bloggy comments.

The Free Lunch Is Over. Get Out, You PC Bums.

I've been slowly drifting out of the world of PC gaming over the last few years. I still fire up the odd round of Quake or UT now and then to blow off some steam, but it's been more than three or four years since I looked at a game release and thought "crap, I have pre-order that!", or better yet, "crap, I have to upgrade my machine and THEN I have to pre-order that!". The fun of slapping together components on a tight budget and carefully tuning them to eke every last frame per second out of that latest title used to be a huge and integral part of the experience. In those three or four years though, something's changed. Something that used to be fundamental to the marketing machine of developing and selling games.

The ancient art of the free demo has died a quiet death.

I'm serious. In the last couple of years the development focus of a huge fraction of game studios has swung from "PC first, and yeah then maybe a console port" to "Consoles first, and aw geez, do we really have to do a PC version?" It's something people like Carmack et al have been predicting for a long time; the huge attraction for the developer is the guaranteed stability of console hardware, and the switch was always going to happen as soon as a significant fraction of the game-buying population had a console in their house.

Checking out the demo used to be a surefire way of deciding whether or not to drop a few hundred bucks on a game - no more. A whole slew of recent games have either had no demo at all, or demos released so late that there's little point (if the dev can't be bothered to launch a demo until more than a year after the game's release date, I can't be bothered to give them any of my precious bandwidth).

Perhaps I should just cave in and get an Xbox, but to be honest I'm more likely to spend my free time hacking up some photo edits than fragging bad guys these days. So it goes, but I can't help but feel a bit nostalgic for the time you could get your demo fix for anything that was on the shelf in your local computer shop...

-q-

2009/09/05
15:44

I play open source games if I play any at all.

But I think we just got old. I'm leaving the gaming to the whippersnappers.

2009/09/06
11:45

The problem is, open source games are crap. Not to say most closed games aren't crap too, but at least they have a higher hit-rate than zero.

Dang whippersnappers. We did leave gaming to them, and look what a pig's ear they've made of it. Get off my porch you kids!

2009/09/06
13:06

There are a few decent ones -- depends what you're looking for. If cutting-edge graphics are what you want, disappointment awaits.


Happy with a retro-vibe, or 2-d platform games? There are good titles available.

2009/09/07
09:23

Well yes, good graphics, novel gameplay, and clever story are all important to me in a game. Why else would I exchange a significant chunk of my life to play it?

I've tried out a lot of open source games and I've never seen anything that came close to what the commercial studios produce. Perhaps someone in OSS-land could have produced something as engrossing as Bioshock or as unique as Portal, but the fact of the matter is that (to date) they never have.

Unfortunately the nature of the product means that you need a tight, dedicated team working hard on a game for months/years on end. By its very nature, the open source development model is just too loose and relaxed for this kind of application. That's not necessarily a bad thing - it's just horses for courses.

2009/09/07
09:43

There's probably a good reason. To produce something that epic requires a substantial amount of time, which in turn will require an income source to pay the bills.

I found a number of decent open source games, but my tastes tend to move well away from the twitch-reflex games that you so enjoy.

2009/09/10
15:10