13th March 2006, 12:11 AM
Quote:Perhaps the fact that 90% of them fall into three major genres, to the exclusion of everything else?
I mean, how many RTS, FPS and MMORPGs can a person play? And most of what's left is console ports. Most of the PC games I play are console ports, played only because I like the higher-res.
Then there's the added factor of consoles get to be played in a soft chair on a large TV from a distance of several feet, instead of a chair on a small monitor 2 feet away.
The PC market has fallen far, hasn't it... that was not true five or eight years ago, but now... yeah, casual games (Sims, etc), MMORPGs, RTSes, and FPSes definitely dominate... I haven't bought many recent PC games at all. Of course, one big reason for that is that my computer is old and most of them won't run on it, because I've seen some I'd like to play... but even so, it is true that most of them are either console ports, MMORPGs, or RTSes... and I do have a good number of console ports among my PC collection, so they've never really been rare. Not that that's a bad thing though, and more than porting a game between other consoles is... it just gives you more ways to play a game...
But anyway, the PC used to also be very strong in graphic adventures, PC RPGs, vehicular simulations (mech sims (MechWarrior 2...), space sims (X-Wing, Freespace, etc), fighter jet sims (Falcon 4.0), racing sims (Papyrus games, for instance), etc...), wargames (traditional hex-based wargames, that is), a respectable number of arcadish racing games, sports games that were actually exclusive (other than stats-only sims, which still do exist), etc... almost all gone...
Oh, PC games aren't dying. Online PC gaming is as strong as ever, and digital distribution is rising strongly. I've put hundreds of hours into Guild Wars. The shareware and freeware markets provide some very interesting stuff. But still, the retail PC industry certainly isn't what it used to be, sadly. All I have to do to prove that fact is go look at my years of old PC Gamer magazines and see the gradual thinning of the average magazine size to prove that one... and note how, from looking in the store, it hasn't recovered in the years since I stopped subscribing.