pirated games as a kid - I always bought them (I've had a job since I was 10). However, in the last year I've started pirating games, but only if they have DRM. Why? Because the DRM bullshit has gotten way out of hand and I refuse to pay to be punished by a company. They're not getting my money one way or another if there is DRM in the game, so there's no reason NOT to pirate it.

I still hate pirating games, but I won't buy any game with DRM. I'll stop playing games before I pay to be punished.

Re:OK, lets go!

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention the raw numbers don't take two factors into consideration: The first I call "Pokemon syndrome" where I have met pirates that have literally downloaded hundreds of games they have never played simply so they can have "all" of a particular genre/interest. Now me personally I don't fricking get it, but apparently from what I've seen it is a pretty common syndrome and the funny thing was the pirates bought more games than anybody I knew because anything they showed more than "Pokemon" interest in they wanted the full game with box art and multiplayer. so that doesn't get taken into consideration.

The second are guys that want to make sure it runs before handing out their hard earned dollars and I'll be the first to admit I have occasionally fallen into that category. One can't tell by demos anymore because often the demo will be "rigged" in that it has had the most strict QA and coding quality compared to the rest of the game. For example see the original Max Payne, which the demo ran great on my PC but after shelling out $39 at release I found the game would CTD the second you went past the demo stage and which they didn't fix for me until the game was at $10 which pissed me off. another was Vampire:Bloodlines where until the fan made patch came out I was screwed out of my $49 because even though I was WAAY over spec it would lock hard and simply fail.

So one can't simply look at TPB raw data and get any real feel for the situation. Hell I've bought a hell of a lot more media since the rise of P2P since it gave me a chance to try something I had NO access to locally and find out if I liked it or not. A good example of this is the $1000 I spent on the Joss Whedon collection, all because I heard about "this weird cool show about a girl that hunts vampires" and since I didn't have the WB in my area P2P was the only way for me to actually catch an episode. I have also bought entire game series simply because I try one and it works well on my system and looks like it will be reasonably fun.

So if one were to simply look at the raw data one would list me as a "dirty filthy pirate" when I don't actually HAVE any pirated games and was simply making sure something would play before shelling out my $$$. Nowadays you can't tell shit by system reqs anymore, as a game might play great on Intel and choke on AMD or vice versa, and thanks to not being able to return non functional games it doesn't take getting burned out of $50 too many times before one becomes gun shy. Personally if a game is more than $20 I want to see it run 20 minutes of non demo code to ensure the thing will actually be stable before I shell out my cash. Too many publishers are putting out gaming code I would be ashamed to even call alpha quality and a closet full of paperweights really isn't fun.

Re:OK, lets go!

[Omestes]

So one can't simply look at TPB raw data and get any real feel for the situation.

Agreed. I was basically showing that I could poke some holes in the parents baseless argument by spending less than a minute on Pirate Bay. Things fracture beyond that, as you state.

I'm not sure what the parent meant by "hardcore" anymore. I view hardcore gamers as those who spend tons of money for the most cutting edge machine, meaning they have a fair amount of extra cash sitting around. Depending on how cutting edge we're talking, far more cash than I have on hand. Most of these gamers have no problem coughing up cash, and probably would for the added support and experience (packaging, manual, added features) that come with buying games. I always figure that those metal box deluxe editions, which cost more, were for the "hardcore" crowd.

I suppose my definition is old and out of style. I think hardcore might just mean "plays first person shooters" these days. Halo and CoD is hardcore... It makes me sad for some inexplicable reason. And hurts the phrase a bit, since these games are among the MOST popular, meaning most people are "hardcore", so why bother with the term?

Its

[antdude]

"Steam, with it's billion dollars a year in sales ..."

No apostrophe. :)

Re:Its

[Shikaku]

*worsened

It also hasn't been crying out for a champion

[Sycraft-fu]

I mean really, I think it is just that some publishers get stupid about the PC, and many PC gamers are whiny. From my perspective, PC gaming is doing great. Is it crushing all the consoles? No. However it seems to have more revenue than any single console, which is a more apt comparison. It is a platform, like the 360 or PS3, and in that regard is the biggest.

The PC gets most major titles just like the consoles. Sometimes they are poor ports, sometimes they are better versions. So you may see something like Hot Pursuit that is better on the 360 (because the PC version doesn't have DLC) and then see something like Dragon Age that is better on the PC (because of moddability, better graphics, and superior control).

Likewise, the PC gets exclusives, just like the consoles. No, it doesn't get a ton, but then neither do the consoles. No platform get a ton of exclusives. However the PC is certainly not left out in that regard. Most MMOs, certainly all the good ones, are PC exclusive. The PC gets many exclusive strategy games, like Civ 5 and Shogun 2.

Really PC gaming does not seem to need a champion, it is doing just fine. It is not the One True System(tm) for gaming but then has it ever been that?

At this point most publishers seem to be willing to port their games to PC, many are willing to enhance their PC versions (and that seems to be on the rise) and some are willing to make PC exclusive games. There is lots and lots to play in pretty much every category. I am a PC only gamer, don't own a console, don't want a console and I do not lack for good games to play, I lack for time to play them all.

I really think the PC Gaming Alliance died from lack of need. The platform needs to champion. Games are being made, games are being sold, that is all that there needs to be. As you aptly point out, the digital download services now ensure that even marketing is largely taken care of. Just put your game on there, people can find it.

Odd given their busness model....

[Anonymous Coward]

I will NEVER buy an X-Box to game on, so they will not be getting money from me for that.
I DO buy windows products for 2 reasons 1) play games on, 2) keep up with current version so I can make money fixing other peoples PC's.
if they are no longer supporting gaming why would people buy their operating system? To do office work? Linux does that quite well. To do development? Linux does that even better.
Apparently their new business model will be leasing out cloud servers to run legacy OS to businesses that were not smart enough to use Linux. How sad.

And why wouldn't they bail?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a gamer, I generally prefer playing on my PC because of the higher resolution, higher frame rates and better "eye candy" that modern PC hardware can provide. No game console comes even close.

As a game publisher, though, I unfortunately have to admit that consoles are "better". They're "better" because you can write, debug and tune a game to run well on your test console and know that it's going to work in the exact same way for everyone else's console. You can't do that with PC games - everyone's going to have different sound cards, graphics cards, broken OS or DirectX/OpenGL installs. It's a support nightmare. You only have to look at all the trouble over the recent (Arrowhead) Majicka game release - brilliant game, but unstable as anything on so many peoples' computers.

Re:And why wouldn't they bail?

[mordenkhai]

I just wish developers would add mouse/keyboard support for all console games. I would play much more on consoles then. I just don't care for joysticks, much rather have a mouse.

Re:And why wouldn't they bail?

[Seumas]

I would rather developers create games that worked well on both consoles and PC and made optimal use of both (not maxing out the console experience and then merely porting that identical experience to the PC without optimizing it for the PC -- for a much better experience with the game). More importantly, that they also made the game available somehow on all platforms for the purchaser. Why? Well, sometimes I want to play something on my PC with my pair of 30" 2560x1600 monitors and a keyboard and a mouse, hunched over my desk and with a browser and chat window open.

Other times, I want to relax on my sofa with a 65" 1080p screen and my massive audio system and just one button away from putting the game down and leaning over for a nap.

Another M$ "partnership" bites the dust

[Compaqt]

Nokia, you're next.

Re:Another M$ "partnership" bites the dust

[snookiex]

Sure. And now NVIDIA is dead

Games for Windows Live

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only MS would also ditch Games for Windows Live they might show some of their old mojo they have lost recently...

Bootable DVD games

[jlebrech]

Clearly games which boot from DVD are the way to go, NVidia could ally itself with a Linux distro which can autoconfig the optimal configuration and launch the game. Save games could be online.

Re:Bootable DVD games

[iRommel]

eww? why on earth would I want to be forced to reboot every time I wanted to play a game :S

Re:Bootable DVD games

[Machtyn]

The OS lives in RAM, perhaps they wouldn't have to reboot, but disks with similar setups can be popped in, add a link to the desktop and off you go. This is essentially what a console is.

Re:Bootable DVD games

[Rakarra]

This sounds like a horrible idea for gamers like me.

I never, never sit and play a game to the exclusion of anything else. Always at the same time open is at least one of the following:

1) Instant messengers to chat with friends (and sometimes that will take priority over the single-player game).
2) Ventrilo to talk with my guildmates, especially on MMO or even regular multiplayer online games like Diablo 2.
3) A web browser (good for GameFAQs, stats sites, other tools).

Hey NVidia, want to help out PC gaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could sponser the mod makers and mappers of PC games. These modders aren't going to turn their backs on the PC or sell out to consoles, because they really can't modify console games in any meaningful way. How about donating one of those shiny new cards to a guy who builds the best mission for The Dark Mod for example. Maybe you could release an engine for the community to build upon. Maybe you could release some of thsoe assets in the tech demos to the modders too. Don't waste your time promoting "cyber-athletes". Most of us really aren't impressed with them, and having game content is what really gets us to upgrade our systems to play it.

By the way, thank you for being the only ones who provides Linux graphics drivers that don't completely suck.

Sincerly: a Linux gamer who will not subject himself to Windows post-2000.

How to save PC gaming: 5 easy steps.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Concentrate on making long, engaging, moddable games that blow our minds and really push the capabilities of the hardware, like Unreal, Deus Ex, or Thief did. People still mod and play these games today.
2. I know it is tempting, but stop dumbing down games and skill systems. PC gamers like options. We also like replayability.
3. Stop treating your paying customers like used toilet paper. When I go to the store and buy a game, I shouldn't have to worry about what kind of malware the modern game will be installing. I don't trust your activation schemes. Given the fact that you can't even stick around and fix critical game bugs for five years, why would I trust you with the ability to take the product back from me? I wasn't born yesterday.
4. Build PC games, not console games. Stop with the squashed, blurry textures and maps the size of my apartment.
5. Profit!

PC = Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is "PC gaming" equivalent to "Windows gaming"? The only reason why I still use Windows is because almost no games are released for Linux/Mac. I'm amazed that people (read "game developers") is uncapable of writing platform independent code. Nokia has a very good solution to this problem - a framework called Qt (yes, I'm a big fan). Moving the code (even if it is called CryEngine or Unreal Engine) to this framework should be a piece of cake.

Re:PC = Windows?

[polyp2000]

Game Developers are more than capable of developing cross platform. But they have to go where the money is and what the Managers say, games cost an awful lot to develop. and while developing the code to be cross platform may or may not impact much on development time , it certainly impacts on QA - you are at least tripling your playtesting time as you now have to support 3 platforms. Look at the market share of Linux and Mac and its obvious that while its possible to develop crossplatform - the additional cost of supporting those platforms becomes a real problem. Not to mention Linux having a million different distributions and questionable graphics driver support.

Unless someone finds a disruptive technology that solves this problem.

One way may be to develop some sort of Virtual Machine that runs on all 3 major platforms and have games target that - this would then allow developers to target one "virtual" platform.

By the way -Porting CryEngine or Unreal Engine to QT is a preposterous suggestion - they are in no way similar frameworks , QT is for building desktop / moble applications - the other is for building 3D games. As far as I am aware Unreal Engine is already crossplatform in its own right.

N.

Re:PC = Windows?

[Moondevil]

The problem is not the game developers, but the publishers.

The game industry works in a similar way to the other entertaining industries. A game studio needs to find a publisher that sponsors the game development, the publisher then gets to say how the game gets developed and which platforms are to be targeted.

This is the main reason why only Indies are targeting Mac and Linux platforms.

Because the publishers only want easy money, they only accept consoles first and the type of game style proven to make money.

We need more Indies.

Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

passive-agressive smiley face

what is steam

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry havent bought a game since 2003
nor will i till DRM is dead

Re:what is steam

[Sir_Sri]

that's ok, you fall into the 'the pirate bay' as your gaming alliance representative group.

Though to be fair, you're missing out. There are lots of great DRM free games being released every year (the Witcher for example) that are AAA full price games, and those guys deserve money for the work they do.

Where do they develop the console games?

[souravzzz]

One thing I have never understood: all the console games are developed on PC, and i guess the levels can also be run on a PC (You can't probably do the code-debug-code cycle if you can't debug it on your IDE). So. they probably always develop something that can run the game on a PC (It may be just an alpha version). So, you design and test your game on PC but make it console only? Is it not pretty much stupid and probably insulting?

PC gaming has changed

[feidaykin]

Gaming on the PC is not dead, even though some have been claiming the end is near for at least ten years now. But, gaming on the PC has changed quite a bit in the last decade. If you look at the gaming environment on the PC a decade ago, a bit longer even, in the late 90s with the launch of the first GeForce... gaming on the PC was a much larger affair - big budget games that took a big budget PC to play. Developers expected PC gamers to be on the bleeding edge, and for the most part they were. Sure, some developers tried to market to the low-end niche. But the general sense seemed to be, if you were gaming on the PC you had a beast of a rig for it, and all the big budget developers tailored their games with that in mind.

Now things have really changed. There a lot more PCs out there, but the high-end gaming enthusiast is a very small portion of computer users. So developers, with a few exceptions, tend to target those low to mid range systems out there, since that's where the market is... it's no longer reasonable for developers to expect a gamer to have a state of the art system. As a good example to this, I can't help but mention the elephant in the room when it comes to PC gaming: World of Warcraft. Easily one of the most popular PC games in the world. While WoW obviously requires more hardware than your average Facebook game, it's really not by much. They've made sure to design the game so it will run on a very low end machine, like the kind you can pick up at Walmart for under $500. Now, a game like WoW does have advanced shader features and DX11 stuff that can be toggled on for those with higher end systems, but none of it is required. Sure, the higher end machines make it look better and run faster, but it's a huge shift from the late 90s where developers just expected gamers to have high end machines to play their games at all.

Now, before someone points out that my example, WoW, is already several years old, I would point that Blizzard just released an expansion at the end of 2010, and if they wanted they could have totally reworked the game engine for high end systems (while that would be an expensive endeavour, if anyone could afford to it's Blizzard). They did not though, because Blizzard knows that having more systems able to run the game increases the potential market.

That's not to say games for high end systems don't exist on the PC anymore, since they obviously do, but they seem to be the exception instead of the norm these days. And a lot of those high end games are cross-platform, so they only require high end systems because they're competing with the current generation of consoles (which, I admit, isn't hard given this generation of consoles seems to have outlived all previous generations). I guess my long-winded point here is that the landscape of the PC gaming world has changed. High end systems are no longer the default assumption like they were a decade ago. I think overall this is good for gamers, since instead of being an expensive niche hobby, PC gaming is within the reach of anyone who can own a very modest PC.

Re:PC gaming has changed

[Machtyn]

For some evidence, they did completely rework the graphics and models in the old lands. If they wanted to, they could have updated the engine. But like you said, they are targeting a very large audience - not necessarily the casual gamer, but a step up from that to the hardcore gamers.

More steam behind steam

[HalAtWork]

That's fine with me, Steam seems to be accomplishing all of the PCGA's goals anyway with ease.

PCGA is among other things working to develop marketing for PC games, combat piracy, developing new business models beyond retail sales, and establishing minimum hardware requirements for PC games, along with guidelines for developers to make games work for those requirements. According to president Randy Stude, the PC Gaming Alliance is to "help make certain that the PC game industry had a public voice and a pulpit for accurately communicating the size, growth and overall popularity of the single largest gaming platform worldwide." They will also perform market research for their members and the public.

From Wikipedia

Win8

[Anonymous Coward]

Well this is going to make the advertising blitz for Windows 8 very interesting considering they've already plugged that bullet point, isn't it. (or just laughable, as usual..)

captcha:contrary

Completely wrong about VAC

[Nick Ives]

That's total FUD. VAC doesn't scan your storage for cheat hacks and only the initial version of VAC banned people for faulty memory; those bans were rescinded.

Valve also doesn't take a "Talk to the hand" approach to VAC false positives, even the VAC Wikipedia entry lists four instances where VAC has made mistakes. All instances were rescinded.

That page lists only two instances of "benign cheats" causing irreversible VAC bans. Both those cases clearly contravened VAC policy.

Finally, only 56 games are VAC enabled and VAC bans only apply to games that use the same engine as the game you're caught cheating in.

They develop on special development hardware

[HannethCom]

While it is true that many of the assets are developed on the PC, the games code is mostly developed on the special dev kit hardware that interfaces with the PC, or is a PC/Console hybrid. It is easy to find pictures of the development kits by using a search engine.

Thus it doesn't ever run on a stock PC. There are exceptions to this like anything made in XNA. Also I understand that early versions of the Xbox360 dev hardware were just Mac computers running emulation software, but the code ran at something like 1/10th the speed of the final system.

"Closed Xbox Ecosystem"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am tired of mindless blogatorials. There is some connotation here that developing for PC is "open" while developing for Xbox is "closed", where open = good and closed = evil. What? Last I checked game developers made games that span many systems, PC, Xbox, PS3, etc. Sure, there are exclusives, but generally speaking Microsoft has made their exclusives available on PC around the same time as on the Xbox, so I am not sure where this rhetoric is coming form.

PC gaming has been dying a very slow death. While companies like Valve are making a decent push to ensure the final nail doesn't hit the coffin, the reality is people do not buy $4000 gaming PC's filled with $1000 video cards anymore. The highest selling PC platform sold in 2010 were netbooks/laptops, these are not gaming powerhouses. There is no more money in PC gaming. If Crysis 2 or Alan Wake was released as a PC only exclusive, the game developers releasing those games would go bankrupt.

Also Microsoft != PC gaming. Microsoft has been pulling out of PC gaming for a while now, but they are not the sole contributors or providers of PC gaming. All the Microsoft/nVidia partnership was about was to ensure that Direct X ran smoothly on nVidia hardware, so games were branded with nVidia logos to indicate that games were optimized for nVidia hardware. Fast forward 10 years and mostly any video card will run about any video game smoothly. Why keep a partnership for a requirement that is no longer necessary in a dying market.

As long as there are $300 gaming systems that offer excellent graphics and broad enough feature set, there is no more reason for PC gaming. The purists might disagree, but come on, you can't keep a market strong while less then 1% of the market are still concerned about how many FPS they can push out of their PC gaming rig.

BTW, the PC is dying too. As more devices like phones, set-top boxes and tablets start blurring the line between computer/internet device, the need for a dedicated desktop is becoming more and more irrelevant. About all a "PC" is going to be used for in the next 5 years is a file server or development system for other platforms.

What can nVidia do?

[mitzampt]

Well nVidia can't really quit developing graphic card drivers and promoting the Windows platform... I mean FOSS users would like seeing nVidia giving more attention to linux and the other *nix-es, and also getting back at Microsoft by moving to OSX should still benefit FOSS, at least in a way. But as long as there are Microsoft technologies such as DirectX and Direct3D in the middle, PC Gaming will more or less be a Windows asset, without Microsoft backing anything...

I just purchase a new intel core i3 pc

[sam4briggs]

hi guys, i have read some good reviews about the latest computer intel core i3 pc on this site. you can check it out if you like, its great they also sell good quality computer i bought 1 myself It gives me a great experience in playing online games, no lags, no errors and very fast. visit this site and see for your self: http://shop.pchappy.com.au/Desktops-%E2%80%93-Leader-Prebuilt/Happy-Deal-1.aspx?stockid=12819