News Molyneux: PC gaming is 'in tatters'

What would Molyneux know about the PC gaming industry anyway? He's only been in the business since the beginning and generated for revenue from it than any ten people here can claim! sheesh!

 

All of this is just a pathetic attempt to cover devs laziness. Developing for X360 is far easier than for PC, takes less money and time. PC games pirating? Come on, I know quite a lot Xbox owners and I have never seen ONE original game. In eastern Europe it's even hard to buy unmodded Xbox/PS3/PSP, there are more shops selling modded consoles AND they are actually cheaper.

 

Yet sales of console games are still higher than PCs. This is the thing they're getting at. They can make more money developing for consoles than they can for PCs. Piracy debate is irrelevant to this point. The fact of the matter is the PC market can sometimes barely make them any money back with the mammoth cost of developing AAA titles, all this piracy talk is just trying to lay the blame on what is causing that lack of sales. It doesn't matter if piracy is the cause of this, in black and white, AAA games don't make a whole lot of money on PC, so developers are less inclined to develop them for the PC. Like it or not, this is a business, developers need money to make games.

Yes, there is console piracy, no-one is denying that. But console piracy is much less widespread than PC piracy. With a PC, almost anyone can pirate a PC game, for completely free no less. With consoles it involves voiding your warranty and paying money to do so, you need to buy the chip and you need to buy the media. You also can't play the games online (on the 360 at least) as xbox live detects you running the hardware required to run pirated games and stops it connecting to xbox live forever. Since online play is a massive draw for modern games, this is a big detriment to wanting to do it.

I don't see why it's "lazy" to develop for consoles. So it's easier. So what? Do you realise how stressful and time consuming developing a game is? If I were a developer, I'd much rather develop for the platform that has one hardware configuration across all units and makes me money than develop for a platform that has thousands of hardware configurations to take into account and makes little money. The choice is pretty obvious.

 

Ya, PC is in tatters alright, this is why an indie developer like Games Faction released a damn good RTS on Steam versus a console..

 

If I knew how to code, I would be tempted to rip a game, and insert a hard drive wiping virus with a message that says something along the lines of tsk tsk, you shouldn't have pirated the game should you. I would make it delete all their files it could when they were playing the game so they would be unaware of it happening. The only problem with doing that is the developer could end up with the blame.

PC gaming is not in tatters, it is going strong and always will be. I can't think of more than a couple of upcoming titles for the consoles that I want (FFXIII) and few that have already been released (DMC and MGS) and yet there are several PC games that are upcoming (Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Fallout 3 , X3: Terran Conflict, Left for Dead) and many that I just don't have the money to get yet (Crysis, Stalker, Civ IV, Spore (even with the DRM), RA3) and they just keep coming.

 

Greetings!

Veles in post #63: Spot on!

Then, companies add absurd DRM schemes and alienate even more the paying PC gamers.

 

Molyneux is correct it is in tatrs but most people dont own a pc for playing games .gaming is just the best reason for somone to own a pc and do all the other thiings realted to owning a pc like oc like build your own mod it strip it break it and repair it just like you could do with a car or motobike this is why most people that play games on pc do what they do with pc and not with the ps3 or xbox or nitnendo pee .

 

Pete M is a senile old git who couldn't produce a decent game nowadays with all the money and time in the world and needs to stop flapping his gums and retire....








Yeah, I dont like him.

 

drm does kind of work.. look at assassins creed 2- it took quite a while for crackers to say solved

in that time there was sales made.. anything less than what they did on assassins creed 2 is a waste of time though

 

It's just amazing that nearly two years on from the start of this thread Molyneux still talks a load of crap, we've had another L4D game sell by the bucket, the dev's touched up Alien Swarm and given it away as a thank you, gave away one of their own games to expand onto the Mac and not made anyone pay twice, Fallout followed Oblivion...so the usual suspects on PC are doing well, the whiners and console jumpers still making the same excuses.

Molyneux's made his money, thankfully neither of the B&W games were full price to me at the time preferring to stick with with Shogun and whichever C&C was around from EA, now I just try to ignore him...

 

It took the pirates longer to crack, true, but plenty of people just didn't buy it because of the DRM
I was looking forward to the game, now I have no intention of buying it because my internet connection is flaky at the best of times, so it would be impossible to play uninterrupted.

p.s. what's with the thread necromancy going on around here?