What's wrong with PC gaming

I don't necessarily mind paying more / sooner, depending on a few factors (namely reputation of the company aka how much support can i expect in terms of both bugfixes, new content, and active help forums) but I also feel like console prices are artificially inflated. In addition to that, it depends on what I feel like I'm getting. What I guess I'm trying to say here is that I'm not incapable of shelling out $60 on release day but I have a much different set of expectations than what I perceive the typical console user has. I still want the game to be fun but there are certain design aspects that come into play as well.

For instance, things that make me more likely to shell out extra / not wait for a sale include:

• Obviously, the game itself being fun and having good reviews. If its not, then forgot everything else here. But IMO many of these things LEND to the game being more fun.

• Mod support that is well-designed and RELEASED EARLY ON... not "we'll add it later when things are stable". In my experience, if it isn't designed for from the beginning, it rarely happens. And when you think that "EA games need popularity to keep going" combined with "Mods can increase community support and make things more popular", this really seems like a no-brainer for any Early Access games. Gotta give props to Bethesda and Studio Wildcard here; especially, SW for the releasing early part but IMO Bethesda had the better editor hands down.

• Support for running Dedicated Servers. Extremely nice to be able to host your own server, in the event that official ones go away or just don't have the mood that you're looking for. Even better when modding is present and you can offer a custom-tailored experience for yourself and your friends.

• Cross-platform play (ESPECIALLY Linux support). Major kudos to GearBox and Harebrained Schemes for making Borderlands 1/2/Prequel and Shadowrun Returns/etc playable on my Linux rig.... I hate having to dual-boot out of Linux. I know most folks play on Windows and that's fine, but think of it like if you had to drive to your friend's house to play a game... not the worst thing in the world, but sometimes you just prefer to enjoy things at home. That's how booting into Window feels for me. It's fine for you to like Windows more, but for me personally I'm more likely to drop money on release day if Linux support actually exists and isn't just something the developer "plans to offer". I imagine Mac users feel much the same about Macs.

• FULL controller support. Just because I CAN use a mouse and keyboard doesn't mean I WANT to use a mouse and keyboard. I usually either play on my Linux rig hooked up to a steam link which in turn displays to a projector (on the ceiling above my bed :-D) or from my Windows rig in the living room hooked up to a 50"... with a 360 controller in both cases. Hell, even if devs made an effort to keep mouse controls simple and just made 100% of the menu navigation accessible via JUST keyboard (no mouse) then I'm usually fine manually creating controller to keyboard mappings with AntiMicro.

• Couch-cop, if available in any version, should be available in ALL versions and never removed just because the platform is PC. It's so annoying to see games that have console versions with this feature come to PC and be totally gimped... I hear hardware cited as a reason most of the time.. And it always sounds like an excuse to me.. Devs... here's a novel idea.. instead of saying NO, instead try saying MUST HAVE THESE MINIMUM SPECS FOR SPLITSCREEN MODE...you'd be surprised what some people's PC's can actually run / how many people are willing to upgrade. Have had plenty of friends that upgraded their computers back in the day to play Crysis etc and again more recently for Oculus Rift and/or Witcher 3. And honestly, I've seen plenty of PC games that pull this off quite well with just decent hardware (Serious Sam 3 comes to mind).. by the way, any devs reading this...notice that Serious Sam 3 lets us choose whether to split the screen horizontally or vertically... please either do the same or choose horizontal every time (I like my peripheral vision thank you). I will never bother with the rainbox six series ever because of this.

• Lack of DRM. I have spent a stupid amount of money on first-day releases on GOG... sometimes even for things I already own on steam. While I understand the thinking behind DRM and especially protecting your investment initially until you can start recouping some development costs, DRM is annoying. Ditto for additional login systems. If I see that I have to sign in through something like Origin or similar, I am instantly much less inclined to buy at full price.

//Edit: I think I fixed most of my fuck-ups... err typos.

The market is oversaturated.
Why would I buy a 20€ game that I can finish in 5 hours if I have the time and I can buy 4 games with potentially 50+ hours (or if I don't like them, still 5 interesting games to try out) for 5-10$, depending on bundles and sales. Financially it's just way better to be at least half, or one year late with games.

1. its not begging if they are willing to pay for the game once it gets to pc
2. if most people say vote with your wallet, and dont pay full price at launch that means something. Even when the game is good the 50usd isnt worth it, its a good lesson for publishers

I don't mind paying full price for physical games (by that I mean the actual game on the disk, not a Steam/PSN/Digital installer shortcut). I even buy collector's edition games of series I like. What I can't justify is paying the same 60$+ for what is essentially a key that "allows" me to access a game I purchased a "license" to. The prevalence of digital only titles on PC is generally what leads me to not really feel a need to buy them on release. There's no real bonus to doing so, the copies aren't limited, you're essentially paying for the privilege to buy all the DLC for a higher price than the "GoTY"/complete edition that will inevitably go on sale a year from then for the same price as the game released for new without DLC.

The money to hours given is a really stupid thing to judge most games on. An RPG can have "hundreds" of hours of content and still feel empty because most of it's content is fetch sidequests. In the same way a game can tell an engaging story in under three hours and I could still think it was worth fifteen to twenty dollars. The problem I tend to have with a lot of adventure games/story focused games is that they should also excel at something other than a story to be worth the money. Games are a different medium from books and should be treated as such. That said they SHOULD be treated as such and should have something other than a good story to succeed. If I buy a book for twenty dollars and it gives me a dozen hours of entertainment how does a game compete with three hours of a story but somehow has no other redeeming qualities? (be it art, interactivity, choices, multiple endings, etc.)

Walking simulators and other small genres will always have a niche appeal. Judging them on copies sold is a bit off. Most indie companies will make sequels to games that make healthy profits regardless of the number of games sold. Do you really think it takes millions or even hundreds of thousands of copies sold for most games to succeed or be considered profitable?

As for port begging and the like for PC. I think a lot of companies port their years old games to PC for the first time expecting to sell another copy for every console copy sold. That isn't going to happen. In addition to some people actually owning the game for console the publishers port games half-broken or with horrible DRM because "PC is full of pirates" and it's shooting them in the chest before they even release. Nobody is going to want to pay full price for a five year old game that is almost unplayable due to how it was brought to the platform because console publishers think they can make digital storefronts police PC games like consoles can.

They have to start treating the PC platform with a bit more respect if they plan to make money. No more waiting a year for a PC release, no releasing horribly optimized garbage and just raising the minimum specs, and stop trying to double DRM. If you delay a release for no reason other than wanting console sales first, people will most likely feel feel slighted and won't buy it on PC or at severely reduced price, if at all. Releasing a game that runs like shit and just telling people they need a top of the line GPU is retarded, everybody on PC knows what is inside a PS4/Xbone, if your game miraculously requires double the specs when it hops to PC everybody will know you're bullshitting and, again, won't buy it at full price due to feeling second class. If SteamDRM didn't stop somebody pirating adding a second form of DRM is just going to turn away paying customers rather than deter pirates.

https://images.discordapp.net/attachments/217012588448448513/329055687831191552/DDKmxqjWAAABb5d.png

Consumers are not to blame for lack of sales.
I can only think of these four things as being fault for low sales:
bad exposure
bad distribution
bad pricing
bad product

Some questions for the product maker:

1. Do you use an advertisement firm or publisher?
2. Do you use a distributor?
3. Is your product fairly and competitively priced?
4. Is your product a good product?

If you answered yes to all four of these quetions then you should be making some profit and no loss.

If you are at a loss via low sales, then the fault rests soley in the hands of the ad-firm/publisher (not actually doing their job) and the distributor (oversaturation).
At this point, there is really nothing you can do to increase sales; except maybe lower the price of your product and try to somehow increase awareness of your product.

Finally lets all know this, the video game industry is one of the most closed and tightly controlled markets.
Consoles have their own pros and cons for a game maker
Digtial game platforms have their own pros and cons for a game maker.

Physical goods:
have less competition, have less discounts, have higher volume in sales, more fees (cost is always passed onto the consumer)
= Cost more and generally = more profit

Digital goods:
has more competition, have more discounts, have lower volume in sales, less to little fees
= Cost less and generally = less profit (some times same profit or even more profit then consoles, word of mouth and kids be stupid: I'm looking at you FNAF)

Both rarely ever see a loss, and if there is a loss, nearly always a management problem: like bad management in "projected sales", if you use a projected sales number to determing your initial funding/overhead, and you don't reach those sales, you may come out with a loss.

From the consumer side of this is nearly all negative:
We are all covering the console maker fees, the publisher fees, and the distributor fees.

If a video game maker can get their product strait to the consumer without 2 or 3 fucking middleman, the and cost for the consumer should be much lower (most likely the cost of a game @ 50-75% disount) and has the potential to be much more profit for the game maker.
Sadly, there are ZERO devs that sell directly to consumer without the publisher/distributor fees taked in, they always use the same fucking price as if their product was in the store.
Direct to consumer prices should be at least 50% of the price @ stores.
I call these devs:
http://m.memegen.com/ecqetz.jpg

All I can say is a lot of the market manipulation and control these consolemakers/distrubutors do, is downright evil and illegal.
And I only see it getting worse for use consumers.

ps. wrote this up real fast, maybe not explained my view points well enough and sure to be grammer errors and typos.

edit: my pictures got move to the bottom when using them with the feature to be opened within the post, so instead i'm forced to use just links, blame cg

My own 2 cents:

1) I'd rather other people have lower time preference than higher.

2) If a project can't recover its investment in a given market, then it's far more likely that the project has a problem to be solved, not the market.

3) That the people who played a game liked it doesn't mean the people who didn't necessarily would. Or should.

We are not willing to invest money in the right things. Of course, that's a generalization. And what are the "right things" anyway? That's highly subjective, after all, right? Yes, it is.

You've defeated your own argument before you even begun proper. Your whole post is, well, not successful rhetoric. If other peoples' self interested is not aligned with your own (getting Edith Finch supported to market-signal developers to make more Edith Finch-like games), the solution isn't to condescend and ask them to act retarded. To act against their own self interest.

"Here's a game you may be interested in. It hasn't received a lot of attention or support so please take a look." versus "Why don't people like the things I like and throw money at it?"

I would find it very sad if PSN was a better place for indie games than PC. PC is the origin of indie games, after all. It's what made these games possible. It would be a shame if high quality indie developers like Giant Sparrow went back to avoiding PC because of low sales.

Giant Sparrow put forward something that looks an awful lot like a walking simulator in a market inundated with walking simulators. So the game is easily worth $20 to you. Rah rah. Your quantitative assessment has no relevance to mine or anybody else. It was up to their marketing to convince people that purchasing their game would be worthwhile at the initial price point. If they failed that's on them, not the consumer.

I agree that good games are not supported by the PC community as they should be. Part of that is a glutted market, part of it is the sheer number of times PC gamers have been burned. A large portion of "the classics" in PC gaming history were only acknowledged as such long after the fact, with many of their developers having gone out of business in the meantime.

You might consider starting a new thread called "PC Games You Should Support." In it, you could ask people to post about games that deserve to be bought at full price. Just an idea....

$80 for a AAA game is too much, imo, as I don't get nearly that much entertainment out of most of them. I definitely want a good amount of time from a game, if I'm paying a small fortune for it. Then, on top of that, most games have a season pass etc., that costs another $40. I hate paying for a game more than once, so I am more likely to wait for a complete edition, and by then, my interest in the game has dropped a lot.

I have also been burned by some games I was sure I could count on being good(Arkham Knight and Just Cause 3), so that makes me more likely to wait for a big discount, as most games have at least some people complaining about performance problems and I can't be sure if I will be lucky and have it run well, or if it will run like shit. And then of course there is unexpected pc repair/upgrade costs on top of the usual upgrade costs. Hardware being so expensive, causes me to spend less on other stuff, and games are the easiest thing to spend less on.

I am curious how much money big publishers make from people that pay full price vs half price vs 75% off etc.?

This is of course not directed at people who are low on money and can't buy that many full-priced titles anyway. It's also not directed at people who simply don't enjoy these games. I am only addressing the people who are interested in these games, could buy them, but refuse to do so, because they rather wait for big discounts. To those I say: vote with your wallet! Support the games you like! :)

That clarification was much needed! Yes I don't have much money (or time) to spend on video games so I never pay full price, the only game I bought at launch was Doom last year since Green Man Gaming gave a 15% off discount right of the bat (or 20% can't remember), and I really really wanted to play that game right away.

However, another reason people don't buy games early on is due to their broken state at launch, the industry got complacent of shipping out games full of bugs! So people wait for the first sale at least so the game is more playable. In the case of indies is diferent, since they rarely have much promotion, in this case I've never heard of the studio or the 2 games you mentioned, I even added the game to my SG blacklist just for seing the bland thumbnail.

However, after watching the trailer, reading your post and seeing the good user reviews I decided to add it to my wishlist! I won't buy it since I have The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on my backlog and it's a little similar, and I'm mainly just buy 80-90% discount games since I have literally 50 games that I want to play on my backlog xD

I'm struggling with having enough money to pay the bills sometimes but if I think a game is worth it I will absolutely try and buy it at full price simply because I want that particular game in my life and right now. The trouble is walking simulators are not something that interest me so I pass them by.

What Remains of Edith Finch looks like an amazing game, saw a review from bunnyhop.
Anyway, I'm one of those who "bragging" about not buying new games, biggest reason here I don't have the zeal to play new games anymore, I got a huge backlog on top of that. Nevertheless, I'm trying to buy some new indie releases from time to time from devs I like, to support them.

Biggest problem, I believe, is big publishers and their politics. They spend tons of money on marketing, so people buy games they heard of and after the purchase of 12th Assasin creed, they don't have money (or time) for a little indie game. On top of that there is a tendency to create lots of "copy-paste content" (any Ubisoft game for example), devs trying to create as much gameplay time as they could without actually making something, while one again lots of story-driven indie title a short (Inside - 4 hours, Little Nightmares - 4 hours, etc)