Sad Days for PC Gaming
I have been in the market of building a new gaming rig and have been getting excited about the new processor architecture that is about to come out such as SandyBridge. I would only be doing this to have the best PC gaming experience possible. The sad part when I think about it though is that I really dont need that kind of hardware to play the current console ports. The best the game can render is what the best console can render.
I have been a PC Gamer since the 90s. I mostly play first person shooters. They are what I enjoy. I have really enjoyed some of the great military style sims that have come out in the 2000s. Mainly mid 2000s to clarify. I miss those games and those days of gaming. Last night I played Battlefield 2 for the first time in years. I had forgotten how much fun that game was. It is a true PC game and yes it has its faults, but it blows away recent console ports like Bad Company 2. The graphics from that 6 year old game still look pretty good amazingly. Todays releases like CoD; black Ops, BC2, have grown old quickly and are boring. To me, all the games feel the same now just on different battlefields. I miss the days of being able to mod or even in some cases repair a game like BF2. This practice keeps a game alive for many years and offers a game developer the opportunity to sell DLC to us. I know the developers look at this differently, but I miss it. Look back at the true PC games and how many PC gamer community mods have been created. PC Gamers may never see those days again.
What do we have today as PC gamers? How has PC gaming evolved over the years for us? The answers to both those questions are directly related to profits maximized by the current game developers. I understand that its just business. But since when does that give them the right to release games that are basically betas and patched mid stream to allow them to work on a PC? Let me clarify. Most of the PC games that we play today are what is called console ports; Games that were designed to run optimally on a console and then ported over for use on a PC. The problems that arise from this money saving practice are that PC gamers get a version of a given game that is not really optimized to run on a PC. Case in point was the recent release of Black Ops. That game would not run on dual core processor PCs. Why? The answer is because no console uses a dual core processor. The PS3 uses multicore and the Xbox 360 uses a tri-core processor. A patch had to be created and basically the game code had to be re-written to run on dual cores. How could a game developer not know of this prior to the release of this game? After all, according to hardware surveys based on Blizzards WOW, almost 70% of all PC Gamers are still using dual core! Was anybody at Activision or Treyarch watching? Did they care? The answer is painful to PC gamers, but obvious. Yes! But they do NOT care. According to their own surveys and sales numbers the console games outsell PC games almost 10 to 1. These numbers are based on retail sales. DLC, D2D are NOT counted in these stats so the accuracy of these numbers is skewed a bit. In the end, these game developers have forgotten the PC gamer. The PC gamer put them where they are today and in the position to make 1 billion dollars in sales.
It is much easier and cheaper for a game developer to design and engineer a game to work on a fixed hardware platform as a console offers compared to the multi-hardware configurations offered by the PC gaming world. This trend is not limited to Activision/ Treyarch either because EA/ DICE and many other developers have gone this route. That is why I have been supporting many games from Valve and games like ArmA. I know that some of the Valve games are console ports, but they have grown tremendously popular on the PC and Valve updates them constantly for us. ArmA is the epitome of a true PC game and should be supported by all of us. What an immersive experience this game offers and the game looks amazing if you have good PC hardware. Remember the days when you upgraded your hardware to meet a games requirements? All you need today is equal hardware to a console and you can play any ported game; which brings me to my next question Why upgrade expensive hardware for a console port?
Obviously, the hardware companies have a lot to lose if the future games being released are just console ported games. We PC gamers upgraded our hardware on average of 2 years. The average console uses the same hardware that was installed in it throughout its lifetime. I think that the hardware companies know that. Why dont the hardware companies both pay the developers to create a true PC game or hire their own PC game developers and create games that will benefit from upgraded PC hardware? I have been writing all of the major hardware companies with that very question and to date have received 1 reply and that was just a form letter.
I would like to see more PC gamers voice their collective opinions on this issue. In the end it comes down to money and it should be interesting to see who has more; the game developers or the hardware companies
I am not trying to troll I am just very disappointed thats all.
Note- This post is based on many of my opinions. The statistical data is from various sites that acquire such data.
I have been in the market of building a new gaming rig and have been getting excited about the new processor architecture that is about to come out such as SandyBridge. I would only be doing this to have the best PC gaming experience possible. The sad part when I think about it though is that I really dont need that kind of hardware to play the current console ports. The best the game can render is what the best console can render.
I have been a PC Gamer since the 90s. I mostly play first person shooters. They are what I enjoy. I have really enjoyed some of the great military style sims that have come out in the 2000s. Mainly mid 2000s to clarify. I miss those games and those days of gaming. Last night I played Battlefield 2 for the first time in years. I had forgotten how much fun that game was. It is a true PC game and yes it has its faults, but it blows away recent console ports like Bad Company 2. The graphics from that 6 year old game still look pretty good amazingly. Todays releases like CoD; black Ops, BC2, have grown old quickly and are boring. To me, all the games feel the same now just on different battlefields. I miss the days of being able to mod or even in some cases repair a game like BF2. This practice keeps a game alive for many years and offers a game developer the opportunity to sell DLC to us. I know the developers look at this differently, but I miss it. Look back at the true PC games and how many PC gamer community mods have been created. PC Gamers may never see those days again.
What do we have today as PC gamers? How has PC gaming evolved over the years for us? The answers to both those questions are directly related to profits maximized by the current game developers. I understand that its just business. But since when does that give them the right to release games that are basically betas and patched mid stream to allow them to work on a PC? Let me clarify. Most of the PC games that we play today are what is called console ports; Games that were designed to run optimally on a console and then ported over for use on a PC. The problems that arise from this money saving practice are that PC gamers get a version of a given game that is not really optimized to run on a PC. Case in point was the recent release of Black Ops. That game would not run on dual core processor PCs. Why? The answer is because no console uses a dual core processor. The PS3 uses multicore and the Xbox 360 uses a tri-core processor. A patch had to be created and basically the game code had to be re-written to run on dual cores. How could a game developer not know of this prior to the release of this game? After all, according to hardware surveys based on Blizzards WOW, almost 70% of all PC Gamers are still using dual core! Was anybody at Activision or Treyarch watching? Did they care? The answer is painful to PC gamers, but obvious. Yes! But they do NOT care. According to their own surveys and sales numbers the console games outsell PC games almost 10 to 1. These numbers are based on retail sales. DLC, D2D are NOT counted in these stats so the accuracy of these numbers is skewed a bit. In the end, these game developers have forgotten the PC gamer. The PC gamer put them where they are today and in the position to make 1 billion dollars in sales.
It is much easier and cheaper for a game developer to design and engineer a game to work on a fixed hardware platform as a console offers compared to the multi-hardware configurations offered by the PC gaming world. This trend is not limited to Activision/ Treyarch either because EA/ DICE and many other developers have gone this route. That is why I have been supporting many games from Valve and games like ArmA. I know that some of the Valve games are console ports, but they have grown tremendously popular on the PC and Valve updates them constantly for us. ArmA is the epitome of a true PC game and should be supported by all of us. What an immersive experience this game offers and the game looks amazing if you have good PC hardware. Remember the days when you upgraded your hardware to meet a games requirements? All you need today is equal hardware to a console and you can play any ported game; which brings me to my next question Why upgrade expensive hardware for a console port?
Obviously, the hardware companies have a lot to lose if the future games being released are just console ported games. We PC gamers upgraded our hardware on average of 2 years. The average console uses the same hardware that was installed in it throughout its lifetime. I think that the hardware companies know that. Why dont the hardware companies both pay the developers to create a true PC game or hire their own PC game developers and create games that will benefit from upgraded PC hardware? I have been writing all of the major hardware companies with that very question and to date have received 1 reply and that was just a form letter.
I would like to see more PC gamers voice their collective opinions on this issue. In the end it comes down to money and it should be interesting to see who has more; the game developers or the hardware companies
I am not trying to troll I am just very disappointed thats all.
Note- This post is based on many of my opinions. The statistical data is from various sites that acquire such data.