I don't thin it will die but it's still pretty scary. A LOT of developers who made their beginning on the PC are shying away from it.

I don't piracy hurts the MONEY but it sure does scare the publishers. Pirates may say they don't really hurt anyone's wallets directly but they sure are hurting the catalog though.

Yeah, I think it's been obvious the last few years that focus has shifted away from PC titles, both for gamers and developers and publishers and investors (rarely all in one package).

However, I think a key point of "evolving" the pc genre will be cutting away the fat, which is the physical retailers. So while cutting shelf space may certainly be a sign of a bigger problem in the industry, it may also be the solution to part of that problem.

Imagine, Brad, the day you won't have to worry about physical retailers releasing your game four days early.

As a person "in the industry" with several significant published titles, could you enlighten us as to how many sales are actually physical copies by retailers?

Yeah I think in the long run, removing the stranglehold that the physical retailers have over the PC game industry will be one of the best things that ever happened to PC gaming. It will take some time to get there, but we are seeing more and more major developers having digital download options.

The retail outlets are just seeing the writing on the wall. Steam and the other major digital distribution platforms have already taken the lion's share of the market.

The margins are so bad for developers in retail and so amazingly good on the digital distribution side that this transition is going to be a net win for PC developers in the long run.

The great part about the PC platform is that it's free (as in freedom). No pillars to adhere to, no approvals to wait for nor any serious upfront capital investments to access platform tools. You can either do it or you can't. The hardware will always be there, it's in the IHVs best interest without games anyway. It's not like a console or other embedded device where a few mistakes can make the whole platform die.

Because it's free, PC does things before the other gaming platforms. I'm sure in 5 years we'll be reading about how the hot new consoles are finally using digital distribution and it's going to kill off the PC platform.

I have not bought a computer game from a brick and mortar store since SoaSE (bought the first week). Whats the point? The boxes clutter up space. You have to update games online anyway. Digital distributors have better selections and sales. There's no disc to keep in or worry about.

I won't buy digital music because the quality deprivation but that doesn't happen with video games. Consoles should be so lucky.

- Othello

There are no PC Games Section in any of the stores in my town.  If it isn't labelled 'The Sims' or 'World of Warcraft', it's space that's filled with Console Games.  And even high profile titles like Fable III aren't given shelf room, while Call of Duty: Black Ops dominates an enitre 20 meter wall in my local Target.

If I want to buy a game these days, it's eBay, Impulse or Steam.  I have no other options.  I use eBay for Console titles, which are usually 50% cheaper even with postage on Brand New copies, and Steam/Impusle for everything else.  The last game I bought from a Store was New Vegas, Starcraft II before that and before that I can't remember - it was that long ago.  This isn't a decision on part - I have to use online methods because I have no interest in The Sims, World of Warcraft and Call of Duty - the only titles that seem to sit on shelves these days.

You could also argue that's a downside of PC gaming. You have to test your game on every configuration you can come up with (and/or afford) and you'll probably miss some. Look at the release of Elemental. Weird crashes and errors resulted on configurations that hadn't been tested. It wasn't really Stardock's fault for that; there's only so many different things you can test. On a console you know exactly what the system resources you have to work with and you only ever have to test on one configuration.

That's not to say that consoles are better than PCs, or vice versa, just that the freedom of PCs is a double-edged sword.

Consoles have been using digital distribution for years. Yes, PC did it first, but it's still been in consoles for a while (and the "big" games are still discs).

Until all consoles have large hard drives, digital distribution ain't going to replace retail discs. When 250GB hard drives are the standard.. maybe then. AFAIK, ATM those are pretty much minority still. When the next generation consoles arrive... I wouldn't be surprised if digital distribution would be standard method for buying games.

...I bet M$ will require Xbox Live Gold subscription to allow buying games from Live. No retail discs for most games...

I have no idea whether purely digital distribution will be a good thing for PCs but i know that there needs to be more competition. Because if one DD platform will gain monopoly, PCs will be in danger becoming a closed platform. Of course one can setup another digital store but can they afford to keep it up if one gets 99.99% of customers?

Yes, talking about Steam. Impulse needs to be more visible and attract more customers. Cheap weekend sales really attracted me to use Steam.

Of course... what happens when someone bombs Steam/other DD stores servers, infects them with virus(es) or something like that? Didn't Ubisoft's DRM system have some issues that prevented people from playing and even destroyed their progression?

It's not strange at all, in fact in the next decade I'd expect to see more and more developers go entirely digital; PC AND console.  Increasing numbers of console games are coming with product keys for online play, making buying second hand increasingly pointless.  It's only a matter of time before the single player portions of console games require activation too, making physical copies increasingly not worth the disc they're copied on.  Most Indie developers have already moved to digital distribution only, even on consoles.

I can't say whether this is a good or bad thing for gamers in general, but I can say that it's certainly not a sign PC gaming is dead.  Digital Distribution is the future, like it or not.  Retailers are just finally realizing this, and are simply cutting their losses by removing games that most people don't come to them for.  I certainly haven't bought a PC game in a box in several years now, and I'm sure many are the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

This discusses the phenomenon a bit - it is more efficient to distribute something via a single searchable point rather than distributing to retail stores where most wouldn't actually sell a copy of a fantasy turn based RPG/4X crossover customised for a particular series of fantasy books (which wasn't the original) as the demand in that town was too small.  However on the web all those that are really into that type of game can be seen together and can access that.

One of the benefits of Amazon is that it has actually increased the sale of rare and specialist books, as they are now easier to get hold of.  This does mean that the high street is a bit more boring as they concentrate on shifting volume.

Of course this will happen for PC games, even more so than for books, as the tool you are searching on is the tool you use to receive and use the content on, less so for a console which still needs to deliver a physical item for the most part.

@ozo:  Yeah, they did.  In March, shortly after the release of "The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom," their servers, only two days in, went down...  For about a week.  This prevented anyone from playing AT ALL, single player included, even if they'd bought the game.  Actually, the Pirates were the only people who could reliably play the game at this time.  Their servers going down consequently prevented anyone from playing Silent Hunter 5 I believe it was, and Assassin's Creed 2 as well, one of those titles being exclusively single player.  Again, Pirates prospered, and even proliferated during this time-span, as many people lost faith in Ubisoft and moved to illegitimate copies of the games just so they could play them reliably.  Unfortunately, this was basically a drop in the bucket for Ubisoft.  Their servers are still notorious for being the worst on the web, and many reviewers will totally advise against buying even great games from them for the PC, simply because the DRM is 'Inexcusable, Awful, Horrendous, A pure pain in the ass," and my favorite, "Total and utter crap no matter how you cut it."  I pulled those from various sites btw, real reviews, all paraphrased of course.

@RFH:  Actually...  It always needs a physical item...  The console.  Every four years or so, you have to buy a new Console in order to stay up-to-date, regardless of how the games are distributed.  So if we assume that all Game Distribution already was digital, you're paying 200-600$, with the current console set, just to buy a Digital Distribution Platform.  For that same cost, you can upgrade your computer to play games at higher resolution and with more reliable tech-support and bug-fixes, without having to waste the extra effort of flipping on the console, logging into your XBox Live/PSN Account, and waiting what's likely to be 2 times, 3 times, or maybe even 4 times as long to download a game that you could have on your PC, DL'd and Installed in 35 minutes and good to go, with a better, more intuitive control scheme, better resolution and graphics, CHANGEABLE SETTINGS IN ALMOST EVERY AREA, (!!!!!!,) and the ability to play without voice chat without feeling like you're missing out on some part of the experience, despite the people on voice chat being 90% idiots and assholes.

Edit:  Meanwhile, Powergamers and the like can just alt-tab out of the game they're playing to look up strategies, cheats, what-have-you to their game, whilst console users will have to take a step back from their game, then their console, then take a step towards the computer, and use the same process the PC Users already use anyway.

Double-Edit:  Futhermore, until Consoles get access to things like Word processors, Keyboards, Mathematics Simplification Tools, and real Web Browsers, the computer at it's core is always a superior choice, simply for secondary functions like these.  Consoles will also never run programs like MathCAD or your more advanced software that you use to make games in the first place, and again, with keyboard and word processors, modding is an impossibility unless those mods are already coming from the PC Communities.  And could you imagine trying to accurately design Particle Effects in the Cauldron using a Paddle?  What a nightmare that would be.  So beyond convenience, access, functionality, and convenience, you also have to deal with design.  Computers, and their games, aren't going anywhere just yet.

Triple-Edit:  And it's also just occurred to me, that with the current lack of accuracy in any Console Controller, you'll never have the speed necessary to play Real Time Strategy games at anything even resembling a competitive level.  RTS would have to completely die off as a genre before PC Gaming is truly in trouble, and that'll never happen.

It's also interesting to note that the latest expansion for World of Warcraft is now being sold online directly by Blizzard. Given that this is one of the very last titles that does get significant shelf space at retail stores, it's likely to have a shrinking effect on PC shelf space as well.

It's not fair to pin Elemental's issues on the PC platform, they stem from something else. If you compare PC and console platforms, all the same issues exist. You have to worry about Wii vs PS3 vs DS vs PSP, they all have different hardware and requirements and quirks. Sure, you can just target one, but you can just target Macs or certain GPU families or some other subset of the market. Blaming the technology is a cop out.

No, it's completely fair to blame Stardock (or whomever) for the failings of their product. As I said earlier with regards to PC software, you can either do it or you can't.

Yep but the current generation consoles barely even have the hardware requirements to do this. I expect the next generation console distribution channels to be fully based around digital distribution.

I didn't say all of Elemental's problems were becuase of hardware issues, but some of them certainly were. I suppose you could blame lack of testing on Stardock's part, but again, there are only so many different combinations of hardware and/or software you can feasibly test. On consoles, you have a grand total of five different systems to test on, assuming you got for all five (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, DS, PSP). Compare that to the who-knows-how-many different configurations of PCs that are out there, and the fact that two machines can be identical in every way except for one component, and a given piece of software can work on one but not the other.

Choice is not necessarily a bad thing; the PC certainly does have plenty of advantages over consoles. But sometimes the many choices in PCs can be detrimental (not all the time, but occasionally).

Again, I wasn't talking about the whole game. Yes, Stardock is at fault for most of it. But they can't test every concievable PC configuration, no company can. There are just too many choices. You can blame Stardock for most of it, but you can't blame them for the very specific issues on very specific hardware configurations. It's a problem with the non-standarization of PCs.

What exactly are the hardware requirements needed for digital distribution? What do you need besides an internet connection and some sort of memory system to store the games? All the current consoles have both of those, and the DD works fine. It might be underutilized at the moment, but they can do it.

The only real differences are the OS and the GPU family. That's where 99% of the platform differences lie. So lets see: Windows, Mac, Linux (if you count Linux), Nvidia, ATI and Intel.

It's not as different as you have been led to believe.

Again, the differences aren't as bad as they're made out to be. It's an easy cop out when the software you shipped is buggy, which is almost always not some strange combination of hardware but the fact that your developer didn't understand the api, specification or technique (s)he was working with.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, they don't have the storage capacity. Consider that most of the current gen consoles only got some type of online store feature after launch.