I've heard this before, and it just seems like a whiny thing to say. Can they really expect companies to not cut costs? Should Dell ship all desktops with "mainstream" graphics cards that their users didn't ask for and don't need, just so that maybe, maybe they'll decided to pick up a copy of UT2007 with Excel 2007?

If anything's crippling the PC gaming market, it's the need to add pricey high end components (starting with an extra $150+ for your video card) to a functional desktop PC.

Yeah the type of consumer who is going to buy a Dell with an integrated graphics chip probably is not going to have any interest in UT2007. They want their PopCap games and maybe some WoW.

As consoles like the 360 and PS3 increase the available horsepower to developers, they have less reason to rollout a AAA title like UT2007 on PC. Why do it when you have a nice installed base of console hardware that is standardized - less headaches to worry about with hardware incompatibilities, etc.. I'd hate to see it happen as I think of UT as a PC series, but the day may come soon when the latest id or Epic tile only comes to console.

QFT

That's a poor assumption to make. How many kids in the DOS era got their gaming fix on Daddy's home office PC? How many kids are getting sent off to college with new Dell laptops that they'd probably put games on if the damn things could run any? Just because the person that purchases the machine didn't intend it for games does not mean that there isn't someone that would game on it if they could.

When I was 10 years old, my parents bought a computer that wasn't "for games", but how quickly do you think Wolfenstein got put on it? Think about the 10 year olds today that can't do that. Think that impacts PC gaming's future audience?

Damn lazy kids nowadays. When I was 13 I mowed lawns so I could buy a soundblaster card for the PC my dad brought home, cuz he wouldn't. All for Wing Commander. And it was worth it.

/had to buy my own Nintendo too, and both of my Amigas
//uphill both ways to the store to pick them up, etc

Ever heard of Gears of War?

I really think the problem is the cost. For the price of 2-3 consoles, you can have a decent gaming computer for about 2 years. Then you need to drop about $1k again... and again...

And what do you get for your trouble? Hardware conflicts, buggy software, draconian copy protection, cheaters and hackers. Do the availability of mods slightly better graphics outweigh the bad side? I'm not so sure anymore.

If I didn't have friends that only played PC games online, I think I would have no trouble sticking to only the Xbox 360.

Yeah, and Kia is to blame for the US not having 120MPH speed limits on freeways.

I'd pay more than $400 for a system that could do that.

On the other hand, would Quake or UT or Half-Life be where they are today without the mod scene?

It won't be long before we see mods hit console games. Sometime after user-made games (XNA, etc) gain a foothold. It's long been rumored and whispered about, and you can bet money that it's a feature of a future update to Xbox Live (maybe for the next Xbox system).

Well, the Mod/indie scene wasn't really what it is now when it first started out, either. Give it time.

I'm with Legion and Podunk. I already waxed rhapsodic in another venue about why I'm basically a console girl. Which pisses me off, BTW. I used to have a box oozing hertz from every pore with a joystick you could pilot the Enterprise with. I waited impatiently for the lastest releases in Wingcommander, Mechwarrior, Starcraft, and several other franchises. But when the rubber hits the road these days I do not have the time, energy, or financial resources to keep up with the PC Joneses. And even if they did, those games that I loved are nowhere to be found.

Well the difference is you would already have a gaming rig. No need to buy a console.

********
Another thing working against pcgaming is the rise of laptops. Laptops outsell desktops and you can't upgrade the graphics in most laptops. It would be a coup if ATI/Nvidia could release an external gpu for $100-$150 that you could just plug in.

The other difference now with pcs is that there's no need to upgrade your pc for anything other than gaming. BAck in 1995 if you upgraded your pc you really some performance improvements on the busines/home use side things. Not just gaming.

The rise of the 'net may have made piracy bigger, but it's also made developers lazier. There was never this many patches back in the day. DOS too for all it sound issues and what not, never had to contend with all these programs running in the background and 30 versions of vid cards. I think DOS may have been better for games in some ways.

And lastly consoles have always been bigger for gaming than pcs as far as I can tell. So it seems logical the more expensive games get the more they need to be on consoles. Couple that with piracy, MS pushing the Xbox/360 and developers pushing $600 vidcards and software conflicts and all these different vid cards on the market (altho only 2 manufactures) and it's no wonder pcgaming has slowed down. Now the twist is you'll need Vista and an expensive DX10 card to run the great games in all their glory later this year.

Now if only consoles could satisfy all my gaming needs.

Well for an engine that costs in the range of 350k USD + a 3% percentage of the revenue I sure can expect a properly optimized one (costs for Unreal engine 2 at the time of writing this).
We can have a game like Doom 3 and Unreal Championship 2 on a 733 Mhz CPU with 64 megs of unified RAM and a Geforce 3 Level Graphics card. On a PC with two times the specs of this, we still won't have a decent gaming experience.
Epic as of late has been increasing the requirements of their engine by quite some levels for every release, because they relied on the manufacturers to deliver decent material. They should have come to the conclusion that they rather start optimizing their codebase when a decent gaming machine was in the price range of 1100+ USD.

Instead they sit back and try to blame intel for their lousy performance as if they never heard of graceful degradation. Epic is milking its licencees and at the same time is cutting them of from a large percentage of their target market. You cannot produce a multimillion seller when you do not even have a large enough install base to get to such levels.

He talks about the rise of development costs, yet if you look at the price of their current engine iteration, they themselves are a big part of said rise.

And his answer when being asked about the Stardock way of protecting their games, shows they really don't care either way helping the situation,
but that rather belongs in the copy protection thread:

This interview had my bloodpressure rise quite a bit in the morning

Something like this?