AwesomeOcelot

Japanese people don't play PC games, Japanese developers don't know how to develop PC games, meaning they'd have to outsource to South Korea or Eastern Europe, something they may be unwilling to do. I also wonder whether there's necessarily a market for them, Japanese games fill gaps in the console market that are already filled on PC with better western games. We would have saw a decline in FPS games regardless, because it was a fad, the console FPS explosion has only meant instead of a decline in FPS games we've got many ****ty console FPS games. iD and Epic were already making mediocre games, and that had nothing to do with consoles, they were PC led developers still. Saying that, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (PC led), Black Light: Retribution (PC led), Tribes: Ascend (PC exclusive), and Planetside 2 (PC exclusive), are good FPS from 2012 onwards, soon there will be ARMA 3. Multi-platform releases were always going to happen because it makes business sense, it's not a sign of any market declining. Many of the console exclusives you can list are exclusives because the console manufacturers paid for them to be, or they made them. There's complex histories that aren't necessarily about the market growing or declining why certain developers started on PC and then were bought or stayed independent but were contracted to work on console. None of this is evidence that PC gaming is smaller in anyway than it was previously, PC gaming has only grown.

Same could be said for piracy, there's people that pirate every game as there's people that buy all games second hand, but there's pirates that buy a lot of games. I think that's why I'm assuming Sony and Microsoft won't kill used games, they'll kill retailers taking all the revenue from used games.

I do consider MMORPG part of PC gaming, and it has been for a long time, they have historical links to PC gaming, they're well suited to PC, and they're clearly PC games. Ultima Online, Everquest, and Asheron's Call were pretty big in their day. I don't really understand why you would discount them apart from they've seen large growth and massive revenue that defeats your argument. I played MMORPGs instead of other MP RPGs for a while, I didn't consider what I was doing "not PC gaming". PC gaming in the late 90's didn't have "AAA" releases. The classics of the late 90's or early 00's were not the "AAA" of their time, they didn't have the same budgets, the same goals, or the amount of sales required. I also remember the biggest PC games, even in the 90's and early 00's being on consoles as well. There's a reason why certain genres died out, like straight RTS Dune/Warcraft-style, that's because genres evolve, people want a change, the little guys get beat by the big guys like Blizzard, Relic, and Creative Assembly, or EA buys them and kills them. I don't think there was period of PC gaming that's like what you're suggesting, under your definition PC gaming has always been dead.

That doesn't relate to the sales, revenue, or profits of the PC as a platform. The consoles have always been the largest install base by far. No one was throwing money at PC titles in the 90's or even the early 00's. You seem to think their was some mythical era of PC gaming, but the truth is that PC gaming has only grown. "AAA" and massive budgets are a thing that have grown out of consoles. If you consider the PC to be a success in the past, it's a success now. Of course they're more profitable, consoles combined have many more potential customers than the PC. As was the case with the PS2 vs the GameCube and Xbox, that system had far more "AAA" titles, has far more exclusives, so I guess you declared Xbox and Nintendo "dead" even though Xbox game releases, sales, and profits grew. My point is that your definition of "dead" is stupid and you know this, and you're trolling.

This is called moving the goal posts. First it was about sales, with stats completely false and pulled out of someone's arse, and now it's about lack of AAA exclusives or levels of sales on par with consoles. I don't mind that PC gaming isn't as large as console gaming, and has never even been close, not in the 80's or 90's, a lot of console games are bad. The Wii sold more than the PS3/Xbox360, a lot of people only played WiiSports and WiiFit, that market is bigger than the "core" gamer market as is the tablet/phone market, but that doesn't mean PS3/Xbox360 is dead, or the "core" gamer market on console is dead. What kind of definition of "dead" is that? It's not just PC gaming that's shifted to multi-platform releases, console gaming doesn't have that many exclusives any more, and out of those most are subsidized by the console manufacturer, and that's always been the case. PC gaming has never had money thrown at it for exclusives. "AAA" is a nonsense, the classics of the 90's, the games that made PC gaming great, weren't all big budgets for the time, a lot of them didn't have all the nonsense that causes the ridiculous budgets of multi-platform releases and console exclusives. That's an extremely odd definition of "dead", no one else accepts that definition of dead, you're just trolling. The RTS genre has exploded, MOBA games are a RTS subgenre, there are quite a few new IPs in that area. There's always been a shift in focus in genres, even on console. Western RPGs died on PC and consoles, that's why so many are getting funded on KickStarter. A lot of these console games are bad, because: FPS shouldn't be played on gamepad, they're designed for the lowest common denominator, PS3/Xbox360 hardware wasn't great even when it was new, too much resources were spent on really expensive set pieces, voice actors, and cut scenes. What gamer wants to play another virtually on rails, QTE infested, incredibly easy, constantly cutting user control "AAA" ****fest designed for consoles? None. A lack of "AAA" PC exclusives doesn't mean a lack of good games, independents are producing better games than console games all the time.

Mark of The Ninja, one of the best looking games I've played, one of the best stealth games I've played. Annoying QTE, also the contextual actions and platforming, are frustrating but no game is perfect. I thought the gameplay in Shank was the weakest part of that game, but it's the strongest part in this, patience and planning are important, varied styles and pacing work, but you're also going to need quick reflexes. I liked it so much I think I'll get the Special Edition.

Free-To-Play = Expensive-To-Enjoy

Fact is there are more PC games released, more sales, more subscriptions, more DLC sold, more micro transactions, year on year. How a platform can be dying when it's seen growth for the last 2 decades is beyond me, not only that but the growth has accelerated since people turned to digital stores. PC gaming is not, and has never been, bigger than console gaming. Console gaming hasn't been taking consumers from PC. Console gaming can grow without touching PC gaming. I don't know where someone can get the idea that PC game sales have decreased, let alone be 1/25th of what they were, that's crazy.

PC game sales are larger than they were a decade ago, enough of the crazy talk. Consoles have always been the far larger install base, for over 2 decades, in terms of "core" gaming, because they're cheaper and often sold at a loss. For revenue, DLC, F2P, and MMO, plus no loss leading hardware, mean the equations are different. PC gaming never shrank, console gaming just grew faster, with more casual gamers and ****ty games.

For myself, PC games and console games are typically the same price today ($60). Having said that, games inevitably come down in price. Is waiting not an option? The problem is that most console games comes down in price due to sales of used games providing competition. I'm not sure if the incentive to drop prices will still be there. PC games start cheaper and drop faster without second hand sales. Partly this is to do with much greater competition on the PC and no licensing fees.

I don't have much sympathy for second hand buyers or the retailers, it's no better than piracy, it gives the publisher the same amount of money. I've bought some games second hand that were not on sale any more. The sad thing is that this would introduce DRM, and there are reports of a daily login that's unacceptable to me. Seems like a stupid system to me, the disc itself is pretty cheap to manufacture, there's no reason why the Xbox One couldn't have a register on purchase system like Steam with an offline mode.

USB2 is good enough I find. When installing a SSD in a laptop, get an enclosure for around $20, now you have a portable 2.5" HDD of whatever capacity the laptop had.

Windows 7 only uses about a gig, and IE is partially loaded, I wouldn't have thought any of those things would make up the 2 gig that's left. My guess would be that actual applications are always running or it's just reserved for them.

Exactly, and that's why I think that people would rather have a normal screen + PC or console rather than pay for "smart" stuff in your TV that every other device you have can do better. When have SmartTVs existed but computers and consoles have also been too slow to get the same functionality? The latest and faster SmartTVs coming out now are slower than the computers and consoles of 8 Years ago. SmartTVs exist because it doesn't cost much to add the processing power needed to a TV, not everyone will have a console or another box that's far more expensive than the additional cost of a manufacturing a SmartTV with ARM CPU compared to a non-SmartTV, and TV manufacturers need to compete with features, but also probably think the services are an opportunity to sell owners things and sell ads.

The computing power of a SmartTV is not equivalent to a HTPC from 8 years ago or Xbox360 or PS3, they use cheap low power ARM CPUs. It doesn't take the power of a midrange PC that's in the Xbox One or PS4 to do the things the Xbox One and SmartTVs are trying to do with media and television.

a) Compression levels are a different thing, we're not talking about artefacts. b) Displaying jpegs is different to a 3D game. c) You can test this yourself by playing a game on 720p with the highest resolution textures and playing a game on 1080p with the lowest.

Pretty much, at least it doesn't use half of its memory like the Wii U. I suspect the PS4 uses less considering they were planning on only having 4GB up until recently. Do console gamers really complain about installing games on HDD? "Ahhhh they're going to make my games load multiple times faster, now I will have to pause to make coffee".

Play them badly maybe with frame drops. No one wants to play at 4K with low polygons and blurry textures, no AF. In terms of graphical fidelity it makes no sense, it would be better to render to 1080p and up scale, the game would look a million times better. With a bad frame rates, Haswell is no where near powerful enough.

The PS4 and Xbox One couldn't touch a PC with a i5 and just one Titan but the architecture in them is a generation ahead, because these consoles are using PC hardware, that will be released around the same time, i.e. a generation ahead, on PCs that's around every 6 months, summer 2014 PCs will be a generation ahead. He switches to talking about the PS3 and the Xbox 360 when he talks about benchmarks. It's not that surprising they're using the older engine on PC, football is much bigger than those other sports, it's a worldwide sport, other countries have more PC gamers. They want the game to play on as many PCs as possible, FIFA is one of those titles that people who don't play many games but like football will get. There's going to be a period where PC is going to get ****ty ports from the Xbox360 even though the PS4 and Xbox One are out, because they don't care about making good games and they'd rather people not play games on PC. The Xbox One and PS4 version of FIFA was developed and will be running on a PC with mid tier GPU, but they won't release it.

I wasn't really making a point about you, I was making a point about not being able to judge what something is worth to someone else, I'm not really interested in that. I don't have an issue with what's worth it to you. I was only interested in the facts. 4 facts: SSD don't care about fragmentation. MLC SSD drives can last years even with extreme writing that no one hear would ever do. What ever you load will load a lot faster on a SSD, especially if it involves seek time or random access. Price per GB doesn't matter if all you do is put a OS on it. What you're paying for is price per MB per second read speeds, which on a SSD are way better than HDD, and random access or seek time there's an even greater disparity. If you're never going to use the additional space, it's worthless to you. I feel like this is the only point you actually disagree with me on. I don't really understand your point of view, it's like demanding a 3 litre bottle instead of a 2 litre bottle to carry 1 litre of water before the bottle is recycled, even though you're going to have to wait longer for the 3 litre bottle.

I don't blame them, Sony putting the CPU of the previous console into the next one was not going to be sustainable as they got more expensive and hotter. They also switched from Nvidia to AMD, the same reason the Xbox360 couldn't have backwards compatibility even if they wanted to implement it. That's the great thing about PC, with the x86 instruction set compatibility with AMD64/x86-64 extension, Microsoft's steely stance on legacy support, and the hard work of modders, I can play my favourite games on new hardware. I'm fine with them charging for re-releasing good games though, as long as they don't suck. Sega's Genesis emulator is not great, and a lot of the HD remakes suck, while also being pretty expensive. Gaming would be a lot worse if I couldn't play my favourite games every year. I only played the original Deus Ex in 2009, I wouldn't have even known what I was missing. I'm hoping with lots of games using the same engine, consoles moving to AMD64, this will make re-releases easier for the Xbox One and PS4. They could just port over the PC version, especially with the Xbox One that's using some form of Windows and DirectX. I think we can criticize publishers if they don't re-release games that are in demand because they want us to buy new games, it's sensible to decide to screw them and not buy their console and new games, that's consumer choice. They need us more than we need them.

I can't say whether something will benefit someone, if they don't care about speed, have endless patience then loading things faster will be of no benefit to them. I can't say whether drastically improving loading times is worth $64 to anyone, perhaps they only ever boot up their PC in 1 minute, load their browser with 1 tab in 10 seconds, and then shut down. I don't care whether people get a SSD or not, but whoever you are, if you get a $64 60GB SSD and install your OS and most of your software (apart from games) things will load much faster, at least twice as fast and sometimes many times faster. $ per GB is irrelevant if all you ever do with the SSD is install the OS that's 20GB or more smaller than the capacity of the drive. If you have 120GB of games and get a 120GB SSD for $90 those games will load many times faster. You don't have to install all your games on one drive, even Steam now has the option to install games on different drives. I also use multiple computers, but I tend to shove batch processing work off to the older computer. I'd rather not wait for it to boot and switch over to it if I don't have to, especially for little things I'd like to do immediately. On write endurance, some people are writing to SSDs constantly. The Crucial M4 64GB, running for 238 days at 5874GB writes a day, no reallocated sectors, P/E = 23748 (drive rated at 3000, other drives with same chips rated 5000). A Crucial M4 128GB would have double the write endurance. They're MLC drives, TLC drives like the Samsung 840 (not Pro version) have a 3rd of the rated life.

What are you talking about? That's not even remotely true.

The larger install base (because of user friendliness and cheaper initial costs, although I believe PC gaming is cheaper in the long run), lack of piracy (and ridiculous exaggerated perceived level of piracy on PC), and move to multi-platform releases (because of higher production costs) destroyed FPS gaming, and damaged PC gaming across most genres including RPG and even RTS.

I'm not the biggest fan of his work but I haven't read much of his work, I think I stopped reading American Gods, and that meant I never really tried any other. His books for children are some of the best that there are though, Coraline (and the Selick movie) and The Wolves in the Walls, I gift them to child relatives. Sandman was great, pretty much the only comic I have actually liked, but there is plenty of filler there too. The Stardust movie wasn't bad, I thought it was quite funny. Neverwhere, the TV show was bad, the radio show was better, both have actors I really like in them. That Babylon 5 episode he wrote was pretty good.