I share your points, draginol, however I miss one important point, why customers are turning their back on games--to me, its simply because more and more games get to the stores unfinished/beta, and customers are increasingliy fed up with it, being testers and sentenced to wait for a patch solving serious gameplay bugs, which in some case never came out. As a customer, I only buy quality games with good support, since there seems to be a tendency in the gamesindustry to rush out title after "souless" titles, without the neccessary support on their products. I can give examples, where companies even deny customers right to have a fully functioning product. I would not buy a eg. car with just three tires.
If only more developers were going stardocks road...

This is a great topic! Personally, I think there is more going on than piracy vs. quality. But if those are the two options I go with quality being the engine behind the decline in PC game sales.

According to projections money spent on electronic entertainment is still projected to rise for the foreseeable future. The depressing part is when you start to look at the PC games sector.

In 2004 (chosen because that is when this topic started) PC game sales were 1.1 billion. In 2006, that was down to only $970 million. Compare that with consoles which sold 5.2 billion in 2004 and CLIMBED to $6.5 billion in 2006. Why are these two sectors of the game market heading in opposite directions?

Perhaps it is that piracy is such a huge problem and it is easier to pirate PC titles. I think there is another factor at play, and I will put it under the larger term of "quality".

Before I continue, I should mention that I grew up with video games, but am probably older than the typical demographic. I'm in my mid thirties, and I have as many friends play games as I have friends that buy games for their growing children. This gives me an interesting perspective in watching how two different groups of people make game purchasing decisions.

But first, my own tale:

Fog effects, have they ever sold a game?
My biggest gripe with the modern trend in PC gaming is putting graphics above everything to the point where you artificially limit your potential market (and market share). This is the reason modern games are failing.

Over the last 10 years, Starcraft has sold 67 million copies. Yes it is a great game. But more importantly, it will RUN ON ANYTHING. My first copy of Starcraft I installed on an overclocked 486 with 16MB of RAM. You would have to hunt high and low for a PC with as little power these days. No graphics acceleration cards required.

I will never forget the first PC game that I bought, thinking I could run it looking at the back of the box - Battle for Middle Earth 2. The graphics were not much better than the original (which I already had) - but this new one added fog effects and realistic reflections in water. This was advertised on the box! I didn't buy the game for the fog effects or the water effects. I bought it because I wanted to play a Middle Earth RTS. I wanted to explore new factions and missions. Well, their new graphics engine which supported the features required more minimum requirements than my PC at the time had. And I couldn't turn the new options off. EA lost me as a customer for life that day.

I was upset, and I did plenty of complaining to my friends. And I was surprised at the response I got back. I had been privleged in that I had been able to often afford a new PC, every few years I got a new top of the line model. But many people I know don't do that, and they would still be using a 5 or 10 year old PC (it still worked for email and word processing after all). As I recounted my tale to others, I discovered most of my friends had already been through this, and had watched the game industry decide to pass them by and ignore them as customers. Many of my friends just stopped buying PC games and either moved to console games or stuck with the games they already had... or moved to things with lower requirements (online poker, for instance).

Development houses were choosing to add fog effects over retaining customers?? Yup! I have gone shopping with friends who will browse PC titles. Often the line that is used when a shiny new box is picked up and the person reads the requirements is "it looks good, but its not $2,000 good". There are a lot of potential PC game customers that would happily pay $50 to try a new game, but they won't happily buy a new computer as well just for a new title.

You can tell the quality of almost any PC gaming product these days by looking at the minimum requirements it supports. The lower the requirements are, the better job the development team did, and the higher chance you are dealing with a quality product. GalCiv2 is a perfect example. The 1.6 patch helped the game run better on lower end computers. The 1.6 patch of DA is a much better product than the 1.0 release of DL. But I don't need to have played both versions to know that. I can just compare the minimum system requirements between the two versions. I continue to buy new computers. But I now often do NOT buy games that I CAN run. I look to the minimum requirements listed on a box to see how good the team that made the game was. If the minimum requirements are too high, I won't waste my money on the product - chances are the team was sloppy.

Blizzard Entertainment
A recent example that comes to mind is Neverwinter Nights 2. I enjoyed all of the previous titles in this series, and I was planning on purchasing the game when it got released. I went to my local Best Buy the weekend of its release, and happily picked up the box. Then I turned it over to look at the minimum requirements. WOAH! Sure, I could run the game, even easily, on my PC, but I sensed sloppy design when I saw how high the requirements were. Plus they were restricting their customer base. I decided to wait on the title, and talk to people that had played the game. Sure enough, the few people I knew who bought it were disappointed. Bugs, crashing, and generally an experience described to me as "not even as good as the originals". I could have told you that just looking at the hardware specs.

Blizzard really stands out in this regard, and it is the lynchpin of their success. Every Blizzard title that comes out has very very low system requirements compared to the contemporaries they are competing with at the time a game is released. Yes, they make very good, polished games. But they are also able to take advantage of a much larger potential market by default because their games will run well on older systems. Starcraft still runs on every machine I own. So does Diablo and Diablo II. I still have computers from 1997 sitting around in my office. Not a lot of RAM, no shiny graphics cards. And yet they still run these games (well, to be fair I think i have an 8mb graphics card in that PC... but still)

I'm not a huge fan of MMORPGs, but one of my younger sisters is. Several years ago was an exciting time for fans of that style of game, almost on top of each other (historically speaking) Everquest II and World of Warcraft were released. My sister loved EQ2... she liked the voice acting, the wide range of characters and classes, the interesting quest design, the ability to switch sides, the overall world story, etc. But the game barely ran on her computer, and she would often freeze completely while in town if there were lots of other players on. She eventually quit out of frustration and started playing WoW. In her opinion, WoW was a worse game in every way but one... the only one that mattered. WoW ran on her computer.

Parents
The situation is even worse for the middle aged mother who doesn't really like/understand games herself but purchases them for her children. PC games already are less attractive than console games because:
1. Children are impatient, installation times are an annoying stamina test while the child continually asks to play the new game and "is it ready yet?". With a console game you just plug it in and it starts going.
2. PCs are dangerous for children anyway, because of the internet access, and must be closely monitored and have parental controls installed. With console games, there is less supervision required from the parent.
3. Console controllers are harder to destroy than keyboards... when dealing with either frustrated or exhubarent young players.

But really, the downfall of PC games in each household like this I know of has happened for the same reason. A game doesn't work out of the box. Now, these games are being purchased who are not the most tech savy, I think its fair to say. But when they went to the trouble of selecting a game for their child, and then have to try to explain to their crushed little boy that for some reason the game doesn't work, when they themselves don't know why it isn't working either, well, a new PC game will never be bought in that household. Perhaps the hardware wasn't good enough. Perhaps someone needed to update their video drivers. To be stereotypical... soccer moms buying a new game for their 11 year old don't understand how to update video drivers.

With a console game it is plug and play. And the parents are never disillusioned as customers by having bought a product that just wouldn't work when they got it open - if they stick to purchasing console games for their children.

Ease of use (low system requirements, easy installation, no additional hardware/software needed) might be hard to track as a factor for how many games it sells, and is difficult to advertise, but is actually one of the single strongest factors in attracting older customers.

Targeting gamers?
I am in the unique position in that I once ran an indie game company myself. I have participated in the independent games festival, E3, and I used to look forward to Game Developer magazine which would show up every month in my mailbox. I went to seminars, I read over whitepaper. The SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) in this industry do not understand what they are selling.

People have wasted reams of paper talking about what "gamers" want. Apparantly they want a game that takes advantage of their brand new $5,000 Alienware. They want massive FPS multiplayer matches with teams from different continents. Etc.

This is all garbage. There is a type of consumer for which this is true, but EVERYONE is a potential gamer. I've worked as a lawyer. I've seen people in their 60s with laptops playing games. Men, women, old, young. I've not yet met a person with a computer that has not played solitaire. That means everyone who owns a computer is a potential customer... not just people with top of the line computers.

Solitaire has no high end graphic requirements. It is easy to learn. It takes no time to install. You might scoff, but I guarantee if someone was selling it for 99 cents there would be purchasers (thanks Yahoo). But what if you made an engrossing, easy to pick up game that would run on (almost) all computers in circulation? Suddenly you would not be artificially restricting your market share. Your number of potential customers would be so high that you would sell more by default.

Why do you think Stardock sells so many more copies of its desktop software? Yeah, it does a good job, and there are many reasons. But one of those reasons is it also runs on computers that couldn't run galciv2. They have a much larger potential market right from day one.

This nonsense that you need to design games for "gamers" because they are the only ones who will purchase your product is the cancer eating away the PC game market. Why do people need 64/128/256 MBs of 3d acceleration? And how much RAM? Why artificially restrict your market share to try and sell a few more copies to people that own computers in the top 1%-5% of capable performance? This is a bad marketing model and strategy. And you can see from the numbers it is failing over time.

Think about it this way. If you make a new game that only requires 64MBs of RAM and a 16MB graphics card, say a 200 Mhz processor... how many PCs in use today COULDN'T run that game? You are able to attract a massive potential audience (larger than the installed base of any console system). However, if you make a game that requires people own a computer with top 5% or top 10% hardware of ALL COMPUTERS in circulation - not just what is currently being sold -(this is about the average in the game industry, btw)... you have just taken away 90% of your potential customers before one person has looked at your box.

All of these problems regarding hardware requirements don't exist for consoles. It works when you plug it in, simple. Consoles will continue to rise in sales. PC games will continue to wither on the vine as long as production houses continue to make games with higher and higher MINIMUM hardware requirements.

My two cents,
~ Wyndstar

Just to put a few more number behind my point above:

Estimates say that there are somewhere between 5 and 10 million so called "top end" or "gamer" pcs that have near the top in what is possible for a home computer.

There are also, conservatively, at least 200 million pcs still in use with not top end hardward... although some believe worldwide that number is closer to 500 million older (non-"top end") pcs still in use.

Most companies make games that try and cater to the "hard core gamer" of their particular field, and they drag in between 1% and 10% of the market they restrict themselves to... that top 5-10 million machines for total sales of a title often ranging between 50,000 and a million.

BUT, if you make quality products for lower end machines, you have over 2000% the number of potential customers. Starcraft could not have sold 60 some million copies if it only ran on the top machines. WoW could not have 8 million members and have sold 12 million copies if it only ran on the top machines. There are not that many customers at the top end of the market.

When people say they are upset because Starcraft 2 looks like it has dated graphics, they are just being elitist and don't understand the larger economic picture. When blizzard announces that their new game "won't tax anyone's system" what they are saying is "we are going to have another incredible economic windfall from our new game". Most people who complain that a new game doesn't max out their top end system will pick up the game anyway if it has good gameplay.

Sadly, the sort of elitist, hardcore gamer often lives at game review mags/sites. And marketing departments are scared of what reviews they are going to get because it will effect what percentage of that top 10 million machines they are going to grab. But ignore that for a second, and take the hit in your review for "slightly dated graphics" (as all of Blizzard's products do) and just follow the economic numbers.

If it will run, they will come. Often the problem with the few games made with lower specs is that the underlying games are no good either. But for the quality products that are released that can tap into the whole market... you practically have a monopoly over your consumer base. They are desperate for ANYTHING that is good and will run on their machines.

Release a good game with average graphics, and you have the potential for dozens of millions of customers. Release any game which requires a top end machine for your graphics, and you are limiting yourself right away to a few million customers at most.

If you are in the industry, the question you need to ask yourself is: "Which of these two company types do I want to be?"

- Wyndstar

Wyndstar is hitting on something as well, and that is limiting your player base via technological advancing. I have a high-end machine, at least graphically, and next year I may replace my dual core with a quad, maybe.

Inflation for last year was 3.24%. My "merit" raise was 2.5%, about average. The cost of living is rising faster than the income, so entertainment needs to be sacrificed for living.

I have no intention of investing in Vista at this time, nor DX10. I think both of those would severely limit the player base. I also intend to keep it as low scale as possible, but when I cannot, I will allow the player to turn off effects that are decorative, not really substantial.

well i wasn't really talking about a complete lack of protection. and yes, as you put it, someone will find a way to pirate just about anything they want. i think we agree more than we realize - the business model makes a world of difference. SD compliments some deterrants - the need for a serial to activate the product - with soem positive incentives - free updates from registered users.

people always have the drive to steal, but we're also stuck with the drive to be honorable. honor makes sense because in the long run it tends to reward you. however, many businesses have such horrible customer support and service and such poor products, that being honorable really doesn't pay off in the long run. in those cases, i think piracy is a much bigger problem.

that amalgamated figure of 1.9 billion in sales loss assumes every theif would purchase the product if it weren't piratable. i don't think that's true. i also suspect if you compared theft against customer satisfaction across individual businesses, you'd see an obivious trend.

I was never driven to pirate anything. However, recent BLUDNERS, to put it mildly, by the game industry would have me do just that. Take Civ4:Beyond the Sword, my experience with this game can only be described as unbelievable. First, the game is resealed a week early in Australia. By that time I had pre-ordered it from Gamestop. I already paid full price, and they were keen on taking my money. But no one would tell me it is released in Australia early. Have I known, I might have bought it over the internet. I blame take2 as much as Gamestop for this. What did this was ensure that people who pirated the game in North America, not only got the game when I did, but got it a week before I did! That just doesn't make sense.

Enter part 2 of the problem. Gamestop/EB Games! A virtual stranglehold on the retail distribution of games. Sure other stores sell games, but they carry a very small selection usually. Now what Gamestop did was just beyond belief. I get to the store the day they get the game, mind you it is 1 day after release because these tools can't get the game on time ever. Then I am informed by the dumbass behind the counter that I will be getting a refund. It seems some wisenheimer SOLD my pre-ordered game! Can you believe this? What the hell is the point of pre-order they sell it off to some random person? The guy himself asked me if I wanted to pre-order to make sure I get my copy back when I asked them for the release date. Turns out I was the only pre-order and they only got 1 copy of the game for the whole store.

Anyway, my experience has totally soured me to the whole industry. From the distribution down to the retail end. It's just one failure after another. Now 3 days after the release I don't have the game, and I don't think I will be getting it anytime soon. I am also boycotting Gamestop.

The pirating has some positive side-effects:
demo (you can play longer than 5 minutes, will it run on the pc?)
bringing interest in unknown games (wow, didn't know such game existed (galciv))
mostly no cd-required (not everyone has 5 drives if he/she decides to have a diversion)
I'm still catching up with budget titles, too bad I don't have visa.

I wonder where all the co-op games went, duelling cosy with your friends, either in racing (wacky wheels),football (fifa99),beatthemups (double dragon,mortal kombat),fps (serious sam). Nowadays most of the multiplayermodes requires 2 pc's instead of splitscreen, even they start to skip lan-play altogether.

My $0.02

The "Minimum Systems Requirement" thing was the reason why I did not buy Neverwinter Nights 2. I took a look at the back of the box, saw that it was uncomfortably close to my system's specs, and put the box back. Saved me $50, which I would, several years later, spend on GalCivII Gold

Another example of sloppy game design: Monolith. Monolith makes really fun First Person Shooters that I don't play because their sound system uses a strange MP3 codec that interferes with my PC's codecs. Every fix, change, and workaround I tried failed. That was my experience with No One Lives Forever, and the reason why I didn't buy FEAR. That and the fact that my friend already owned it, I could play it at his house, and I'm goddamned if I'll play that game in the dark alone. . .

Yet another example: Phantasy Star Universe. Fun Action MMORPG. . . but its anti-pirating software not only didn't work, it interfered with several anti-virus programs, including the one I used. In order to play this game, I had to screw up my own anti-virus program, leaving my computer vulnerable. Gee, thanks, guys, that's what I'm paying $10 a month for?

Still one more: Deus Ex II. Picked it up for $5 at my local game store because I liked the first, and then soon discovered why it was so darn cheap. Immediately after I installed it, my box started freezing up and slowing down. I uninstalled the game. The problems ceased.

I'd have to say that sloppy game design, more than anything else, is responsible for the decline in PC game sales. I basically got sick and tired of trying to futz with the settings to get games to work on my computer, which means that all my PC games aside from GalCivII have been bargain-bin purchases that I'm usually guaranteed will run on my computer. That's how I discovered hidden gems like Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and Beyond Good and Evil. Aside from that, most of my gaming is done on the Nintendo DS, the true gamer's system (my current obsession: "Moeru!! Nekettsu Rhythm Damashii!: Osu! Tatekae! Ouendan 2", the sequel to the Japanese version of the game that was released here as "Elite Beat Agents," and candidate for longest game title ever.)

So yeah, I'd agree that game designers have become too damn tech-oriented and not enough fun-oriented, especially when free/bargain flash games like "Desktop Tower Defense" and "Uplink: Hacker Elite" beat out the latest 3D-shoot-em-up-flash-bang-whiz-bang-ten-million-dollar-budget-Doom-Clone for my time and money.

I haven't experienced that, but I'm not saying your f*cked in the head. I've run 3D modeling software the totally screwed up the threads for my nVidia drivers, but allegedly it shouldn't be using the video drivers and almost everyone else runs it just fine, so it's a case of the planets are aligned against us.



A sign that game is a winner. For me, it was Doom all over again. Doom was the first game to actually make me jump in my seat. I found myself knee-jerk shooting at Alma when her avatar would come toward me out of the dark.



WTF would they have anti pirate software going if they are charging a monthly fee? I could see copy protection, keep opportunistic copying low, but if the thrust is a premium service, wtf would they worry so much about piracy. Let them pirate and make it up with online service charges.



They're trying to disattach what's fun from any particular genre. They ask the public, what do you look for in a game, the public says realistic graphics, so they get it. The problem is the game isn't fun. I think in large part, the public is having trouble expressing what is fun. It's like art. You can't define it, you just know it when you see it.

Possibly quality is a factor, but I don't think it's the main one. Since the market is huge and mass distribution and demo-ing is easy and in place, then sucker games get ignored, while winner games simply take home a larger slice of the market.

I agree that Piracy is kind of a boogey-man in the modern era, since developers/publishers are able to control their games through the internet now. Naive, indie developers are still are risk to being squelched by Pirates, like all the damage Pirates did in the 1980's especially. Nowadays publishers have the power to outflank pirates on the net through MMO/MP content, serial number registration, official corporate servers, patching and sanctioned modding etc.. Sure there may be clans of college and high school kids running illegal LAN parties, but probably those people wouldn't have the income to buy the games anyway. Overall I agree, piracy is factored into the business model as a cost of business these days, but not as a catastrophic loss, thanks to safeguards and internet integration of software.

I think if anything, the hardware industry collaborates with publishers to try to push the envelope and see what the market will bear through planned obsolescence of hardware, and increased system specs. I see nowadays that my 32MB video card can't get any love in the form of software emulation on the newest games (unlike in past years where 64MB recommended really didn't matter if I had a powerful CPU and lots of ram), yet the newest games don't strike me as being revolutionary except in graphics primarily. So possibly the decline is simply the warning that the consumer market is getting tired of trying to follow the hardware curve, and is simply unable to play the new games (For instance I can't even get a single 64MB video game to even play an intro screen now, since they really won't support it at all).

Rather than quality, I think the simple answer is that console gaming is the major slice of the electronic gaming industry, and any past PC gains were due to definite weaknesses in the console technology, a lead which has now eroded. With M$ in the fray, and the Japanese picking up their next gen systems (e.g Wi), the fallout is that the PC's no longer hold an enviable tech advantage. And face it, the average consumer is not interested in building their own computer, nor upgrading it regularly. They want instant gratification, and something that fits their lifestyle without requiring a major schooling, or frequent, total system upgrading through a company like Dell.

If anything, if there are reduced pay-offs to competing with consoles, rather than joining them, then quality may decline as a side-effect of loss of interest and capital in the PC market, as well as say due to greed.

I used to probably buy 4-6 games a year, now I usually buy 1 or 2 if that. Why? Well, the big reason is because most everything out now is just a better looking re-hash of an old idea. Also, like others have said, I don't want to have to buy a new computer every year to keep up with specs. Finally, and this to me is the kicker, I don't have time to play the games anymore. They all seem to be these long, drawn out games that require hours upon hours to play. I just don't have that time with work, family, and other stuff. I think today's generation is a console generation, and the people who are in the computer generation just don't have time anymore to keep up with 5-6 games a year. And even when I do buy games, it's games you can play here and there, and where there isn't this long stretching campaign where you don't feel satisified until it's completely done.

I should have clarified: it was the anti-cheating software that was messing up my antivirus. It also didn't work, since by the time I quit the game economy was shot from hacked money.

For me, I agree that piracy is not the problem. Most of the time I go to bestbuy, and I can't even find a game that I think I'll like. It seems the only sensible way to pick a game is to read a zillion reviews, which I usually don't do before happening to be in a store.

The game boxes don't tell you jack. A lot of them don't even show a "real" picture of the game. You have no idea what the gameplay is going to be.

For me, I'm down to one or two PC games a year, and usually one is such a disappointment that I am even more hesitant to buy. There needs to be more simple/quick games out there, and hand out free demos to hook me. Piracy is not the problem, it probably actually helps allow people to find good games, and then buy them and thier sequels.

Simple fact of the matter is that the big time pirates will take hack and pirate if they want it no matter how good the anti-pirate software is. The most frustrating thing is that often times the anti-pirating software actually distrupts the honest consumer and makes their legal copy buggy and infunctional. I just highly doubt pirating is the big issue here, I think its simply the easiest one to point the finger at, and the flasher scarier problem.

Personally I blame poor quality as the big issue behind lagging sales. Far too often I've found games are just flat out not ready to be sold. Neverwinternights 2 is a damn good example, a good game resided under its rushed exterior. Atari pushed the game out too quickly in their desperation for sales, and while the game is pretty stable now from what I've seen, they lost many customers in its release. Halo 2 is to a lesser extent an example of this problem, while its considered a good game, its ending felt flat and it seemed to be incomplete overall. Bungie even admitted to this, and claimed that they simply ran out of time and had to get it finished. Why do you think they are saying "We've got as much time as it takes to finish" for Halo 3? Because they dont want to repeat what they did with Halo 2, which by their accounts could have been much much better.

The second quality factor is the over emphasis on game graphics. I love a good looking game, I love fancy effects and awesome animations. But I love a excellent gameplay and an enthralling storyline even more. I'll take dated graphics over photo-realistic graphics if it means that the game plays and feels that much better when I'm immersed in it. There are so many dated games that just play better and are more interesting then the latest "greatest" out there, Baldurs Gate, Diablo, Starcraft, all the old greats are great not because you can see the characters nose hairs individually rendered but because they played like being dipped into a tub of liquid ecstasy. Games like Crysis and Hellgate London, looks cool, but I just cant get myself worked up because of how a game looks anymore...I've been left wanting and disappointed too many times.

The third and last quality factor I want to talk about is innovation. So many games anymore feel like every other game of its genre anymore. You pick up one RTS, it probably plays like every other RTS. Same goes for RPGs, FPSs and MMOs, they are all the same, the lack inspiration and creativity anymore. Galciv2 is guilty of this as well, but, it plays so well, and is well made with enough differences that it can get away with its sameness. But not all games are good enough to overshadow this trend, and after an hour or two you begin to wonder if they just slapped new graphics on an older game. MMOs have used the same general mechanics for gameplay for a decade or more, RTSs have mostly been mine gold(or its equivelant), build a base, a mass units, send wave after wave of units until your enemy is dead. After awhile you simply get tired of it, the same things, even if the game is a good one. I'm to the point now that I just dont buy games anymore, $50 to discover I already owned a game exactly like it after an hour of gaming is insane.

To sum it all up, Pirating is undoubtedly a factor, but I think its all a bunch of smoke and mirrors and is simply an easy scapegoat for the sales slump. Graphics are over emphasised and gameplay suffers. Games also feel rushed and unfinished 90% of the time. And to top it all off, most games lack innovation, and play like the hundreds of similar games that came before them.

Basicly if you want me to buy your games, spend the time needed to get it done, be innovative with your design, and make it look nice but not to the detriment of other factors of the game. Heck getting just 2 out of the 3 and I'll highly consider buying it.

Anywho, I'm done rambling, I hope that all makes sense...and that I didnt out think my fingers and left major gaps anywhere! hehe

I'll keep that in mind because once I move my game to MMO, I do intend to check files for tampering. One cheater can chase away 50 honest customers.