Let me tell you what I think is killing PC gaming: The way modern games are produce, DOSBox and retro gaming. The math is simple: Modern games have less and less gameplay. More interest is therefore garnered in retro PC gaming, to respond to this a group of programmers release DOSBox, in less than 6 six years we now have 10 million DOSBox downloads. That’s millions of gamers saying yes to 90’s game and no to 00’s games. We have the success of STEAM based mostly on retro game sales, not HL2 as you would think, you have GOG.com being very successful too, utilizing as a big selling point of: ‘guaranteed to work in XP and Vista and no DRM’. These are the two bugbears gamers have with modern games, and CD Projeckt knew that.

So we have millions of people playing millions of DOS games to an extent that modern games seem dull and simple in comparison after a while. These modern games are not good and PC games are not being released because the industry thinks all console gamers are snotty 15 year olds with little IQ and attention span,and they produce games like that and then convert them to PC. They put little effort into PC because they think we’re all pirates and they produce crappy console games that PC gamers are then expected to buy because they cannot get their head around the fact console gamers are more likely to be 25 than 15 and middle class and educated than dumb. This dumbing down then is killing PC game today and will kill hardcore (360/PS3) console gaming tomorrow. We know this is happening on the PC with £40 price points for games, Starcraft II selling the three campaigns separately, making Starcraft a £35 game and Starcraft II a £105 game,both with three campaigns, but Starcraft has network play, Starcraft II won”t. We also have all those £35 10-12 hour games, which work out very expensive too. Plenty of signs then, but it’s a lot more complicated than ‘piracy’!

I ‘pirated’ games constantly as a child. Why? I didn’t have the money to buy them. When I did, I bought them. I don’t pirate games pretty much at all, unless I’m unsure of a game and want to see if, you know, it’ll run. How often have you bought a game, only to discover that despite meeting the minimum (or hell, recommended) requirements, you still can’t run it? How many games that promise the world, don’t deliver?

I think hype is actually a huge part of pirating, as people are told games will be whatever, but end up being awful. Basically, gamers got burned, learned from that, and are now wary.

If you give me a good single player game with a fair amount of gameplay (say, Deus Ex style) I will buy it. I won’t buy another Bioshock, which took me maybe 5 hours to beat, and I’ll never touch again.

No, Mr.Braben! The Amiga died because Commodore was a hollowed-out console builder after the Tramiel clan had left for Atari. The Amiga design team was dissolved and the machine never updated, how long should it live on after the PC technology had finally overtaken it??

However I do remember that people went for consoles following the atricously bugged games of the Frontier series, thats more like the truth.

And “Elite 4″ – it is actually the one product thats more vaporous than even Nukem!

He hasn’t made a playable game since then either but look how many ideas he has to make safe profits with his mediocre productions.

This is one of the bad apples who actually put people off PC gaming with their bugged games and restrictive DRM ideas!

I’d also like places to stop comparing PC game sales to console game sales because it’s comparing 1 platform to 3 (5 if you count handhelds, 2 if you exclude handhelds and the Wii).

And honestly they should try this: award people who actually buy the game and use a legit serial code and go online, MOST PEOPLE have access to the net, regardless of what he says. They should be able to get extra goodies online if they’re really worthy of it. Piraters can try but they’ll be limited to mostly emu-servers and SP.

I stand corrected!

The problem with having the encryption tied to the hardware, is once the encryption is cracked (it will be, moreso when you’ve given the key and the lock to the same person), you’ve got to make a new key which obsoletes older cards.

Another problem is that if the card only works with encrypted content, it won’t work for general purpose use. If it works with unencrypted content, it doesn’t stop anything.

Also, how would having the encryption on the video card, which is only rendering what you see, not really doing anything to the game, stop anything apart from legitimate uses?

Well, games cost a certain amount to make and developers have to recoup their costs. So even a bad, short game costs money to make.

I’m aware, which is why I want to see game makers get more money. 9/10 copies of Crysis were stolen, if you believe Crytek’s statement. That is evidence that 9/10 customers didn’t think their game justified the 50 dollar price tag. COD4 was a 50 dollar game. Crysis was not the same quality as COD4, and as such doesn’t deserve a COD4 price tag. Developers need to be honest with themselves and judge how much their game is really worth. Car manufacturers are used to pricing their cars according to what they think the new car is worth, but most game companies are only familiar with the 50 dollar price per game model. If they don’t break out of this, they will go down.

@Sam
Taking your point as fact, why would a hardware copy protection scheme hinder the application of gaming video cards for other uses? I’m not being flippant by the way, I would genuinely like to know the technical reason why this wouldn’t be possible.