Heh, looks like you’re the exception to the rule 
Are you hiring? ;D
Sadly I’ve left that job because the work part was crap. Puppygames is hiring but we pay in used decidious leaves and promises of riches.
Cas
You are right. The major studios work under the ludicrous assumption that people should upgrade their PCs in order to play the same game with better graphics. They don’t sell as much as they should not because the market is bad, but because they target the top 5% only.
Gaming on the PC should be awesome without requiring a quad SLI or anything. If they still do game for a crappy hardware such as the PS2, PSP or DS, why wouldn’t they do it for a platform that has even more processing power and memory is abundant?
I think the blame for little sales is of the developers themselves.
Right now there’s a huge gap in the PC market of games. We have casual on one side and buy-a-new-PC-to-play-it-FPSes on another. Who’s in the middle? WoW? The Sims? If one manages to produce a title with higher quality and content than a casual game, but still cheaper and not as extreme as a more-of-the-same-buy-a-new-PC-FPS, wouldn’t it have a chance? Especially today with the internet as a means of distribution?
We can start inventing statistics.
Mark Rein produces rehashes for selling new video boards, just like many other studios. UT3 is mediocre. Intel IGPs are more than enough to run a regular game, the ones that aren’t like Crysis and don’t require you to buy a new PC. It should be the equivalent of a GeForce series 5 or 6. When I bought a new PC some years ago I got one of those, I could run the old games I had, that the were considered “good-looking” for XBox or PS2 on my PC at excellent speed and 1280x1024.
One example, it would be possible to build a God of War-like game for an IGP in a better resolution and still get better framerates.
No, it’s not the same thing as a PS3 or a X360, but the power is there! And targetting Intel IGPs is targetting 60% of the market. The other 40% will be able to run as well, because usually will have something from Nvidia or ATI. Isn’t it 100% higher than 5%?
The PC market is huge. Maybe it is not for those who target many thousand dollars PCs that produce enough heat and consume enough energy that could be used by a family of 4 people taking bath two times a day.
I just don’t believe that people develop games for such resource constrained devices, like PS2, PSP and DS, but they can’t develop games for PCs.
[quote]Intel IGPs are more than enough to run a regular game, the ones that aren’t like Crysis and don’t require you to buy a new PC. It should be the equivalent of a GeForce series 5 or 6.
[/quote]
Hm, are you sure of that?
The Intel gfx hw in my newish laptop is an order of magnitude slower than my old GeForce 4 Ti4200 in my old desktop. That is, if the intel drivers don’t crash, which they usually do whenever I try to run a game.
It might be able to churn out God of War in low res if developers would take enough time to work around all driver bugs, but I doubt many Intel gfx owners are interested in running God of War, otherwise they would have opted for something at least half decent.
Still, the fact remains that those shoddy Intel gfx chips sit in most PC’s, which is a shame.
[quote]I just don’t believe that people develop games for such resource constrained devices, like PS2, PSP and DS, but they can’t develop games for PCs.
[/quote]
That’s probably because those people want to make money. Console owners usually buy games, PC owners usually don’t.
Yes, I am. For example, Splinter Cell, the first one that was also released for the original XBox, ran at a higher resolution and faster than a GeForce 4 that I had in the past. It is far more powerful than a PS2. NFS Most Wanted would run fine on it, but without all the graphics turned on, just like a GeForce 5.
Even Half-Life 2 would run at a decent speed at 1024x768. The problem was that it would crash, not the framerate.
Again with the 3D. There’s no need to be in 3D to sell games. A GeForce card is fast enough for pretty much any sensibly conceived 2D game. The 2D market is as big as the 3D one. Pick your battles!
Cas
So many people seem to forget about isometric projection-matrices in OpenGL… both the 3D and the ease of having an orthogonal quad as frustrum == easy to optimise == 90% of hard stuff vanished.
I agree with you on one point, there is no need to be in 3D to sell games. However, I’m not sure that 2D market is as big as the 3D one and I won’t develop this point but I don’t think in terms of “market”, I prefer speaking about potential players. I can’t be absolutely sure of it but I assume that most of the players want 3D games.
[quote]I assume that most of the players want 3D games.
[/quote]
That is the root of one of the biggest problems in the gaming industry right now. It is so absolutely wrong. There are only a very tiny percentage of game designs that work in 3D!
Cas
Hm, ok I suppose then that there are better Intel chips than I have in my laptop. The one in my laptop is just not capable of running anything more advanced than Quake 2. Half-Life 2 crashes on my laptop after a 2 minute slideshow of the intro (which runs fine on my GF4).
[quote]That is the root of one of the biggest problems in the gaming industry right now. It is so absolutely wrong. There are only a very tiny percentage of game designs that work in 3D!
[/quote]
Do you have any numbers to back up that statement?
You might be right, if you consider the huge market for online card games, casual games etc, but I’m curious about actual numbers.
Worryingly, it’s actually easier for proper studios to produce 3d games than 2d games. Good 2d artists are getting harder to find, traditional 2d animators even more so. For something like a basic run animation it’s much easier to knock up a model and animate it than it is to do each frame painstakingly by hand. And if you want to change something (like the character’s clothes, or the camera angle) you can keep most of your work for 3d, but for 2d you’ve basically got to scrap the whole lot and start again.
It’s a bold move to attempt to do a full AAA 2d game these days, and I doubt we’ll see anything near as good quality-wise as Odin Sphere for a loooong time. :’(
[quote=“erikd,post:91,topic:18405”]
No numbers of course (and you know the old adage about statistics and lies etc). but you are bang on with my reasoning there when you remembered card games (and board games, etc etc etc). There are in fact so many 2D games out there they absolutely swamp 3D games in terms of numbers. It is because 3D technology has been in the ascendant for the last 10 years that it grabs all the headlines - it is basically novelty. The novelty is wearing off now and the grim financial reality of it is setting in: if you try and simulate real life you end up with an exponentially expensive toolchain as real life is bastardly complex.
The happy side effect is that this crazy powerful 3D technology makes 2D technology so utterly simple to do with barely any hard work any more. It is a crying shame nobody agreed on a simple common API for everything (eg OpenGL) which brings us back to where we were, musing about XNA.
Cas
Actually, the 2D market DWARFS the 3D market, period. Look at game portals, flash sites, Disney.com, Nick.com, Pogo.com, Maple Story, and on and on. The market for 2D is much bigger than 3D. However, in the console world, it is the opposite, but the number of “casual” players crushes the number of “hardcore”. If you are looking at potential players, 2D is the way to do. Many 2D only games (soccer moms included) may not play 3D games, but many 3D gamers also play 2D games.
In terms of numbers of games and players I agree, but what about the value of that market? Isn’t it true that the big $$$ is still on consoles, and wouldn’t that mean that in terms of monetary value the 3D market is bigger than 2D?
That said, I see more and more 2D games appearing on PS3 through the Playstation Store, so it looks like Sony is more and more targetting mainstream and trying to tap into this huge 2D market. Which still reeks like a good opportunity for a PS3 JVM (hides for cover ;D)
Where the hell did I put my bat? shuffle shuffle shuffle
Who cares? Game sales are a distraction, not a point to dwell upon. I am not paid in “game sales”; I’m paid in money.
What matters is how much REVENUE came from PC vs Console. (Actually … how much profit, but revenue is easier to estimate accurately)
On console, there is still almost no way you can get revenue without sales (there’s very little you can get without boxed sales).
On PC, most of the easy revenue is not from game sales, its from alternate revenue models. The way the market works at the moment, it wouldn’t take much to change for the majority of the revenue to come from non-sales.
* blahblahblahh innocently wonders how much you can deflate the PC games market by conveniently removing the subscriptions from the 10 million WoW players, the 1 million Runescape players, million Lineage players, million Lineage2 players, etc (http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html for a back-of-envelope estimate)
Ask some PS3 game developers nicely, and they might tell you a different story.
That’s a good point.
Also, reading those ESA reports again, it actually looks like the numbers from ESA (esp. that 9,5%) are probably just a small part of the whole story: The ESA seems to represent only a selection of the gaming industry (just look at the list of companies that are part of the ESA).
In the company I work for, 100% of the profits come from PC games, but we’ve never ever sold a single copy. Or, you could argue, we sell very very many copies, far more than most “traditional” (or whatever you want to call them) games ever do, but I somehow doubt we’re included in any game sale statistics.
As an added bonus, it doesn’t take us two years and 50 people to develop a game.