Pre-WoW I may have agreed with you. Now they are just turning into SOE.

Couldn't help but notice the title of the thread.

I think subscription games like WoW have mainly taken over what's left the PC gamimg market. You've got millions of PC gamers spending $240+ a year on WoW. Some don't even bother purchasing or playing other PC games.

There's also the shift by many publishers and development teams to console gaming. It's somewhat easier to work with: pre-spec'd hardware, gaming experience can be fairly consistent, and development for consoles tend to be easier to do (programming, graphics, etc.).

I think we might see 'subscription' type games becoming more of the standard in the PC market over the next few years while game publishers and developers concentrate mainly on consoles (which give them a higher profit-to-cost ratio).

Spot on. Boring dressed up in sparkles and rainbows is still boring. Unfortunately I think the majority of gatekeepers who dole out the industry cash, have attention spans more in line with sparkles and rainbows.

Graphics be damned, providing a game has the necessary symbols, my imagination can do the rest. It only took me five weeks of HOMM5 b4 I was back playing HOMM3 again, damn that game wins. The fact that I can't zoom in and float around a pile of gems never even occurs to me while I'm playing.

What bugs me is the way publishers and ditributers do business. Which is the main thing that is herting PC gameing. And there is some componies that will never truely die like blizzard and id Software. In the end I think id Software will be the longest lasting Software company, because they dont just make games. They make games, the engines that run them and they also make the tool used to make the games. The newest one to come is the Tech 5, which is going to be used in Doom4 and Rage. If you havent already do some reasure on the tech 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuTtrkVtns

PC games will never die, period! We know PC games can be modded, patched, etc... Consoles games cannot, a real shame. Worse, from playing several titles on the PS3 has me thinking, game companies making them care only for one thing, profit. There's only at the most 2 to 3 decent titles for PS3. The rest is camel dung! Even camel dung is more useful! If you played Gundam Crossfire you'd know. OMG what a $%^&* of **&^! I've changed my mind about console gaming for that one reason. I have returned the PS3 to the store and sold all the games for it for full refund.

Heck, I'll be the first to testify that PC gaming will outlast console gaming in the long run. Those console game makers are totally lame. Screw em.  

I'll support PC gaming as long as I live! (games that do the walk not just the talk)  

I'm fine with anti-cheat programs (though leave 'em off my darn single player games, I wanna cheat with CE solo!). The problem I have is this: Why do I not have to validate my 360 games (Yes, it is possible to find bootleg software) or DS games (Even more bootleggable), but my PC games are such a pain to jump through hoops versus the push'n'play.

The problem with PC games is that people make them too often based entirely on graphics, and not enough on gameplay. Also, people don't like to use as many of the optimizing features as are possible, because they almost always alienate those with different hardware.

Or to put it another way, the value you place on his art is significantly greater than the value that anyone else places on it. How is capitalism undermining that? All it means is that you will keep those paintings rather than sell them, since you benefit more from them than anyone else, and hence won't sell them. Thus the person who derives the most enjoyment out of those paintings ends up owning them!


No, this is not the case. Yes, you can argue that PC games are a work of art, but their worth has everything to do with the "economic value" of the game, because they are games - that is, items sold for an entertainment value. The price attached to each game will typically be the amount deemed to maximise the profit from that game, which is highly correlated to the amount that will maximise the sales revenue for that particular game. This then results in a price that a large number of people are prepared to pay for the game, from which you can obtain it's worth. To argue that a game that sells for $10 is really worth $100 because it is a piece of art is flawed. It may be that some of those people paying $10 for that game would be prepared to pay $100 for it, but if the game was priced at $100 you wouldn't sell as many because only a few people are prepared to pay that much, hence what you are then talking about is simply the worth of that game to an individual (which is different from the actual value of that game overall). To put it a bit more clearly, the "value" of the game, ignoring cost of sales and a few other minor considerations, is simply the price of that game times by the number of people who will buy it at that price. So the worth of the game has everything to do with the "economic value" of it.


Actually "large public companies (like EA)" exist to make profit. Their stock goes up if investors believe the likely profit that they will make has increased. So their focus isn't about growth, it is about profit, and the more of it the better. It's no good doubling your sales if it comes at the cost of halving your overall profit - then your stock would go down, not up (unless it is as part of a more specialised strategy such as a new firm entering the market, or other cases - e.g. boost your sales revenue to establish yourself in the market, and once established you can afford to increase your prices and hence profit margins without your sales revenue suffering too much, thanks to your strong presence). Obviously if you can increase your profit it is good, but growth by itself is typically used in reference to a companies size/sales revenue, not profit growth.

Slightly more theoretically, you could argue that shareholders are only interested in the money they gain from their shares in the company, which in turn will come from dividends. Thus the share price will be based off the amount of dividends it is expected the company can provide (and then capital gains/losses will also be realised if the company increases/decreases expectations of the dividends it will be paying). Now dividends typically come from the profit that the company makes (that is, the profit after tax is either reinvested back into the company, or is paid out to shareholders). Now let's say you have 2 companies expected to pay out the same proportion of their profits as dividends indefinitely; The one company has a net profit ratio of 20%, and sales revenue of $100,000, meaning (ignoring taxes to keep things a bit simpler) it will have profits of 20k. The other firm however has pursued growth, and has sales revenue of $1,000,000. The only problem is that it has a profit ratio of just 1%, and it is not expected to be able to raise this figure at all unless it is at the cost of sales revenue.

Now as a shareholder, which would you prefer, the company who is selling loads and loads, but making hardly any money on it (in turn meaning it hardly gives any money out in dividends), or the company which is much smaller, but which has higher levels of profit, in turn meaning it pays out more in dividends? That is, would you rather receive say $100 a year, or $50 a year? Obviously unless you're expecting those figures to then change over future years to change the situation, you'd prefer $100 a year, hence meaning the share price of the smaller but more profitable firm will be higher than the share price of the larger less profitable firm. There are a ton of simplifications with this example, but it's mainly to provide an illustration of how profit rather than growth is the key factor in a firms share price.



Huh? PC games simply do work in this model, hence why so much money is made off them. Produce a good game, make people aware of it, and chances are it will sell. Providing you didn't spend a massive fortune making that game, it means you'll likely make profit. Make loads of bad games, and people will be less likely to buy your games, meaning you're more likely to make a loss. To put it another way, let's say you're making PC games (using a capitalist model). You want to maximise your revenue while minimising your costs. How to maximise your revenue? Produce a good game (gets good reviews+recommendations, makes people more likely to buy it), Raise awareness of that game (e.g. marketing), produce a game people will actually want to play (it's no good producing an amazing game that costs a fortune if it's for a ridiculously small niche market), etc.;
For costs, don't spend too much on having amazing graphics (unless you think that the increased sales from the improved graphics will outweigh the increased costs), don't introduce other features/bells+whistles if hardly anyone is going to care about them in the first place and they cost alot to do, etc. etc.

The end result is that companies end up having to listen to gamers and what they want, since this in turn helps them make more money. The good firms who keep on adapting+giving gamers what they want end up doing well, the bad firms who don't end up doing worse. There are obviously some time lags and exceptions (DRM is probably a good example atm - something which companies pay for and which has the result of decreasing their sales, but which fortunately some firms seem to be realising is a bad thing and are phasing it out or not using it at all), but on the whole it is a very good framework.



As explained above, this has little to do with it really. The key question is can PC games provide PROFIT for companies. The amount of profit opportunities will then affect the size of the PC gaming industry, but there will always (well, in the forseeable future) be such potential for profits. I'll just go through it again quickly; let's say that hypothetically there are no more growth prospects in PC gaming - that is, the market is expected to shrink over the coming years, and the big companies expect their market share will also fall slightly. By your reasoning this seems to suggest they will leave/PC gaming will be dying. Let's say that all these big companies like EA do then leave. What happens? Well if no-ones producing all of the games that they would have been, yet there is still the demand for those games, all you need is for some new company to come along and take their place producing these games that people want, and they can make a ton of money! So long as money can be made off it at a suitable rate of return, such companies will therefore exist. As for whether big companies themselves will specifically exist, that depends on other issues, such as barriers to entry in the market/heavy sunk costs for making a game, economies of scale, etc., as to whether you're likely to end up in a market dominated by a few big firms or lots of little ones.


So long as profits can be made from the PC gaming market, then if you're a large development studio you would be foolish to ignore it completely and focus only on one market if you could have 2. Bear in mind just because you're a "large" company, it doesn't mean you can't just have a tiny division of your large company with just 1 person in it, who works on a particular area. So for example if you employ 1000 people, you could always have 399 focusing on consoles and 1 on PC gaming if you believed the profits from PC gaming are tiny and the ones from consoles are massive, but that you suffer diminishing returns to scale from work/investment in consoles and pc gaming meaning that 1 person will make more money for you working in pc gaming than in consoles.




Who is making this artistic valuation? I mean a painting might sell for millions of pounds because there is only 1 of that painting, and there are a few people with ridiculous amounts of money who place a high value on it. As such, any painting will have a value placed on it as being equal to what it will sell for. With a game of course you can produce multiple copies of the same game, hence why I don't follow what you mean with this "artistic valuation". Either you mean the valuation of the game in terms of what it would sell for, or the valuation of it to a particular individual (how much it is worth to them). Either way, it wouldn't affect the fundamental capital framekwork used, which will always be followed regardless of whether PC gaming is dominated by lots of small firms or a few large firms. Would you care to explain how you see a market functioning based on individuals valuations of items, as opposed to the market valuations? (since one extreme, where a company is able to sell it's product to each person separately at a price equal to the value they place on it, or the "artistic value" for that person, just isn't viable)



I'm curious, why not? It depends on what you mean by not being able to make it "work" of course (work in terms of being possible, or being profitable, since there is a massive difference), but it would be quite possible for WoW to be available on consoles. It's not presumably because it's not deemed to be sufficiently profitable however (you'd have the issue of commission to the console creators, and the considerable expense of making the game run on the relevant consoles along with adapting the controls/interface slightly, which if you're only going to be targeting a small userbase likely isn't worth the effort).

Not that I disagree with some of the points that you make, of course, I just took issue with a few of them .

Well with anyone who is employed, you would hope the value that they provide through labour is greater than the amount you are paying them, or else you'd be better off not employing them/employing someone else!


Hardly. You seem to be wanting some idealised world where subjective/notional concepts of value are used (i.e. an individuals valuation of something). You fail to give a single example of how this is possible though, most likely because it just isn't possible (only in extremely theoretical scenarios could you have such a situation where an individuals valuation of an item is always used, as I explained later on)


This suggests there's a fairly fundamental gap in your understanding of the stock market. I'll spell it out again; assuming that the ability to vote (as a shareholder) is of no value to you, then buying a share in a company will entitle you to capital gains/losses, and dividends. Capital gains/losses are based on what is expected to happen for the firms future dividends, since the dividends themselves are the only direct source of money (in this case I'm using dividends to encompass all forms of payout policy on the part of the company to save use of lots of different terms and encorporating all the varients+differences etc.). Hence a firms value will only be affected as a result of these expected dividends being affected.

Here's a really simple example: You have a company earning $100 in every quarter (to use the figures you gave above). Lets say the company is expected to earn $100 in every quarter indefinitely (you can also do a more realistic example such as that it will grow by x%, or stop after t years, using the exact same analysis, but for now lets keep things simple). The company has 100,000 shares in circulation. What would you expect the price of those shares to be? The present value (discounted at the risk-adjusted rate for that company) of that stream of future payments divided by the number of shares. THAT is "stock market 101" since you can't really get much more basic than it.

Now, as to stock prices mainly only going up on speculation and growth, again you are missing the reason behind all this. A stock price may go up from speculation IF that speculation is that this future stream of profits will increase! Meanwhile growth may increase the price IF it is expected to translate into a growth in this future stream of profits! Speculation that this future stream of profits is likely to fall, or alternatively growth in sales revenue that is expected to cause the future stream of profits to fall will both cause the stock price to decrease, not increase.

"PC games simply do work in this model, hence why so much money is made off them"

To say no you'd have to be able to show that no company has been able to make a profit from the PC gaming market. I find that pretty hard to believe, so before you go further maybe you should go and check the statistics on that first. You also seem to be getting in a muddle about the improtance of the size of the console market relative to the PC market; the PC market could be 1/10th the size of the console market, and a capitalist framework of profit maximisation would still work for it (while the market composition of it would depend on the factors I already outlined as to whether you see a few big firms or lots of small ones). Even if you had various market imperfections for which a pure market economy system wouldn't be ideal, again you'd still want to be using this underlying profit maximisation framework, you'd just be looking at correcting those various imperfections to make it more efficient.


(just a note, if you're going to say something like this, it helps to follow it up with a reason why, rather than just saying where you believe I am correct and missing out where you believe I'm incorrect)


"Who is making this artistic valuation?"

So just to clarify, the developers wouldn't be interested in maximising profits? That is rather than sell their game at price x and gain $100,000 they'd prefer to sell it at price y and gain $50,000, because they place a higher value on their game than many other people?! It is also here that your painting analogy is staring to get a bit flaky, since a game is produced countless times, whereas a painting is only ever done once. So the value of a game (from the perspective of a company) will be the sum of profits it is expected to yield at the profit maximising price; that then means that for an "artistic valuation" to be applied to it that is different to this, the actual value of that game would fall, hence meaning you would be selling your game for less than it's worth (or to try and stretch the painting analogy to fit, you could sell a painting for $100, but instead you choose to sell it for $50). Another way to try and fit the analogy would be for those developers to think 'well, what would 1 copy of this game be worth to me', and then use that price (assuming it's above the profit maximising price), but that again isn't looking at the whole picture.



I fail to see how all of your 'credentials' prove that you couldn't take WoW to a console. Let's go through the various parts. Is a MMO(/MMORPG) subscription based model possible on a console? Yes, there have already been several (not very successful) examples of this being done.
Can a game be updated on a console? Again, yes.
Can RPGs from the PC be ported to the console? Yes

So, how is it impossible to bring out WoW on the console again? Remember, you're not arguing about affordibility here, you're arguing that it is impossible to make WoW work on a console to a "playable degree". Now from a playable point of view, if a game with as many menus+different controls such as morrowind can be ported from the PC to the console, I fail to see how something with a simpler user-interface+gameplay mechanics such as WoW couldn't be.

I don't wanna play a MMORPG on a console, though. MMO's are better on PC, where I can look up stuff in .5 seconds.

This is such a lame topic!  PC Gaming will go away when computers go away.  As that won't be happening anytime in the near future anyone that thinks PC gaming is dying is just plain diluted.

Actually it's you who have failed to see something despite me pointing it out fairly early on; It's fair to assume diminishing returns to scale wrt developing a PC game and the no. of developers/game designers required to be working on it. It's also fair to assume that is half the people drop out of a market and no-one new comes to fill their place, the market share of those remaining will increase, as well as various other effects, such as them being able to make much more money for the same thing (to view it more simply, if you produce a game at the moment, and half of the games you're competing against suddenly are removed, your sales are going to increase)
As such to argue that EA would move every single person into consoles and not have anyone working on PC games is highly unlikely since they are large enough that the specialisation gains that might make that a viable/likely strategy for a very small group of developers won't be such a factor.


This is no doubt another argument of yours borne from a lack of understanding of the true reasons behind such decisions. I've already gone through this once, but here it is again for you: The more graphics in a game the higher the cost of making it, but the more likely people are to buy it (you'd buy a game with amazing graphics over an identical one but without good graphics for example). The company will therefore estimate the point at which their profits will be maximised (too much spent on resources and the extra cost borne from a 'graphic improvement' won't be compensated fully by an increase in sales as a result of that, so you do it up to the point where the marginal cost is equal to the marginal benefit). So no, spiralling costs is, as with all your other arguments so far, not going to cause all big companies to suddenly leave the market.

Oh and since you keep contradicting yourself (one moment large public companies can't survive, next moment they can):





So to summarise, you're saying that as a general rule large public companies won't be able to survive, but private ones will? You can't claim both that large public companies won't survive, and in the same breath say that you're not saying that !


No, there's absolutely nothing wrong with hybrids, and I applaud them since it means much more choice for everyone. A hybrid will be made if the costs of making/porting it are deemed lower than the profit that will be brought in as a result of it (from increased sales). So for example if you own a PC but not an Xbox360 you can still play mass effect (if you don't mind all the DRM) thanks to it being on the PC as well as the 360. If however you view such games as "bastards" then you don't have to ever get them. As usual, what gamers want is what matters here, since a company who wants to maximise their profits will be looking to satisfy their demands.


Nope, both arguments are flawed. You've still failed to present any reason for publicly traded companies suddenly suffering an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and so arguing that publicly traded (PC gaming focused) companies are dying is just as flawed. As long as profit can be made from the market, these companies will remain. And that will be the case unless some phenominal new technology comes around that completely obsoletes the computer, in which case it will then start dying.

Feel free to insert "straw men" into your post as many times as you like, but as long as you try and argue that publicly traded companies are dying wrt PC gaming (and failing to present evidence to support this), I'm going to keep on disagreeing.

If you wanna make sure it dies, go do that.