I firmly don't believe that PC gaming's problems can be attributed to piracy. Well, ok...piracy is part of the problem, but by no means the largest part. It's just that the entire setup isn't really consumer friendly at least. You can know absolutely everything about your computer and modern hardware, walk into a store, see some game you've never heard about because you might not check gamespot or the other news sites every day, check the min. and recommended requirements, buy it and still totally get burned simply because it doesn't run well or at all. Sure, I guess in the recent generations of consoles it's become a bit of a problem as well with freezing and patches, but you can't even argue it's anywhere on the same scale.
That's the thing in my mind: a complete lack of it being a consumer friendly industry. Games get released as betas all the time, and people sit on them so they don't get burned that way. Hardware is another issue altogether, but I actually think a lot of the current problem is it moves TOO fast. Each company has, what, two major GPU revisions a year? Those inter-idiots that claim your card from last year is OBSOLETE!!! aren't exactly that far off. Why would a developer spend time trying to find innovative ways to make a game run better when they can just jack up the poly count, particles, and post-processing so it runs worse, looks better in still frames, and claim that it's the engine of 2010? Online used to be a major draw, and it still is, but consoles are moving in. I assume it's only a matter of time before there'll be more servers active for two year old games console side than PC side...because most of the people left in PC gaming are the ones who don't stick to one game for any extended period of time. They play something and when something new and better comes out they buy a new card to play it. Go back to the old game? That's not why I bought my Geforce 19000!
Min requirements don't mean shit to anyone - even those who've been in this game for years. Every single company has a different standard of what min. and recc. requirements are. Beyond that some just seem to outright lie. It's a total crapshoot. And sure, there is truth to what many people say; even though your PC hardware doesn't last as long, if you keep upgrading you'll eventually surpass the graphics consoles are capable of within the 5 year active console lifespan. That's great and all, but a lot of the problem is a lot of people don't give a shit. You know what...if my card is hypothetically capable of better graphics than a PS3 now, why the fuck wouldn't it be for the entire lifespan of the card? Oh, thats right, because the console developers are spending hours upon hours thinking up ways to squeeze more out of the hardware, while the PC developers and PC hardware companies are jerking each other off while watching hardware sales and releasing games that look fucking great on the latest shit, but like Quake 3 with a lower frame rate on anything more than 6 months old.
I check sales a lot, and about once or twice a week I get my credit card out and start ordering an 8800GT or 9600GT for anywhere between $110-$150. But every week I stop because what's it matter? There's probably going to be like a year's total worth of games I can't play comfortably on my current 7900GS but can on that card before they start releasing games that don't scale to the new card either. Why buy it now when I can just wait, get those games bargin bin, and maybe stretch that out to two years worth of games?
In the mean time, Metal Gear Solid comes out, and for roughly $400 I can get the entire system with probably five years left in it and the game. Yeah, it's more than a video card, but not more than the five those fuckers would probably want me buying in the meantime. It's tempting and if I wasn't so against buying a new TV right now (I'm planning on waiting until after I'm done school completely), I already would have done it. Quality control is far better, shit is just tighter and more polished, the little indy games are on consoles as well now, and it's just generally a more user-friendly experience for the most part.
They can just blame piracy all they want, and I'm not going to deny that I've done it and I'll probably do it again, but you know what drives a lot of people to it? The fact that they don't know if it's worth it because they can even fucking play it. Those are the loss sales - not the total, not the people downloading games just because they can and it's easy - it's the people downloading games because they'd rather actually play craps if they're going to gamble rather than just roll the dice and hope your game is a.) fucking finished and b.) fucking 100% compatible with every piece of hardware in your system.
On a side note, I bought Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay a while ago because of how awesome all you guys said it was. You know what? The game is shit. Don't get me wrong: it seems like it's fun, it's just not in any way playable. I had to roll my drivers back a while ago because Doom 3 engine based games didn't like the newest (at the time) Nvidia drivers and I wanted to play Prey. Fine, did it, played Prey. Then, a month or two later I buy Riddick and try to play that....it doesn't like the Nvidia drivers I'm now using. If you guys could get both these fucking games working on nvidia's xbox hardware, where's the fucking issue here? "The publishers rushed us!!" And they rushed you on the non-broken xbox version too...hey, that one works.
So that was kind of gay...but fixable. The cool thing about Riddick is that there's like a game before you play the game. It's a bit more cerebral, but it works like this: if you're not using the latest hardware and it's not 2004 (or whatever) you have to figure out how to make this shit work. Stage one was pretty easy, search google for "working nvidia drivers riddick", get those drivers, uninstall and clean other drivers, install, reboot multiple times throughout the process. Stage two was kind of a bitch. See, you have to search google for "Open Gl error, Nvidia drivers xxxx, riddick". Aparently for these drivers recommended by numerous people for running riddick with my card you have to open up Rivia Tuner, go to driver control settings, and manually override the Open GL shaders to run an older version (1.5?). Actually to be fair, this might have had something to do with just getting the graphics bareable on a modern system.
Finding the search string for stage three was a bitch though. See, after passing the first two stages, there's the mysterious problem of the framerate of the game just suddenly dropping into the single digits for a while, staying there and then shooting back up for a few seconds. The ingenious part of this level is that it teaches you to throw all prior knowledge out the window. Since this is going on no matter what you're doing, you'd assume it was a driver problem again...but no my friends. See, the game just really doesn't like modern dual core CPUs. So, every single fucking time you boot the piece of fucking shit garbage up you have to open task manager, right click on the process, go to 'cpu affinity' and uncheck every box except for one of them.
Stage five (the number jumped from three to five because I forgot to include the initial 'patching' stage) was wondering why after doing all this, the game ran just about as well as Crysis on high on a flagship card released a good four fucking generations after the min. required card, a CPU twice as fast with double the cores of the min, and about ten times the required RAM. That's where I gave up.
You want to know why your PC games aren't selling as well? Because fuck you. You only stole $20 from me this time, but some kid bought that game at launch for $50 and couldn't play it because you lied right there on the box. No, it's cool he can play it when he upgrades his system. It's like a zero interest investment with no capital gains. Oh, yeah...he also can't play the fucking game after he upgrades his system either unless he upgrades right into the 12 month period of hardware releases that actually are capable of playing the game well and/or at all. You're fucking lucky I pay for any of your goddamn games.
Lesson learnt here: Steal old shit. It's smarter and way less time consuming. Morality is only really admirable when it doesn't end up in you getting bent over and raped...then it's just being a moron.
