[PC] Decline of PC Gaming?

Originally Posted by Sexninja

Ok first lets do rundown

Best of PC

WoW=MMORPG

Crysis
Farcry
HL2
Fear
Fear 2(inevitable)
Prey
CallofDuty 1,2 and 3
Unreal series
Quake series
Doom3
Sin
You can name any other technically sound and hit pc game ,it would be definatley FPS.

You're using games that haven't been previewed, much less released as evidence. They can't possibly be the "best of PC" if they aren't available. I could list some games like Warhammer 40,000, Black & White 2, or classics like Bad Mojo, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and so on, but in my eyes it's hard to make a claim for the decline of PC gaming in the first place, considering most if not all console games eventually find their way into user's windows-operated machines.

Example: KOTOR is one of my favorite games...for the PC.
Prince of Persia was fantastic...played on my PC.
Fahrenheit is a new classic for me. I have it...for PC.

Getting back to playing older games on PC, though: the accessibility of PC systems is what often makes me prefer a game on PC rather than on console. Knowing that I can install or uninstall it pretty much at leisure (rather than requiring a backwards-compatibility module on my console) is reassuring. How do I know how long they'll let me play the PSX version of Street Fighter Alpha 3? Will I have to drag my dusty old PS2 out of the closet some time in the future to play a round or two, disc read errors and all?

Now, console exclusives exist, sure. PC exclusives exist as well. Trying to compare the two is apples and oranges, because the developers just want to make a buck. If they can do that by offering console exclusivity, they'll do it. If they see that there is a market for certain kinds of games on a certain kind of console (the way many people said RPGs was a Sony-owned market for the longest time) then you can damn well bet they'll put their game where ti will have the best effect, for the least cost.
Saying that developers are abandoning the PC because the exclusives you've seen are all the same kind of game doesn't hold up. What you're really saying is that all of the games with the most publicity (i.e. the most money riding on their success, i.e. the most parent company clout) show up the most in stores and magazine ads. And that's true. I don't think innovation necessarily means abandoning an audience at its most rapt, however. I may have played Blade Runner before, but that doesn't necessarily mean I won't enjoy Syberia or Dreamfall.

This is all still bullshit politics. Saying "computer < consoles lol" doesn't earn you any street cred, okay?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Something I want to underline, because I don't think people have recognized it for what it is.

The vast majority of DOS and windows-based games operate under current windows operating systems. Those that don't usually have exe fixes or emulators available to let them play on a windows system.

Just because people play games that came out years before doesn't mean PC gaming is in decline. It just means people can play those games much more easily, and hell, if they're good, more power to those people.

The same option didn't exist with consoles up until PS2, so it's only recently that console developers have been catching on. The question is, how much of their resources are they willing to put into backwards compatibility?

Now whether or not Microsoft decides to continue their support for a backlog of games is pretty much irrelevant. The fact that this question even exists should be a reminder to everyone here that console gaming is competitive in nature, and the companies are only willing to give so much attention to something that earns them little or no profit.

By comparison, windows gaming is very often community-oriented, and will often foster groups devoted to seeing that games continue to be playable into the forseeable future. I might really want to play Full Throttle on windows XP, and normally, I wouldn't be able to. But because I'm using SCUMMV, I can. This kind of universality is something the PC offers that can't really be equalled by consoles in their current state.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Sexninja

I am objective

Laffo.

Has it occurred to you that in his original post, he made a few of the same claims you have, he just didn't make blanket statements?

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.