Developers using piracy as an excuse for dumping the PC platform for consoles should look in the mirror and consider making games which people are interested in paying for instead of taking the easy route of only developing for a platform where piracy is harder. The huge irony about anti-piracy DRM is that in a lot of cases, pirates get a better product than the people actually paying for their purchase, because pirates don't have to deal with SecuROM, online activations or keep their game DVD in the drive during play.

Both The Sims and Oblivion had no piracy protection whatsoever and while the latter sold pretty well, the former is/was a licence to print money, on a platform that's supposedly being killed by pirates. Or is it perhaps that someone managed to make a game that is fun to play for a large audience and doesn't require a monstrous PC to run?

Now, from a business POV, I get it, it makes more business sense to develop for consoles because you can get away with releasing shit games and people will buy them anyway, because pirating a console game is much harder than it is to do on the PC, but at least have the decency to admit that you are doing it purely because you want to swim in money despite releasing shit games instead of taking the time and effort to create a title that appeals to a wide audience. 

"Developers using piracy as an excuse for dumping the PC platform for consoles should look in the mirror and consider making games which people are interested in paying for instead of taking the easy route of only developing for a platform where piracy is harder."

I'm sorry? Pirates don't care about the quality of the game. They crack and distribute everything and put it up on easy to search torrent sites. Good or bad doesn't matter. All PC games are cracked and distributed.

"The huge irony about anti-piracy DRM is that in a lot of cases, pirates get a better product than the people actually paying for their purchase, because pirates don't have to deal with SecuROM, online activations or keep their game DVD in the drive during play. "

Know what the cure for that is? Consoles. Every gets the exact same experience.

"Or is it perhaps that someone managed to make a game that is fun to play for a large audience and doesn't require a monstrous PC to run?"

Talk to the Crysis guys about piracy numbers.

PC gaming is dying. And calling developers names or calling them lazy or whatever isn't going to prolong it's life. It's dead, Jim. 

I have the 3xCDROM version

I was surprised to discover that you require no disk!
Pirates are shit. Ruin everything for PCGamers
I bought my copy of Quake from the ID website!
Best value game for �10 you can buy IMHO - weeks and weeks of downloadable original content! :D
The problem is with Steam that you need an internet connection to use it!
Whereas with consoles you dont.
But I like using a keyboard and mouse for gaming... 

Im pretty sure casual MMOs will keep the pc onfloat. wont die completely even in 5 years. MMOs arent games tho (Warren Spector told so!) - they are more of a social thing, like a chat.
And they still keep on releasing PC versions of many games, I guess its still worth it. Who knows when/if this trend stops as more and more people switch to consoles 

"I'm sorry? Pirates don't care about the quality of the game. They crack and distribute everything and put it up on easy to search torrent sites. Good or bad doesn't matter. All PC games are cracked and distributed."

Yet, there are still PC games that sell TRUCKLOADS, some of them are copy-protected while some have no DRM whatsoever. The only conclusion we can make is that DRM does not affect sales in a positive way on the PC platform, while the quality of the game does.

"Talk to the Crysis guys about piracy numbers."

Is it really such a shock that Crysis is pirated so much, when you take into consideration that looking at VALVE's most recent hardware charts, less than 20% of gaming PCs are capable of running it even on moderate settings? Everyone is interested in taking a look at the jawdropping nextgen graphics, but noone is going to pay for a game that runs at 20fps. 

I'm still enjoying PC gaming more than Console gaming (which I also enjoy, just less, as FPS are still better on PC), so I really don't see why I'd jump ship or whatever. If things change, fine, so be it, it's not a reason to rush to console only gaming right away.

Omg piracy discussion! Yeah it's bad. I'm not one to predict the future and how things will evolve, but I know quite a few people who pirate all their console games too, so I'm not yet convinced consoles is the real solution to piracy. 

PC game sales numbers any1??? I think we dont have those, cause PC games ony sell well in EU and there are no solid numbers for overall EU sales.
And withought any sales proof its empty talk.
And USA sales for PC games are abysmal.

Jago: you are right, you need to make a good game to get good sales. Except PC sales will still be smaller than console sales by 2-3 times. And you cant make much money with a shit title on a console either, cause the competition is very strong. Conclusion - ... ? 

"I'm not one to predict the future and how things will evolve, but I know quite a few people who pirate all their console games too, so I'm not yet convinced consoles is the real solution to piracy."

Of course it is. You can't play online with a pirated game and if caught, you'll lose your Live account. There's zero incentive to pirate console games unless you intend to play solely offline and in single player.

Even then, console piracy is very much in the hardcore realm. It isn't a matter of downloading an EXE and running it. You have to mod your console and/or create special boot CDs, burn the game to a disc, etc. And then you can't play with your friends over the internet.

"Jago: you are right, you need to make a good game to get good sales. Except PC sales will still be smaller than console sales by 2-3 times. And you cant make much money with a shit title on a console either, cause the competition is very strong. Conclusion - ... ?"

Right. A developer is going to work their ass off and create a killer game - they want to see some sales for their efforts. That means consoles. Look at the first week sales for Halo 3 and GTA4. Notice how those games weren't released on PC? There's a reason.

Sure, they might do a PC port in a year or so once the primary selling window has passed and they've made their money. At that point, it's a token gesture to the PC guys who just can't let go. 

How many "10+ million sold" titles can you count on the consoles and on the PC? I know of 2 on the PC, WoW and The Sims, but I have trouble coming up with even a single 10+ million seller on the consoles. PC games CAN sell VERY well, it's just that it seems to require a rather special type of game. Now the developers can adapt to the new PC market and thrive in it or they can take the easy route of doing what they've been doing for the past 10 years, but only on the consoles this time, since for the console gamers the whole FPS shooter business is still relatively new. 

Im not arsed about Halo3.
I'll probably play GTA4 on the console. It wouldnt feel right on a PC.
I wouldnt mind some of those PS3 only shooters, like Haze and that other one, er, I forget... 

we already got over your precious WoW with its fenomenal success - its eating up the large chunk of a market.

btw Sims release date? 2004

and these two are the prime examples of what PC gaming has become = MMOs and casual games with low requirements and wide appeal.

And 10mln of wow subscribers is a bad thing - its 10mln of gamers playing WoW and only it. for how-many-years... These are the negative numbers, numbers of the consumers you arent going to get. So it PC market -minus 10mln WoW players. WoW is the heroin that contributes to the killing of the PC gaming, cause it kills the competition. Its the Wallmart of gamedev (in the same sense as Wallmart killed the smaller shops in every town it had come to)

but back to the mumbers: 2007

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock 7.5M (miltiplatform)
Super Mario Galaxy (Wii Exclusive) 4.1M
Halo 3 8M (x360 exclusive)
CoD4 8.3M (miltiplatform - apparently ~6 mln on x360/ps3, cant find numbers by platform)

PC best 2007 I could find:
Burnin Crusade (wow expansion) ~3,5 mln
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (1.65 million)

conclusion ...? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty_4:_Modern_Warfare#Sales
(not very reliable, but still)

2007 top100 combined
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9639&Itemid=2&limit=1&limitstart=1 

One reason why there are so many MMO's being developed these days is that you simply cannot pirate them, warez them, or whatever you want to call it them.

It is a very successful form of DRM, lol :)

Personally, I would not mind paying a subscription to a download service (say steam) and then being able to download any game I wanted at any time and being able to play it there and then. 

if you look at the better selling titles, it becomes very obvious that they're

1) good games. equal console/pc ratio
2) (mostly) bad games that have a cool name or franchise (console)

latter probably sell, because there's a) kids b) casual gamers c) parents buying them judging from the ads, the brand and the packaging. Oh, and word-by-mouth(?).

i guess in a few years the gaming market will be like the msuic market. the taste of the naive younger than 16 crowd will decide what titles will be released, because they're the majority, who still actually BUYS stuff and they certainly are console guys. 

My home machine is: C2D E6600 2,4 Ghz (2 years old), 2GB ram. This machine is running a VMWare virtual machine session of Windows Vista Ultimate x86 that is limited to using a maximum of 768 MB of my host OS system memory. This virtual machine runs basic home user tasks such as webbrowsing, media (both audio and video) playback, IM, etc etc without any hitches and I haven't made any changes to the default configuration, I am running all the default services, the stock candy UI and all that, so anyone saying that Vista "needs" 2GB of memory or more to be usable is talking out of his ass.

Yes, Vista uses much more of your RAM than Windows XP even when you have closed all of your applications, this is by design and is a good thing. Let me explain:

Vista uses a tool called SuperFetch, that basically keeps track of what applications you run and how often. After learning your usage patterns, it knows which applications are most likely to be relaunched soon and keeps a part of them cached in memory, in many cases allowing near-instantenous (1-2 second) launch times for a large application. This is what causes the supposed "OMG Vista ate all my memory!". Well DUH, would you rather have your 2-4GB of ram sit there empty and being of no use whatsoever or would you rather take advantage of it to speed up application launch times?

1) Should you launch an application that suddenly wants to use most of you RAM, like a game, SuperFetch will immideately free the memory from the precached applications to make room for the game you are launching.

2) If for some bizarre reason you still want to disable this feature, just disable the SuperFetch service and Vista will fall back to the same memory management patterns as in Windows XP.

3) By the way, most modern operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD have been using this very same approach for many years now. 

These days, I sell consumer electronics. This includes computers. We also offer a service where we install the customer's computer for them, and take care of their software problems afterwards. I do most of the selling, less installing, but I come into contact with these computers weekly.

Having 1GB of memory compared to 2GB of memory means that these computers (usually laptops, mind you) will start considerably slower, and will take a longer time to perform tasks like browsing the web, music, or harddrive contents. Worse still, customers keep complaining that they can't really do anything with their computers since "they're so slow".

However, note that these aren't scratch-built computers, so they include a lot more (useless) software directly from the manufacturer.

Still, my old computer with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz and a single GB of RAM and XP SP2 will start up faster, load programs quicker, and handle basic tasks in a more timely manner than a laptop with an Intel T2310 dual-core and a single GB of RAM. 

Still, my old computer with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz and a single GB of RAM and XP SP2 will start up faster, load programs quicker, and handle basic tasks in a more timely manner than a laptop with an Intel T2310 dual-core and a single GB of RAM.

The laptop with Vista, obviously. 

PC gaming won't die as long as PC sales don't die. It's really as simple as that. 

that PC gaming will get more indie and direct download. No publishers but word of mouth. The big advertised titles will migrate to consoles.

The music industry pays radio stations to play certain music and then people buy those records. That is, if you listen to the radio. I listen only to internet radio, since the analog radio almost never plays any music that I like.

Coca Cola spends probably more money on advertisement and market research than actually producing the drinks. It's all about selling an image.

PC people are probably different targets from what marketing people are used to working with.

The new people need to somehow take advantage of the internet. If you are a band producing something a bit different, maybe you should think whether signing up for a multinational record label is smart. What about games? Producing them of course costs much more than music. But could you pick your direction such that it would not be so costly somehow, and self publish on the internet?
Even id software started with shareware... 

"PC gaming won't die as long as PC sales don't die. It's really as simple as that."

I guess I should define "die" more specifically. By "die" I mean : cease to be a profitable avenue for large developers to sell games.

Yes, you will always have hobbyist games and indie games on the PC but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about never getting ports of big games like Halo, GTA, etc. 

well, its not 'die', more like degrade 

More like 'change'. 

when it arrives 2 years late, looks shit next to all current titles and requires the latest OS just to run when it's amazingly obvious it could run just as well as it did on xbox on a 5 year old pc.

Mind you, I think Gears of War was ported nicely to the PC with new content etc. That's cool at least.

Personally I don't give a shit about publishers/developers like EA making ports of their sports titles and console franchises like NFS etc. They still have their primarily pc titles like Battlefield and the Sims, which strike me as being the only games they make that are interesting.

It would be sad if Blizzard, Crytek, id and Valve went console only, but I really don't think that's all that likely because they would end up being sad shells of the companies they are now. Part of what makes them great is the content they can include in their PC games that wouldn't work so well on console because the market is different. 

"It would be sad if Blizzard, Crytek, id and Valve went console only, but I really don't think that's all that likely because they would end up being sad shells of the companies they are now."

It would depend on the company greatly. Blizzard won't abandon PC because WoW is a money printing machine for them. And you won't see Valve going anywhere because of Steam. They want to own digital distribution.

But id and Crytek? It wouldn't surprise me. Crytek has said that they suffered terribly from piracy on Crysis and they're fairly bitter right now.

"Mind you, I think Gears of War was ported nicely to the PC with new content etc. That's cool at least. "

It was cool but numbers don't lie. It didn't sell tons of copies.

"Part of what makes them great is the content they can include in their PC games that wouldn't work so well on console because the market is different."

Really? Like what? I'm honestly curious because when it comes to games that are released on both platforms I'm not sure what content wouldn't work on the console that would on the PC. 

Aside from the release of dev tools and the ability to mod and tweak?