Are you willing to PAY for better PC games?

[HardcoreRobot]

developers dont owe gamers anything. they can release what they want, whenever they want, and charge whatever they want.

the market will decide if they made smart choices.

 

[shortylickens]

developers dont owe gamers anything. they can release what they want, whenever they want, and charge whatever they want.

the market will decide if they made smart choices.

The big pissing match we keep having in this forum is that the majority of consumers are fucking morons. They pay way too much for crap and screw the system over. The intelligent people like us (minority) are tired of not being able to get our dollars worth of electronic entertainment cuz everyone else is too simple minded to realize whats going on.

 

[taltamir]

Somebody here in PCG posted a hacked EXE for BG2 that lets you play in any res you want. As opposed to the in game choice of 1024x768, 1600x1200 and 2048x1536 which dont actually work the way they are supposed to.

Dig around the interwebs for Baldurs Gate 2 Widescreen.

... i have those. obviously I meant high res, with higher quality textures, true color, modern 3d, etc...
Basically, apply all the modern 3d deliciousness we have to those games while maintaining current plot and gameplay.

Because if they made baldur gate 3 you know it is just going to play like DA2

BTW. one of the better recent games is magicka. Either have meaningful level gain (this means FIXED enemy power!), or give us a game where levels do not exist.

developers dont owe gamers anything. they can release what they want, whenever they want, and charge whatever they want.

the market will decide if they made smart choices.

Right, and we decide not to buy from companies that don't provide us with what we believe to be "fair value" for our money. For example, fixing bugs is considered "fair value"... not fixing bugs is considered unfair value and a reason to refuse to purchase from such a company

 

[Farmer]

I think the primary culprit is compressed development time.

"Before", games would take minimum 2 years in development before they were released to the public at "full retail" (which was $40-$50). Lower end titles/shorter development cycles were budget titles in the $20-$30.

With the likes of EA, a lot of games are now on a 1 year development cycle. As if that wasn't bad enough, there is so much time pressure that games are often released unfinished. To the business whigs, that is achieving a higher margin, i.e., minimizing development costs by still getting that $50-$60 per license. They achieve higher margin: in the limit where development was free, these companies are essentially printing money. Best recent example is Dragon Age 1 and 2. It's as new games are all on a "Madden cycle," where minimal development justifies like-new pricing every year.

In any case, there are still a few developer/publisher houses that don't follow this model, Blizzard side of Blizzard-Acti being one of them. The $60 I paid for SC2 was worth it, given the amount of enjoyment I derived out of it. On the other hand, another title I recently bought, F1 2010, I feel like should've been a $30 launch title.

But people are still buying "bad" games a these $50-$60 prices, so they can still charge those prices.