Michael Fitch of THQ talks of piracy and the closing of Iron Lore..

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famousringo said:

ssj12 said:

famousringo said:
That was quite a rant. I know there are a lot of people on this forum who say that PC gaming is fine, but with all of the acquisitions, dropouts, or studios who jump over to console development, it's hard not to see that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

The PC market seems to be turning into a place for giants and midgets. There's a small number of really huge developers like Blizzard and Valve who do very well for themselves, and then there are shareware companies who seem to do pretty well for themselves by keeping costs down to a minimum. It's the developers in the middle who seem to be withering away.

it doesn't help with the games suck

anyways Valve did put out Steamworks which should help but it seems developers are to stupid to take advantage.

Seriously if more devs just place their games on Steam their games would sell. Look at AudioSurf. It's selling like crazy. The game was made by 1 guy making his own dev studio. Right now he has to be rolling in dough.

By most accounts, Titan Quest didn't suck.

Actually, I think you have the problem backwards. The games might be too good. Not Titan Quest, but the offerings of the Giants.

I spend a lot of time at my friendly neighbourhood LAN. The kings of the LAN are WoW, Warcraft 3, Counterstrike Source, and TF2. Battlefield used to have a major presence, but has declined, and so has Oblivion. Age of Mythology, Star Wars: Battlefront, UT2004, NFS: Underground, C & C, Battle for Middle Earth are all pretty much dead and never had much presence to begin with, plus a bunch of other titles I'm forgetting about.

The point is that only a tiny handful of games out of a couple dozen recieve substantial playtime, while the rest are cast aside. Warcraft 3 is six years old, and it's possibly the most played game there! When a six-year old game can keep people amused for so many hours over so many years, people don't need to spend money on new games. The incredible replayability of these games and their mod communities satisfy the hardcore indefinitely.

It's a crazy idea, but the presence of a few, incredibly good PC games may be crushing other projects that don't have the brand power or the quality to attract a huge modding community. I'm not suggesting that this is the only problem with the PC market, but I think it may be a factor.

 I played (and occasionally still play) AoM and BFMEII.  It's a shame that those games were so overlooked.