pc gaming dying?

[PicassoCT]

Sending game ideas to a company is pointless, they throw them into the shredder without reading them (out of fear of being accused of ripping the design off even when it's just an obvious thing that they added to their game much earlier).

Also you do NOT need a big company for your game if you set your goals realistically. There's plenty of game designs that can be done without a 100 man team.

First Thing is - you of course don´t send a Idea - you send a Prensentation, a raw Concept, some Rederfaked Vids atleast to support (often lacking) Imagination with the wheelchair "moving Images".

And you don´t send it to a Company like EA of course - they shredder everything they get. You choose a Company who programed similair stuff before or at least has the Potential to do so.
>> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDA

Without Non-Disclosure Agreement, never ever would one of those Touchy Artists deliver it´s beloved Ideas to those Pirats. And there are ways to make shure.. one of the Oldest, traditional ones is to make a Gameconceptcopy, get it into a envelop, that envelop into mailoffice and there a Postagestamp stamped (right over the only oppening) send back to your home, where you put it unoppened into Some Sort of Safe Place.. Ready made Evidence for the Courts to come.
Another (and) Way more expensive is having a PuplicNotary taking a Copy into its files. Not everybody in this Business is able to do patent ideas...

But sometimes you can make it easy (strip down developmentcosts), having a great concept and you don´t will find somebody for that Game, simply Humans don´t like new things.

Well here you go:
Take Tetris 3D in a long Tunnel, replace the Cubes, with the Sort of Cube you could see in the Movie Cube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_%28film%29)
Now take two Teams and let them fight a Teamdeathmatch in this Enviroment- with there Bases on Elveators, always a little below the highest Cube... and on this highest Cube, a little Portal, that once you reach it, kicks the current 3DTetris (and DropGoodies) Player into the lowest (over Lava) Area of the Level, replacing him with yourself to smash those worms down there...

It is nice, it is short, and everybody can imagine it with a little help from a Photoshoplifter... and everybod could do that with the hl2 engine meanwhile.. but look out, you don´t even find the Modworld interested in new stuff like this..

Q. E. Ctrl+D.

[Caydr]

PC and Wii are the only platforms a team of less than a jiggawatt of people can make an actual game for. And if you do it on PC...

Ah shit, I guess then you get pirated don't you... but you do on consoles a little too...

TBH if I was a game developer of any skill, with a team behind me and a good idea, there's no way I'd make PC my main platform, unless it absolutely required a mouse and keyboard. Ask yourself the same question, if you were in that position, would you make a game for PC, which means nutsacks clogging your forum with tech support requests for their Dell monitors, or would you do it for a console, where it can't be pirated easily and there's no glitches if you're not a tard.

I made that whole post just to let you see me pwn that guy.

[SwiftSpear]

PC and Wii are the only platforms a team of less than a jiggawatt of people can make an actual game for. And if you do it on PC...

Ah shit, I guess then you get pirated don't you... but you do on consoles a little too...

TBH if I was a game developer of any skill, with a team behind me and a good idea, there's no way I'd make PC my main platform, unless it absolutely required a mouse and keyboard. Ask yourself the same question, if you were in that position, would you make a game for PC, which means nutsacks clogging your forum with tech support requests for their Dell monitors, or would you do it for a console, where it can't be pirated easily and there's no glitches if you're not a tard.

I made that whole post just to let you see me pwn that guy.

Depends on the game IMO. Alot of the types of games I'd like to make, games in the same vein as DF or Spore, would basically just suck on consoles because consoles aren't really designed to have that much data procedurally managed or generated. I think most story based and single player games are better on consoles though. Final fantasy would be torture hunched infront of a monitor, as opposed to chilled out back on the couch. And console games are generally alot easier to play with friends. Although, in my case I'm kinda special since I can play PC games while laying in bed using my gamepad... only really works for games that are designed to be played with a gamepad though... really really great for emulating though.

[Caydr]

As much as I enjoy the fact that:
1) most people who pirate wouldn't and couldn't have bought the product in question
2) many of the others pirate as a way of finding out if something is worh the purchase

It still makes me cringe to think of how it would feel to see 50,000 people torrenting a game I made - and just at one moment in time, on one tracker. Something like that happened with Crysis... wasn't really fair. That game was worth the purchase price if you can excuse the game-breaking bugs and computer-breaking graphics. It was genuinely well-made, not excellent, but well-made.

[Nemo]

It'd be an interesting thing to see if a game with a nominal cost reached more people via 'illegal' torrenting than a free one distributed by 'normal' means. I'd bet that given products of essentially equal quality and market exposure, a game with a $15 charge would get significantly more players and distribution via torrents than a free one that was downloaded from the company's website. Price as a signal of quality and all that. And plus, for all those saps who DO actually buy the game, you get to make some money!

I recently read an interesting thing on this, and I can't remember where it was from, so sorry if it was linked on this forum - someone arguing that paying for content available over the net is doomed as a business model - the massive ability to transfer information means that sooner or later your content will be found and opened and spread free of charge. This writer proposed that the way forward was in the auxiliary markets - things like tech support, t-shits, mugs, ect ect, and not for the content itself.

Their term for it was the 'Grateful Dead model' since that band allowed its shows to be freely taped and recorded at the exact same quality as the band's output (they allowed people to copy from the main soundboards) and then trade/copy them as much as they wanted, as long as they didn't sell the tapes. They figured that the spread of their music was enough to create more people buying concert tickets and t-shits and whatnot that the actual 'content theft' wasn't a big deal.

Seems to me that people will start catching on to this general trend soon enough - expect to see ingame advertisement pick up in a big way, along with charges for non-essential extras like abilities or custom character skins or whatnot. EA seems to be going in this direction already with its ingame ad services and that upcoming free battlefield game.

[SwiftSpear]

It'd be an interesting thing to see if a game with a nominal cost reached more people via 'illegal' torrenting than a free one distributed by 'normal' means. I'd bet that given products of essentially equal quality and market exposure, a game with a $15 charge would get significantly more players and distribution via torrents than a free one that was downloaded from the company's website. Price as a signal of quality and all that. And plus, for all those saps who DO actually buy the game, you get to make some money!

I recently read an interesting thing on this, and I can't remember where it was from, so sorry if it was linked on this forum - someone arguing that paying for content available over the net is doomed as a business model - the massive ability to transfer information means that sooner or later your content will be found and opened and spread free of charge. This writer proposed that the way forward was in the auxiliary markets - things like tech support, t-shits, mugs, ect ect, and not for the content itself.

Their term for it was the 'Grateful Dead model' since that band allowed its shows to be freely taped and recorded at the exact same quality as the band's output (they allowed people to copy from the main soundboards) and then trade/copy them as much as they wanted, as long as they didn't sell the tapes. They figured that the spread of their music was enough to create more people buying concert tickets and t-shits and whatnot that the actual 'content theft' wasn't a big deal.

Seems to me that people will start catching on to this general trend soon enough - expect to see ingame advertisement pick up in a big way, along with charges for non-essential extras like abilities or custom character skins or whatnot. EA seems to be going in this direction already with its ingame ad services and that upcoming free battlefield game.

We've had this discussion before. It's just not feasible charging for spring. And realistically... for years and years counterstrike was free, didn't stop it from becoming the most popular multiplayer shooter ever.

[manored]

would you do it for a console, where it can't be pirated easily

Ever heard of Brazil? Here there are original console games on shops, but not in homes... :)

[zwzsg]

Oh no I can't delete my own post myself! Sorry about that.

[zwzsg]

'PC is dying' claims are as old as PC and console themselves. Seriously. You can find the same stuff in 15 year old news.

It'd be an interesting thing to see if a game with a nominal cost reached more people via 'illegal' torrenting than a free one distributed by 'normal' means. I'd bet that given products of essentially equal quality and market exposure, a game with a $15 charge would get significantly more players and distribution via torrents than a free one that was downloaded from the company's website. Price as a signal of quality and all that. And plus, for all those saps who DO actually buy the game, you get to make some money!

What made people download Crysis was not that Crysis costed 50E instead of being free. It was that for several years, every gaming website and magazine had plenty of pages dedicated to "preview of Crysis", "Crysis announced!", "Crysis: first gimplse", "Crysis: beta", "Crysis, maybe you haven't heard of it", "Crysis is coming"... In short it's not about having a price tag, it's about being advertised. There are tons of RTS with regular price tags that no ones knows about, simply because they had no publisher to pay big add campaigns for, and because not even reviewers know about them.

[Gota]

Oh ffs.
Crysis failed cause of its extremly demanding GFX.
And there are making an expansion by the way.
I bet if crysis has good modding tools, people will be buying crysis for a few years to enjoy the multiplayer(does crysis have good multiplayer?).

[Peet]

I spent the money just for the multiplayer...and the sdk seems to be very well done, with partial source code provided to allow engine modifications, and a useful sandbox app for higher-level editing. All that really remains are good tutorials, and examples.

[SwiftSpear]

Ya, apparently the crysis modding system is actually quite good... and it scales well too, with multiple teirs of entry. At the low level throwing together new maps and game systems is achievable by pretty much any ock with post retard intelligence.

Realistically though... the modding scene is a fickle beast... with modders tending to be just as inclined to listen to the market trends as gamers. UT2004, despite having a HUGE mod creation push by the game's marketing, and having a far superior modding system, still has less mods made for it than HL2. So frankly, what crysis needs is a miracle project, like CS was for HL. If it doesn't get that then it's just going to be another non spectacular tech demo in terms of it's position in the market.

If an amazing mod comes out 3 years down the line when most systems are crysis compatible, and the crysis marketers have the intelligence to pick it up as a serious force in the gaming community, THEN the crysis engine has a chance at dominance, otherwise it's initial sales have already decided that it's just going to be a lackluster milestone where we're starting to learn that the market isn't so healthy that game developers can afford to push the hardware developers as much as they used to be able to.

[Nemo]

Re: Swift & Zwzsg

That's why I said equal market exposure

I know advertisement is a hugely powerful tool for selling things. I'm just curious to see which method would produce more players, when advertisement and product quality are held equal.

Also, Swifty, I'm still talking abstract. I know Spring isn't really at a sellable point yet (although sometimes I think we have this image of a hugely polished engine as the only possible way to sell things made with spring - there are plenty of commercial engines and games that suck a whole lot more than Spring does currently and have sold at least decently well).

[Wolf-In-Exile]

Games that deliver mediocre experiences not selling well? Blame it all on piracy!

Then declare PC gaming is dead and go make console games while your competitors (e.g. Blizzard & EA) make more money in a year from PC GAMING THAN YOU'LL EVER SEE IN YOUR ENTIRE MISERABLE LIFE.

Yes, i'm looking at you, Chris, Carmack and the rest of you whiners.

[Gota]

Supcom should have been Ta 3 TBH.
For now they should have jsut done a pretty version of ta with very good gui,and just a very good set of game controls for using units building buildings ,waypoints grouping and so on.
Good balance,map editor,good modding tools.
on top of that make 4 races and you got a freaking blobkbuster that avarage computers can play and that will give a storng long lasting community with players that have been playing the original ta even.
With hype and good marketing an immediate game of the year IMO.

[SwiftSpear]

Unless your game is just obscenely astonishing, word of mouth won't get you amazingly far.

[BlackLiger]

PC and Wii are the only platforms a team of less than a jiggawatt of people can make an actual game for. And if you do it on PC...

Ah shit, I guess then you get pirated don't you... but you do on consoles a little too...

TBH if I was a game developer of any skill, with a team behind me and a good idea, there's no way I'd make PC my main platform, unless it absolutely required a mouse and keyboard. Ask yourself the same question, if you were in that position, would you make a game for PC, which means nutsacks clogging your forum with tech support requests for their Dell monitors, or would you do it for a console, where it can't be pirated easily and there's no glitches if you're not a tard.

I made that whole post just to let you see me pwn that guy.

Enjoy paying the licensing fee to produce for a console then. Me, I'll develop for the PC, where I don't have to pay that, and thus can get more money back for my work. (and I've seen the stats on this, PC developers still get more money, which is why most major developers produce for both, so they can impact everywhere)