Remedy explains decision to release Alan Wake on Xbox 360 only

[Reasonable]

ZenfoldorVGI said:

Reasonable said:

loves2splooge said:
Gamers freely admit that they'd rather pirate the PC port of a game for free instead of buying it for the 360 and yet gamers wonder why game publishers are alienating the PC gaming audience by either staying off the PC or introducing crazy DRM....

If the PC gaming audience wants to pretty much kill single-player 'core' games on their platform (by pirating), that's fine but they have no right to complain about these games dying off on the PC. It seems like PC gaming is moving towards the multi-player model (w/ server-side serial key check), casual or free-to-play model. The Indie games will always stick around because Indie devs don't have much choice (if you don't have a rep, it's hard to get on XBLA, PSN or Wiiware. And XNA/Indie Games seems like nowheresville.)

Don't forget that's not a 100% situation though.  The annoying element is folks like me who never pirate but are caught up in the reaction anyway.  And I suspect that's the people complaining about this.

I know a very vocal pirate on this forum who always doing 1 of 2 things:

A. Complaining about the PC being treated as a second class platform this gen.

or

B. Denying that the PC is being treated as a second class platform this gen.

The reason PC IS treated as a bastard child by many 3rd parties this gen is simple. There is no 1st party to lobby for it, and MS certainly doesn't give a shit about PC gaming, they've made that obvious with their Windows 7 adverts.

Multiplayer games still sell relatively well on PC, despite piracy, so there is a financial incentive to keep making games for the platform(most modern games have a MP element anyway).

However, there is no one to complain when AC 2 gets delayed for the PC, for example, and in fact, there are huge companies paying 3rd parties NOT to release their games on PC. That along with the issue PC has with games that are SP only and just a few hours long getting flagrantly pirated, plus the fact that developers have to charge less for PC games due to the gamers themselves, means that it is often financially beneficial to 3rd parties to avoid PC, with a few exceptions, like the PC-centric Blizzard who always  keeps their specs low, so they don't limit their market to techies, like most modern HD games do, on PC.

Oh I know all that - I was just saying don't tar all PC gamers with a generic accusation.  Clearly on PC, as happened with Napster initially with music, the fact that people seem perfectly happy to 'copy' a digital asset vs pay for it because it's not really stealing, just said copying, and very, very, very easy it happens a lot, to the extent it swamps everything else in the end.

For developers the attractions of consoles are pretty clear, particularly with what the 360/PS3 have shown regarding DLC.

The bottom line is that millions of people will buy the game on a console, then happily pay for content that would more than likely have been provided free on PC in previous years, and that they'll buy the latest iteration of a franchise even though it is essentially the same game with new maps.

Why wouldn't you go for that?  On PC each title in a franchise was expected to show a decent jump, with an engine tweaked to take advantage of 2 years of new tech.  On a console, taking MW2 as the obvious example, you take the same engine, tweak it a bit (and in MW2 it really was only a bit because it looks almost identical to MW from a rendering/map size/performance perspective) build some new maps and off you go.

I'd go for that in a second.

Just to be clear, I'm not the type of PC gamer lamenting the changing market.  A PC and a console are simply pieces of HW to me.  So long as they deliver what I want I don't really care which I use.

But I've never pirated, and just don't like the way it's assumed that everyone who uses a PC to play games must pirate everything.  Some of us are actually paying for the game.  Not many though, which is the issue of course.