| Wiintendo said: article: Two companies with a shrewd approach to minimum system requirements are Blizzard and Valve. Now, I don't want to overload you with a flurry of numbers. But if you compare the minimum specs for Blizzard and Valve titles like World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Half-Life 2: The Orange Box, and Left 4 Dead with games like Crysis: Warhead, Call of Duty: World at War, and Fallout 3, you'll see that the former have designed their games to run on older, less-powerful machines. By doing so, they've made their games accessible to a wider audience. |
Indeed lets compare the specs for World of Warcraft a 4 year old game, Half Life 2 Orange box a 4 year old game resold with its various expansions and add ons, and Left 4 Dead a new game built on the engine of a 4 year old game vs. games with current tech.
Fact is WoW and Half Life 2 made people replace hardware, wether it was a graphics card, more ram, or the whole computer when they came out. I know I replaced my laptop for WoW, despite my laptop running FFXI, which was my MMO at the time, pretty darn well. That does not sound like designed to run on older less powerful machines to me. WoW is not successful because of minimum system requirements, despite what many people would want you to think. If that where the case, wouldn't City of Heroes, Lineage II, RF Online, and a dozen other MMO's that share WoW's minimum specs be just as popular or heck, somewhat in the ballpark of WoW's numbers?
Lastly, Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, both from Bliz, look like they are going to be breaking banks for system upgrades/new pcs when they come out.
*edit*Also, arent Fallout 3 & COD WaW currently outselling L4D?
