[Atrocities]

You know if someone says something that is untrue long enough, it becomes a truth.

In this case the lie that PC games are dead was made up by the Console guys and twitch monkeys to shift focus toward their products and away from PC games.

The lie has been perpetuated enough now that everyone believes that the end of the PC gaming industry is right around the corner.

Of course this demise has been so heavily predicted yet time and time again has failed to come to pass.

PC Games are strong, the nitch market is going well, and the only major issue with PC games is that most are rehashed older titles that lack imagination and innovation that made the original games so popular.

Too much focus is on the eye candy and not on the game substance. Many developers have fallen prey to this and have reaped the benefits that come with it.... bankruptcy.

I cannot even begin to count how many game developers have been forced out of business do to the ever-increasing cost of game development.

That is the real PC game killer, the development cost and design curve. To make a really good PC game, a developer must have enough money to work for about two to five years. The best games were made on a shoe string budge with talent and innovation that for the most part seems to be lacking in today’s "make it pretty, make it dumb, make it cheap, but get it done yesterday" market.

Innovation has been made obsolete by the cost cutters and cookie cutter powerhouses of the industry like VUG, Activitision, Lucas Arts, etc.

To see a case study one only has to look as far back as Moo3, Civ3, and the original release of SimCity4. Moo3 was a dismal failure and an insult of epic proportions to the fans. Civ3 was half of a game, and not the better half mind you. Sim City 4, pre rush hour was a dragging disappointment to say the least.

Games like Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Warcraft 3 were long awaited and for the most part did not fail.

Original games such as Farcry flopped not because they were bad games, but because they were too good. Farcry was an innovational leap forward in FPS games. It had a good story, a certain amount of RPG appeal, an open-ended map system that allowed for multiple angles of approach, not the tunnel pre-scripted paths as in HL2 and D3. It had replayability, was a fantastically good-looking game, and was balanced with good weapons and tactics. (Hated the save game feature though.)

The game that I was waiting for, Tribes Vengeance was not that good. VUG lied to us, they failed to listen to the fans of the Tribes franchise and then they lied to us. That translated into less than 40k copies of Tribes Vengeance being sold. (Compared to 500k in over all sales of Tribes 2)

What does all this mean, well it means that unless you have a lot of capitol, time, and innovative developers working for you, your not going to make it in the PC game market. This is the mind set of many would be PC game developers now. So what do they do, they subscribe to the lie that PC games are dead and they perpetuate this myth by choosing to develop crappy *** console games instead of kick *** PC games.

Over the next few years we are going to see a major fundamental shift away from PC game development toward console game and personal hand held gaming device game development. PC Gaming will be relegated to the far left back burner of the gaming industry and there is nothing any one can do about it. The only light at the end of this depressing tunnel is the independent game developer. The guys who program and design games in their free time.

Those games may not be all that great to look at, but they will have something that no other game does, innovation, inspiration, talent, and game play.

Those are the PC games to look forward too.