Software piracy while a major factor in the current downfall of the PC gaming industry is not the only reason. Piracy combined with extremely high system requirements for a lot of the new games, unreliable buggy games, retread of existing gameplay with a graphic enhancement as the main feature, reduction in console hardware release times and finally a lot of people who have always played games on computers are now in thier 30s - now have other priorities.

I agree with the Doom 3 engine being horrible, from far away it looks nice and pretty, you get up close and the textures look like complete garbage. On top of that, i got bored of the game play in a few hours.
HL2 engine is lights years ahead of the Doom 3 engine in my opinion. And it had good game play.

I actually pirated Doom 3, played it for 2-3 hours and im glad i didn't pay $50 for it. But yet i was glad to have paid for HL2 and EP1 because those are games worthy of buying.

I am amazed at the lack of respect that Doom3 gets.

Maybe it was because I wasn't really drawn to many FPS between when the Original Half Life and Unreal Tournament came out, but I was majorly impressed by Doom 3.

Yes the gameplay was a tad vanillarish, but the 3d world was quite believable and the darkness really sucked me in.

After hearing about how many people were disappointed with Doom 3's vanilla approach and how it was too dark, I reluctantly gave the game to a friend of mine who also doesn't play games that often, and he loved it even more than I did.

Interestingly enough, we both were disappointed with Quake 4.

yeah, like epic and id started a new game craze. but they are right, you cant pirate xbox and playstation games! well at least they believe it. LOL! good luck!

Id's answer isn't the whole truth. They forgot to mention the following:
- Id's current engine isn't selling well. Look at the # of 3rd party games built off that engine since Doom3 was released. I can name two shipping titles: Prey and Quake4. Unreal and Steam have seemingly sold more licenses AND shipped more 3rd party titles (Unreal, specifically)
- The "physical" medium for PC games have been well pirated and distributed with the advent of consumer broadband lines. Unfortunately, Id still considers this their "bread and butter" for money.

I'm a fan of Id. I have bought many of their first party titles, along with many licensed engine games and it's really unfortunate to see where they sit now with games. Their current engine doesn't scale well in large outdoor environments (maybe the upcoming title will show off better) and their engine doesn't scale well across multi core systems (Id engines always did well on the latest rig, multi-core is the *new* hawtness). I'd love for Id to show off a new engine (maybe a newer license model) that scales well across multi-core AND across different platforms.

For piracy -- they are climbing a large hill if they want to stop PC piracy. The physical medium of distribution is well copied, they *need* to move toward something *more* like Steam for the delivery of titles. Steam is *NOT* perfect, but a delivery system like it would help keep their sales up.

TL;DR: Give me a Soldier of Fortune 3 running under the latest and greate id engine.

IMO, a lot of what is killing PC gaming for me (besides rehashes + new shiny game killing engines and textures) is the console to PC ports.

Thief 3 suffered from this with the portals and constant level loads.
It *was* pretty, and pretty damn boring (lockpicking was neater, tho), but when compared to 1 or 2...ugh.

Oblivion was less obvious in some places with the console'ness, but saved by the mod community (PCs just wait for fixes, xboxers twisted in the wind until the devs did something).

The conversion is what kills it, as it is easier to take away stuff from a PC release to console, than v/v.

Funny, to me that titles I'd pay for again aren't being made, or remade, like descent 3 updated to the latest OGL, or Max Payne 1 done under 2's engine or heck even doom 1/2 and ultimate doom under quake 1/2's engine (gldoom was nice, but the 3d under a 2.5d game made it unfair and kinda freaky).

Also agree with NOLF...dated but still a blast to play.

Heck, same goes for Serious Sam 1/2, but SS3...some areas were a blast, but a few areas? gah!

did anyone here try gears of war co-op on xbox360?

all i have to say is why the #%^& haven't there been more co-op games for the pc? "oooh but its too harddd" so hard that they did it on GoW fine.... yup.

make a game that i want to play with friends and A) we cant pirate it and B) I will buy it because that would be fun

I was wondering just this past week why Hollywood movie studios make movies with budgets of 70 to 100+ million and are still able to to sell us DVDs of $20 or less, but these video games still continue to cost $50-$60.

I even saw a Geoff Keighley interview with Michael Prachter saying that he thinks that $60 is a very low price for video games and that consumers should be grateful that its not even higher.

Granted that we are getting more entertainment for our buck, but if you make video games an expensive proposition for the consumer, they may try harder to obtain video games in other ways (just look at used game sale revenues for Gamestop and EBgames, they're in the billions).

I do think that video games should be about $30, more people would buy Doom3. But then again, does you average PC/console game sell as much as your average movie DVD?

I think alot of video game companies would love to have a very high amount of sales, but they still treat video games as a limited market, people don't buy entertainment media with Satanic content on a regular basis these days.

What do you mean id GAMES? Dont they only make just one game over and over and over again?

I think that $600 card is actually part of the problem aswell.

Pirates aren't killing PC gaming, lack of innovation is.

This is a piss poor rationalization from people that will steal games all the while telling people how much the new games suck. Piracy doesn't happen because games lack innovation (which is partially true, however, it's irrelevant to the discussion), it happens because there is a small subset of people that break content protection schemes and distribute those mechanisms to the general public, where even casual users can easily steal software. Same for music, same for movies.

If a game is truly great, it's certainly not going to diminish piracy--if anything, it will increase the prevalence of piracy for that title. Anyone here think no one pirated CivIV or Galactic Civilizations or Oblivion or any other objectively great game?

It's intellectually dishonest to lay it all at the feet of developers saying, "You suck and your product sucks, so I'm going to steal it and still use your product, but if you make something good, I won't steal it."

I can say the same people who buy a $400 - $700 console also know how to use bittorrent, plus $20.00 to them for a modchip after shelling out huge bucks for the console is nothing.

WOW, what a topic. I agree with a lot of comments already posted. PC games cost too much, games are released buggy(which seems to have become a standard, "we'll fix it with the first patch") and a lot of them aren't original or enough content to keep you interested.

That being said, I am one of the people that buy top of the line graphics cards. I don't remember spending $600 on one but pretty close. I don't pirate any games because I do believe in supporting game developers. I'm just selective in the games I do purchase. I usually wait for a sale or price to go down unless its a title I really want, then I pay release price.

I once read a article in PC Gamer magazine years ago that broke down where every penny of a game purchase goes too. It was very interesting and stopped me from downloading games on the net. For one it just wasn't worth the time and frustration of trying to find a game I want, make sure it wasn't filled with virus/spyware, the time downloading, making sure it worked, etc. It just isn't worth it to me. I'd rather make my purchase and be done with it.

Developers have no reason to complain, what they need to do is make better, less buggy games and you are sure to get a following.

Roceh is exactly right IMO a great game hasn't been made since 2003 since NOLF2. NOLF was even better. It's all for the eye candy and 5 hours of gameplay nowdays.

I'm sitting here thinking -- who has the time to pirate games? And then I realize the answer is obvious -- kids and people with low-paying jobs and no life. In other words, people with a lot of time and little money.

I wonder if this will lead to a split in the market, where the types of games that appeal to the idle-poor will only be available on consoles while games that appeal to the stretched-for-time-employed will still be available on PCs. If so, this would be fine with me, since I am not a member of the idle-poor.

Wonder if some devs realize how crappy their games really are and are scared of the fact that people just won't buy a game off the shelf anymore because it looks good? I could think of a couple dozen releases within the last year that aren't worth playing, buying or even thinking about. On the contrary, there was only a handful of PC games last year that were worth buying.

IMO the only games loosing money are the ones not worth buying anyway; as in they're losing sales because people don't randomly buy them off the shelves. Good games people buy to play online, because well, you can't play online without buying them.

I don't think either Blizzard or THQ have said anything bad about piracy yet. WoW ISN'T the only sucessful game on the PC either. It's an extremely, overwhelmingly, sucessful game to the point of being comparable to Windows. You don't compare your games to something like that, it's like comparing your existence to god or some other unfathomably large object.

I've played Fireaxis games, they're fun to play for awhile, but they get boring. If you want your game to be sucessful you need replayability, and that means good multiplayer which ALL Fireaxis games lack.

Epic doesn't have anything to worry about. This is either a cover for something, or they're siding with someone behind the scenes. When was the last time you bought an UT iteration for singleplayer? For that matter people can't play online, just like with almost all games, without a valid cd-key.

PC gaming industry, meet MPAA/RIAA.

It's not the declining quality and steady and/or increasing prices of our products that are driving users away, it's those MEDDLESOME KIDS!

Pirates aren't killing PC gaming, lack of innovation is. Taking a tired idea and slapping a new and uber engine into it does not make a compelling new title, it makes Yet Another Rehash.

I've also found it far simpler and easier to pirate things for Xbox and PS2 than PC games. PC games have extensive copy protection for the most part, while the most 'secure' Xbox titles are so simply by being dual layer... The Xbox DVD drives don't read DL +R's very well.

If you dump the PC gaming world for consoles, that's fine, but doing it because you think it reduces piracy is STUPID. Think an idea through fully before executing, folks!

This is 100% pure marketing spin.

The real reason why the mainstream PC market is dying?

It has outgrown the scale of economics of its market. The hardware cost and hassle of getting a modern PC title to work fine is too great for the mainstream market. The quality of the content has declined since 2002. The budget for modern titles has exploded out of proportion and is spend on the wrong areas. The risk of innovation is simply too great for big time publishers and developers to stomatch.

Consoles are becoming more like gaming PCs with a standardized hardware platform without spending a crapload on hardware costs. It is no surprise that publishers and developers are converting over to gaming consoles.

Priacy is just a scapegoat and symptom of the aforementioned problems.

I remember this period in the Amiga games market... basically it is the middle-level game that makes or breaks a market. The sort of game that doesnt involve a lot of effort or developer time but still makes a decent profit. You get a successful market when there is a critical mass of consumers to pick up the sales for the middle-level game the sort of users who arent so picky about what they choose, ie the ones who go solely for film tie-ins or when the Aunt buys the game for little johnny.

AAA games are high risk ventures, sure you`ll get more sales and when a market is in decline you get a higher percentage of hardcore fans who will cough up the cash for quality to balance out any overall downward trend, but it is the risk to start a AAA project in the first place that makes companies weary, they like the assurd middleground and the safety net it offers.

The last dying days of the Amiga saw some great titles at the peak of its technology and playability with rabid Amiga fans spending the money but beneath that AAA tier there was nothing but some budget games and that is ultimately why it died completely.

Why should Epic be so affected by piracy, when their big hitter on the PC is Unreal Tournament, a game almost entirely based around online play which requires a valid CD key?

PC games are also generally much cheaper than console games, I find, because the subsidy you're getting on the initial purchase of a console is recouped through game sales. Most Xbox 360 games launch at £40 here, whereas new PC games are usually £30 or even £25.

It's now official Unreal Tournament 3 is going to be a major suckfest.

Thanks for the headsup Michael, I won't be needing to upgrade anytime soon.

Several good points have already been made. Games that need large patches and are horribly buggy out of the box, games that can bring even powerful systems to their knees (Supreme Commander is a good example), and sometimes even fantom incompatibility problems. Sometimes a person will meet the required specifications for a game but can't run it for one reason or another. The fact that there are so many possible combinations of hardware and drivers out there doesn't help, especially when in the hands of someone who is not technically inclined.

The price of hardware is a valid point to some degree too. It seems like as though if you don't buy a higher-end video card, you won't get a satisfying gaming experience for too long. But while the price of a gaming PC can be a deterrent, the lower price of consoles is often made up by the higher price of games. This is especially true in the first 12 to 18 months after a console is introduced.

But given that console game sales vastly outnumber PC game sales, I can see why a lot of developers previously devoted to the PC would want to go multi-platform. I can hardly blame them. Games are getting too large in size (being on DVD or multiple CD's) and the financial risks are too great. Piracy only further compounds the problem.

Most PC software companies can tolerate piracy because they make money mainly on corporate sales -not an option for PC games developers.

So as the development cost goes up, making single player PC games may no longer be a viable business model.

What a load of garbage.

I buy very few games for the PC. Why? Because 90% of them are GARBAGE.

Let's see... the last few games I bought were: Counter Strike. Diablo II + LOD. StarCraft. Half Life 2. Guild Wars. EVE Online, World of Warcraft. That's it. Counter Strike came out for retail sale... 6 years ago? I've bought 7 games in 6 years. The only purchase I regret out of all of those is World of Warcraft.

Tell me a good reason why I would pay $50 for a game that isn't fun and won't last me more than 4 hours? Because... because those developers worked so hard creating some piece of sh*t excuse for entertainment? When was the last time you saw a guy walk up to you on the street and go "Hey, I'm looking for a good kick, right to the beanbag. I'll pay you $50". Hell that $50 might better off be going to some homeless man looking for his next hit, at least it'll last him longer than it would in my hands buying a PC game.

And then they go "oh yeah, the good MMO's are popular because they can't be pirated". Incidentally they're the POPULAR MMO's that people don't MIND paying for. I think they don't understand the way an economy works. If there's no demand, there will be no sales. If you make a crappy product that people would rather just pirate, play for an hour and then just delete, chances are you weren't going to sell many of them if they were somehow impossible to pirate.

As a side note, I think that article would be more entertaining if you added *cry* every now and then into the quotation. Kind of like this.

"Piracy has pushed id as being multiplatform," *cry* stated Hollenshead, whose company contracted Z-Axis to handle the PlayStation 3 version and Nerve Software the Xbox 360 edition of Splash Damage's forthcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC).

Comments made by Epic's Capps carried a similar tone. "*cry* PC gaming is really falling apart, *sniff*" he revealed. "It killed us to make Unreal Tournament 3 cross-platform, but Epic had to do it, *sob*" adding "the market that would buy a $600 video card knows how Bittorrent works. *boohooohooo*" Epic is currently developing Unreal Tournament 3 for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in-house.

Last week I was at a brick & mortar store, called Media Markt (something akin to Best Buy for Europe, minus the huge size). PC games cost 50€ there, and that's become the standard price, which used to be 30€, then 40€. So I call bluff.

Plus, people also seem to be forgetting that working with PCs has starting to be a very very risky proposition. These past 2 years graphics card just about tripled in speed, and the old dogma of "as soon as you walk out the door with your new PC, it's already outdated" has never been more true. From another angle (almost opposite), as PCs become a commodity, people start having the false illusion that they can buy a complete 400€ PC and play games with it. Then of course, the horrible discovery, it sucks (no surprise).

There's also the technical aspect. We're in 2007, and between installing drivers, spyware, viruses, etc, etc., maintaining a PC has become a herculean task for the average user. Why should they bother when they can just plug the console and go? That I can very much understand, even I get tired sometimes of messing around with the PC because of stupid driver or some other headache.

All of us here in the know in TR know how to work around things and buy smart. Most people don't, so they end up avoiding the PCs altogether.

You can't pirate a MMO, but you CAN run your own UO shard for a number of years and have a userbase in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.

If they're saying that, it's just because it hasn't happened yet.

I have to agree with a lot of people that say that the price of games is just too high nowadays. 50-60 dollars for your average game? I'm sorry, I just can't spend that much anymore, and I'm certain, that the general populous doesn't wish to do so either.

I also agree with the notion that games just aren't produced well enough either. Granted, there are a few gems out there, but for the most part, most games leave you wanting too much more from the game and not the old way, where we just wished for a sequal. I haven't played a truly fulfilling game in a long time, so why should I have to pay to feel incomplete and let down.

I rarely buy any video games anymore, and I believe these arguements aren't solely reserved for just PC games. I almost feel like I get more out of a tank of gas than I do buying a PC or Console game anymore, and that's for an entirely different argument in itself.

Now, I do understand that it does take more programming and man hours for your average game, and I understand that requires more resources and money, but if they were to just try to budget expenses and apply the money and resources more responsibly, I don't believe it would be as difficult to introduce games at a more reasonable price. I also believe that, if you introduce any ads or marketing within the gameplay, then you should automatically reduce the price, as that is money that the game company has already earned. One other end, is the executive side. They make alot, and I mean alot of money on every single game. Now I enjoy the prospect of being payed alot for my work, but in this case, it has gone extremely overboard. Has Mr. Hollenshed or Mr. Capps disclosed any information on how much money they make from each of their games every year? No, of course not. They wouldn't want you to know that if they, alone, just took a 5 percent decrease in salary, it could make a difference between you and I paying 40 dollars for a game or 50. Then you would have to consider all of those other executives receiving the same or more money.

to be continued...

I don't buy PC games anymore because the lion's share of them just aren't fun. The ones that are fun suck your life away in some MMO world, or some single player RPG campaign with a billion different paths. Sorry, I have a busy job, I'm a homeowner, and I have a significant other to spend time with. I can't imagine what it would be like if I had kids. If my PC gaming choices are being bored by the same old fodder or devoting hours and hours of my free time staring at a computer screen, then I won't play PC games anymore.

My hard drive is full of half-finished games or old games I've already finished. The only game I play anymore is Lego Star Wars 2. It's fun (and funny), I get my gaming fix, and I can play for 30-45min and then put the controller down and get back to life. The telling thing is that this is essentially a console game.

you can't really pirate any multiplayer online game if the company creating it is smart.

I would say that piracy has killed the one-time single player game on the PC. I've borrowed a few games from people to play single player, got too bored, and never bought. CIV4 is an example... good game, but too slow for online play and the single player is dull.

It's obviously a BS line since in my area one out of three consoles I see seems to be modded. And the fact that they design this junk on a PC to begin with before they port them makes it silly for them not to try to just package the stuff they're about to port up and sell them for a couple million easy bucks on the side.

That said, I do think MMOs are the way to go on the PC, cause being online is what they do best imho. I wouldn't pay a monthly fee for such games though, the MMOs I get are stuff like Guildwars - got that for $20 off a discount bin heh - for example, and I only get one per year or two. If they do stuff like that game while avoiding the "install a crappy Steam hook on your PC" pitfall, then I'm all for that.