PC gamers....why must we always get shafted?

[GoaThief]

The same with Metro 2033; you can force higher anti-aliasing, field of view for improved graphics and tessellation and v-sync to correct 3D appearance and performance (running any game in 3D, especially Metro 2033, is a major system hog).

Hello again, you've still provided exactly fuck and all evidence. Here's Metro 2033 running on my rig;


I'll accept your forthcoming apology. Still seems that running the game my entire system is using less than 4gb of RAM, even whilst using Fraps. Now I accept that the total could well go over 4gb but not 8 unless I'm doing something silly in photoshop or vegas or similar. You don't need more than 8gb of RAM for gaming.

 

[Vault101]

Are you shopping in dedicated gaming stores like GAME / GameStop? Because from my experience here in Germany: Those stores suck even more ass if you are a PC gamer. In my city we have 2 big electronics distributor (Saturn and MediaMarkt), both with a PC games section at least as big as the one for each console (Media Markt) or bigger (Saturn). Ironically, both of them are in spitting distance to a GameStop store...
Actually one of them did recently a big sell on Sony stuff because it just collected dust and (from explanations of a friend who works in the store) the manager decided that it would make more sense to sell them and half or less than sending them back.

I'm In Australia...the (now dead) GAME had a pretty pathetic selection for all platforms

we have EB games instead of gamestop...though EB is owned by gamestop (I think) it still stocks a more or less decent PC section, our other major electronics retailer is JB HI FI which also stocks a pretty good PC selection

 

[Atmos Duality]

You don't need more than 8gb of RAM for gaming.

I've NEVER needed more than 4GB, and that's what my last *laptop* had.

 

[Dangit2019]

I'd rather focus on the double standard that rears its ugly head every so often, like today. PC Gamers upset that a game is being released on another system that they don't have? = Entitled Brats

Console game released on another system that console owner doesn't have? = Eat a dick Nintendo.

Because as Yahtzee said, your mum will only buy you a single console, and if it turns out you bought the wrong one, you're screwed.

Meanwhile, in PC land.

TF2 was released in the console's Orange box, you know, it just doesn't have any community because of the Xbox's habbit of online communities dying at 4 years.

 

[ResonanceSD]

I'd rather focus on the double standard that rears its ugly head every so often, like today. PC Gamers upset that a game is being released on another system that they don't have? = Entitled Brats

Console game released on another system that console owner doesn't have? = Eat a dick Nintendo.

Because as Yahtzee said, your mum will only buy you a single console, and if it turns out you bought the wrong one, you're screwed.

Meanwhile, in PC land.

TF2 was released in the console's Orange box, you know, it just doesn't have any community because of the Xbox's habbit of online communities dying at 4 years.

Actually it's because the XBLA team didn't allow valve to push through patches without charging them 30,000 a pop.

 

[Souplex]

Do you guys remember when Bungie declared they were shutting down the Halo 2 servers and a bunch of people got together for a last hurrah, but some people refused to finish their matches, turning what was planned to be a glorious farewell into a a mockery? This is sort of like that.

Developers jumped off the PC ship because it was too big a hassle to develop for PC with everyone having varying hardware and other issues.
Players jumped off the PC ship when it became too big of a pain to try to get their games to work.
Developers jumped ship when the piracy problem got really bad.
Players jumped ship when it became too expensive to game on a PC.
Developers jumped ship when console hardware got to a point where you honestly didn't really need to go any further.
Players jumped ship when they saw that all the once PC exclusive developers had gone console.
Developers jumped ship when they saw there were no customers left on the PC ship and more pirates were closing in.
A few people on the ship wondered why nobody wanted to jump on their sinking boat full of holes in shark-infested waters while pirates stayed close by.

Spoiler: This metaphor reminds me of a joke!

A man is standing on his roof during a flood as the waters rise around him.
A raft floats by.
"Get in!"
"You guys can go on, I have faith that god will save me."
The raft leaves and the water gets up to the man's ankles.
A speedboat comes by.
"Get in!"
"Don't worry guys, god will save me, you go look for other survivors.'
The speedboat leaves and the water gets up to the man's torso.
A helicopter hovers above the man.
"Climb up!"
"I'm fine dude, other people need more saving than I do, god will save me."
The helicopter leaves and the man drowns.
In heaven...
"How come you didn't save me god?"
"I sent you a raft, a speedboat and a helicopter. Why didn't you get on?"

 

[Stavros Dimou]

Do you guys remember when Bungie declared they were shutting down the Halo 2 servers and a bunch of people got together for a last hurrah, but some people refused to finish their matches, turning what was planned to be a glorious farewell into a a mockery? This is sort of like that.

Developers jumped off the PC ship because it was too big a hassle to develop for PC with everyone having varying hardware and other issues.
Players jumped off the PC ship when it became too big of a pain to try to get their games to work.
Developers jumped ship when the piracy problem got really bad.
Players jumped ship when it became too expensive to game on a PC.
Developers jumped ship when console hardware got to a point where you honestly didn't really need to go any further.
Players jumped ship when they saw that all the once PC exclusive developers had gone console.
Developers jumped ship when they saw there were no customers left on the PC ship and more pirates were closing in.
A few people on the ship wondered why nobody wanted to jump on their sinking boat full of holes in shark-infested waters while pirates stayed close by.

Spoiler: This metaphor reminds me of a joke!

A man is standing on his roof during a flood as the waters rise around him.
A raft floats by.
"Get in!"
"You guys can go on, I have faith that god will save me."
The raft leaves and the water gets up to the man's ankles.
A speedboat comes by.
"Get in!"
"Don't worry guys, god will save me, you go look for other survivors.'
The speedboat leaves and the water gets up to the man's torso.
A helicopter hovers above the man.
"Climb up!"
"I'm fine dude, other people need more saving than I do, god will save me."
The helicopter leaves and the man drowns.
In heaven...
"How come you didn't save me god?"
"I sent you a raft, a speedboat and a helicopter. Why didn't you get on?"

The Halo series on PC fiasco is because Microsoft thought they could force people to buy Windows Vista,a crap OS,just to play Halo 2.
Microsoft made Halo 2 a Vista exclusive to force gamers to buy this crappy OS,because it was so crap that nobody was buying it,but what broke their plans was the fact that someone found a way to make Halo 2 play on Windows XP.
Since Microsoft realized they couldn't force people to buy their series of unrelated expensive products for playing Halo,they stopped releasing the series on PC as a punishment.

The rest of your arguments on the list are so one-sided,biased,unproved and generalized that I won't spend my precious time answering them.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Steam sales!

This above anything makes me a smug fucker.

 

[vun]

to be honest I'm not actually this upset..

anywhere"data caps"...they are a thing

and by depressing I meant the sections are smaller and don't have as many..but to be fair here (In Aus) the stores still stock an ok section

Are you shopping in dedicated gaming stores like GAME / GameStop? Because from my experience here in Germany: Those stores suck even more ass if you are a PC gamer. In my city we have 2 big electronics distributor (Saturn and MediaMarkt), both with a PC games section at least as big as the one for each console (Media Markt) or bigger (Saturn). Ironically, both of them are in spitting distance to a GameStop store...
Actually one of them did recently a big sell on Sony stuff because it just collected dust and (from explanations of a friend who works in the store) the manager decided that it would make more sense to sell them and half or less than sending them back.

I was at the Oxford Circus HMV store in London, their PC selection was about 10 times smaller than a single console selection.
Obviously consoles sell more because they're cheaper and easier to use for gaming than a PC, or used to be at least, and it's more casual and relaxing to play from your couch on your TV.
Yes, you can do that with a PC, but a lot of the console gamers neither know how nor want to go through the process of hooking their PC up to their TV and all that jazz. For a PC wiz it might be a breeze, but shockingly a large part of gamers just want to play games and often won't bother much with forums or gathering technical knowledge.

The easy to use console has a broader appeal and will sell more so obviously more games will be made to cater to the console market because that's where the money is. Of course this shafts a lot of hardcore PC gamers, but for some developers they simply aren't a big enough market and they don't see any reason to cater to them when catering to console gamers will earn them twice the amount of money. Gaming is a money business, the big names will go towards the money.

 

[Entitled]

Saying that AAA developers are no longer supporting the PC, is like saying that children are no longer playing tag (based on your now 20 year old son's playing record). They still do, in their their earlier phase of development.

Perhaps inadvertently, but that's an analogy that belittles PC gamers.
Seems topical and ironic, given the recent shitstorm...

No, it's not inadvertent, I'm belittling PC gaming, because PC gaming is little.

If you think that this is inherently bad, if you treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, then I have a C.S. Lewis quote for you.

Yes, PC gaming is little. It is an early phase for developers that most of them outgrow. And it still has many of it's own adventages anyways: It means developers listening to their small niche fandom, caring about fulfilling the depth of their obscure interests, instead of just lowering everything to the lowest common denominator. It means giving potential features to those few who are willing to learn them, instead of making everything equally accessible.

In an entertainment industry, "big" doesn't translate to "good". The big console industry has it's own benefits, games made from hundreds of thousands of work hours, large 3D universes getting constructed, with the best actors providing their voices renowned writers writing the plots, but it has it's drawbacks: Everything needs to be easy a guided tour, making sure that several million people will "get it", you can't rely on the fans alone to support it, but average people from the street, so eventually success will depend more on marketing, than on the actual fedback from the audience.

 

[thesilentman]

Amount of RAM and type of HDD matter a lot. More, better RAM and a SSD will load environments faster, hold more in short term memory to decrease pop-in and handle more entities at any given time. If you're building a game for a console, you know exactly what hardware you have to work with. If you're building a game for a PC, you can't be sure how many entities you can have rendered, how large world spaces can be to keep load times short, or how much you can have calculating in a single moment. You need to make your game run on a low setting and a high setting. On a console, you need one game.

Lol amount of RAM and your HDD probably matter the least when it comes to gaming. Sure, an SSD will load environments faster, but otherwise makes no difference, and system RAM doesn't do much at all once you have over 4GB. You're talking out of your ass.

Go research 64 bit Windows. I'm waiting. That's right, the RAM cap for Win7 Ultimate is 192 Gigs. RAM does matter, hence more = better. Go research how system processes work while you're at it. And hard drives? Does matter.

OT- Vault, us PC gamers have the benefits outweigh the negatives. Not a bad thing . I believe Jim said something about this...

 

[Atmos Duality]

No, it's not inadvertent, I'm belittling PC gaming, because PC gaming is little.

Not anymore.

If you think that this is inherently bad, if you treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, then I have a C.S. Lewis quote for you.

I get the gist of what you're saying here, but be careful with what you belittle and why.
I've had a lifetime of people shoving "guilt by association" down my throat, and the popular media loves it too.

(hell, even the news on this website is starting to do that now)

Yes, PC gaming is little. It is an early phase for developers that most of them outgrow. And it still has many of it's own adventages anyways: It means developers listening to their small niche fandom, caring about fulfilling the depth of their obscure interests, instead of just lowering everything to the lowest common denominator. It means giving potential features to those few who are willing to learn them, instead of making everything equally accessible.

Precious few games ever want to approach depth, period. Doesn't matter how niche' or mainstream their market is. Usually, it just takes too much effort on the part of the developer for too little payoff.

You might argue the potential for depth is greater in a smaller market, but potential is a pretty meaningless word outside of Physics.

Ion Storm was created in the late 90s by John Romero and a lot of developers who genuinely wanted to do more in their medium. The company's slogan was "Design is Law".

And to this day, I will swear that few gaming companies ever showed such potential as Ion Storm, on the company's goals alone.

You know what two in/famous games Ion Storm made?
Daikatana and Deus Ex.

By Ion Storm's own premise, those games had the same potential, yet the difference in quality is night and day.

It's only obvious to us in hindsight why things went down the way they did, but at the time, it all existed only as potential.

In an entertainment industry, "big" doesn't translate to "good". The big console industry has it's own benefits, games made from hundreds of thousands of work hours, large 3D universes getting constructed, with the best actors providing their voices renowned writers writing the plots, but it has it's drawbacks: Everything needs to be easy a guided tour, making sure that several million people will "get it", you can't rely on the fans alone to support it, but average people from the street, so eventually success will depend more on marketing, than on the actual feedback from the audience.

Big may not translate to good, but neither does small.
Lets not forget that "exploitation" exists in small/niche' markets too.

 

[Souplex]

Do you guys remember when Bungie declared they were shutting down the Halo 2 servers and a bunch of people got together for a last hurrah, but some people refused to finish their matches, turning what was planned to be a glorious farewell into a a mockery? This is sort of like that.

Developers jumped off the PC ship because it was too big a hassle to develop for PC with everyone having varying hardware and other issues.
Players jumped off the PC ship when it became too big of a pain to try to get their games to work.
Developers jumped ship when the piracy problem got really bad.
Players jumped ship when it became too expensive to game on a PC.
Developers jumped ship when console hardware got to a point where you honestly didn't really need to go any further.
Players jumped ship when they saw that all the once PC exclusive developers had gone console.
Developers jumped ship when they saw there were no customers left on the PC ship and more pirates were closing in.
A few people on the ship wondered why nobody wanted to jump on their sinking boat full of holes in shark-infested waters while pirates stayed close by.

Spoiler: This metaphor reminds me of a joke!

A man is standing on his roof during a flood as the waters rise around him.
A raft floats by.
"Get in!"
"You guys can go on, I have faith that god will save me."
The raft leaves and the water gets up to the man's ankles.
A speedboat comes by.
"Get in!"
"Don't worry guys, god will save me, you go look for other survivors.'
The speedboat leaves and the water gets up to the man's torso.
A helicopter hovers above the man.
"Climb up!"
"I'm fine dude, other people need more saving than I do, god will save me."
The helicopter leaves and the man drowns.
In heaven...
"How come you didn't save me god?"
"I sent you a raft, a speedboat and a helicopter. Why didn't you get on?"

The Halo series on PC fiasco is because Microsoft thought they could force people to buy Windows Vista,a crap OS,just to play Halo 2.
Microsoft made Halo 2 a Vista exclusive to force gamers to buy this crappy OS,because it was so crap that nobody was buying it,but what broke their plans was the fact that someone found a way to make Halo 2 play on Windows XP.
Since Microsoft realized they couldn't force people to buy their series of unrelated expensive products for playing Halo,they stopped releasing the series on PC as a punishment.
Since I responded to your historical parallel incorrectly, and have no grounds to refute the commonly accepted facts, I'm going to resort to belittling you instead.

The Halo 2 example was them shutting of the servers for the console version, try reading the posts of people you respond to please.

 

[SnowBurst]

piracy simple as it fucks pc games up cuz the devs cant get money but if devs made half decent games nowadays not as many would pirate because as if assassins creed 1 was worth the price it was so repetitive it was like de ja vu after every cut scene...

 

[Exius Xavarus]

Actually, I think the controls of a mouse and keyboard are infuriating. I can easily use a controller. I love my PS3, and I'll always prefer console gaming to PC gaming. To me, it's just more fun.

 

[The Lunatic]

PC gaming will always provide a better experience.

There's a few hiccups, and hopefully developers will learn that PC gamers won't buy your games if you're unfair to them, however, regardless of these, the PC is still able to provide a better experience in pretty much all ways.