Hi Shaun: Well, yes and no. If you are talking about PC games produced by big name studios you are right. There is a lot less of those these days because all the major big name studios are almost exclusively developing for XBox, Play Station, or Wii;. However, there is a lot more games for the PC than you might think.
First of all the method of buying and selling them has drastically changed over the last decade. Back in the 90's if a company had a big name game like Quake, Doom, Civilization, etc you went to your local computer or gaming store and purchased it on CD. Now days, the majority of game sales are done online through services like Steam. You can now pay for the game online and download it straight to your PC without having to go out and purchase it on physical media like CD or DVD. This has drastically changed the way game developers do business with PC gamers. Since most PC gaming is either online based or is available through the Internet there are hundreds if not thousands of amateur independent game developers who are selling games online through Steam and other services. Big name corporations simply have no desire to compete with all the competition out there and focus on the major gaming consoles and have left the PC gaming to small independent studios. That is why in terms of PC gaming you won't find much in retail stores like Walmart, Best Buy, K-Mart, etc but if you go online you will find hundreds of new titles for the PC produced by independent developers. One thing I have noticed in modern PC games verses big name mainstream titles for consoles is their surprising simplicity. What I mean by that is if you look at where the big mainstream companies are heading they are getting more and more complicated all the time, lack depth, and overwhelmingly focus on pushing the graphics technology to its fullest. The independent PC developers tend to be focused on small but simple games like what we had in the 80's and 90's with better graphics and sounds. In short, they are more interested in the actual game play than obsessing over graphics, sounds, and so on. To give you an example one game I heard of recently is called Jewels or something like that. Basically, there are Jewels falling down out of the sky and you have to quickly move around the game collecting them, or so I have been told. This sounds like something straight out of the Atari days, but obviously the graphics and sounds are way better. Never-the-less the game is getting good reviews and HP and other PC manufacturers are shipping demos of it on their laptops as part of their trial software. Another game that has gotten some attention of late is called 3D Mahjong or something like that. Unlike classic Mahjong instead of tiles you have square blocks and you have to spin the blocks around and fit them together into a 3d puzzle. It is obviously more difficult than classic Mahjong, but its simply a case of taking a very old idea and making it better without overly complicating the game. The point I am getting at here is that PC games do exist, there are more than ever, but they aren't necessarily available through your local store. If you want them you need to go online to Steam and other places where they are sold. The days of buying a game for your PC on CD or DVD is about gone. It is all downloadable media now, and the two games I mentioned aren't very big to begin with. These days with high speed Internet downloading a game that is 25 MB tops is not a big deal. Even if you purchase and download a game 10 times that size it is still not that much of a problem for most people so the Internet is where all the PC games are now. Cheers! On 12/10/13, shaun everiss <[email protected]> wrote: > Well all I know tom is that whenever I have gone shopping with my > friends to stores that used to be full with games years ago its > mostly console games now. > The computer games still exist but are less. > I think a lot is online to. > Another interesting fact at least from what I have seen on the ground > is that quite a few things are payed online subscription. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
