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PC market decline? Bad for them good for us.

Some of the games conversions for PC don't sell as well as the original console versions. PC market can't seem to cover the game production expenses. Why?

Colm McAndrews, Blogger

July 29, 2009

4 Min Read

During the "classic" age of interaction making games wasn't expensive and the customers were fewer... everything was perfectly balanced, it was like in ancient Greece, a utopia politika.


Ever since the technology race between ID and EPIC began, videogames costs began swelling up and to cover these they had to appeal to vaster and vaster slices of population.


It seems that a healthy market is one that's able to get more and more expensive and maintain itself. Consoles seem to be right born for this. A console game is easily recognizable for its few crisms of accessiblity, action and gratuitous entertainment. Most console players already know the new game is addressed to them and will gladly give in to that invitation and purchase it. So that costs can puff up all they want, there's players ready to support the system. Console games are becoming more and more accessible, more and more hollywood-like, more and more flat to please the ever growing market.


It seems PC market is unable to sustain this, just like a nation that gives too much power to a capitalist aristocracy will sooner or later blow up in revolution and bloody beheading. When a console game is made also for PC the costs are again tragically swollen, plus the game is made for flat-minded gamers, like the console ones. Some publishers don't know the PC gaming community is completely different from the other one, they still deem the players as homogeneous as the console folks, folks who will buy anything. But PC fails giving them fair profit. HEnce many form this conclusion: PC market is plagued by crime and it's in decline. 


Why does this happen? We already mentioned the HOW, the swollen costs. But why can't PC market cover these? 


--- pause to allow everyone to form some conjectures, waiting-room jingle airs ---


Everybody formed his/her own opinion? Well keep reading, if it's at least similar to the following ones you were right... the solutions are implicitly mentioned in the above lines, mind you, the following is just to single them out.


*** 


There's two basical reasons for pc market to reject the blister-swollen system of growing costs=dwindling complexity=games for kids.


1)PC gaming community is ipso facto not well-blended, a Personal Computer is an object that the most diverse types of human possess, people who have one at home(or office) for the most disparate reasons, and since they have one, they decide to buy a game. So naturally because of this sheer diversity of lives and mentalities, the community is formed by at least 10 different NICHES, making it numerically IMPOSSIBLE to reach too high sales for games that are for example extremely polarized into ACTION and ARCADE.(I only buy adventures and simulations, for example)


2)This one is simpler. People can(and have the right to) download the game if they don't have enough money/don't feel like buying it. They had to buy the peripherals to run them, or they're simply trying to pay off something else, or they're humble proletarians, it's a RIGHT to have something for free, it should be legalized so that people with low pay-checks are allowed to download 5+ games a year. But in the case of a person who just bought the new Geforce, downloading a game whose programmers and publishers SURELY already received their dirty mazoola from video card manifacturers definitely isn't a crime... is it, engines-making underworld gomorra/mafia?


Both reasons should explain the market sales that sometimes are weak if there's more than 2 great games in a month. But the most important point is: is it a bad thing? 


Of course it's not. Both reasons serve the same purpose as a speed-limit signal on a highway. They tell the driver to slow down. If the community is formed of small niches, and if some people rightfully download the new game(and i repeat, we must defend the rights of people who can't afford games but still wanna have fun), you're advised to bite the brakes, PIPE DOWN those costs, so that with lower production costs you may still get a high profits off your game and you don't have to make something for everyone, so that quality itself doesn't get choked to death.


That's why piracy is bad for them and good for us: because it sauvegardes quality by preventing bloated prices.


So fellow gamer of the nigh-apocalypse age, turn that mule frown downside up and get down to business!. 


Over & out. 

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