Half Life 2: Episode 3 has become Half Life 3

By doing that, they are implicitly admitting that episodic gaming is a failure. Not that everyone with a little bit of skepticism could have seen that one coming a mile away.

Imho, episodic gaming only has a chance if seperate teams work on their own episodic content (levels/scripts/etc), and major engine development is frozen

I am holding out that this is a true sequel to the original (and best) Unreal. Doubtful. Not going to get my hopes up this time. Not gonna do it.

The original Unreal deserves a proper sequel/followup indeed, but by the direction Epic has taken their franchise i doubt it will happen indeed. Still a shame the adventure/storyline type FPS games have been almost entirely been overtaken by the RPG genre.

The industry keeps pandering to college kids and trying to nickle and dime Dad and Mom. That is ok for a safety net, but to me it's a bunch of lost companies with no clue how to create, and sell games in the present market and have no sense of direction on how to chase the real money.

The reason they target the young crowds has nothing to do with those crowds being a good source of income. It's because most young people have no frame of reference about gaming, so you can just sell any old game concept again.

If the 25+ crowd tries for example a new FPS game, they instantly have all sorts of opinions on quality and are more likely to be skeptical. This makes PC gamers who are typically older more difficult to satisfy .. but that isn't a bad thing.

Hollywood and the TV industry do the same though with remakes/recasts and recycling concepts to young people. The way of the least effort, but it has very little to do with creativity and originality anymore.

As for console piracy, the major parties involved (MS and Nintendo in this case) have absolutely no interest in any official piracy figures. When there is a large (semi)official difference between piracy figures between 2 console makers, publishers and game makers might switch sides or forgo on platform exclusives on the 'pirate console'.

So piracy on the PC is an ideal decoy for the console parties involved. And also for the people who pirate console games in increasing numbers, they're left alone

A remake would be cool

How about a proper sequel, unreal 2 was pretty lame. Unreal 1 had the type of gameplay you don't see very often anymore: an adventure fps. The adventurous type of games are mostly only the role playing ones nowadays. And most FPS games are mission oriented.

A remake wouldn't work i think, but that's just a feeling.

Schemes like Securom work by wrapping around the exe, the actual protection isn't integrated anywhere in the actual game code.

Securom with triggers, like implemented in GTA4, actually requires integration in the game code, otherwise you wouldn't get those funky ingame degradation effects with a crack which hasn't tackled the triggers properly.

I pirate so people like you, Mr Pirate Apologist, no longer have anything to pirate.
This kind of argument would work if piracy really did hurt the industry. But it doesn't. The PC gaming problem isn't piracy.
Also... the more intrusive you get with combating piracy... the more you piss off your legitimate customers.
Very true, people who play by the rules in pc gaming land have to put up with alot of intrusive DRM. I always wondered if the effort of protecting PC games is really worth it, especially since alot of protections simply get cracked in no time at all. Why not try other things, like fingerprinting executables instead of DRM? But i already know the answer, because DRM is a business on it's own.
2. Quit pushing the minimum requirements to play your game to where 80% of the potential market can't meet them. You're only slitting your own throats.
The only advantage of consoles above the PC is consistent system requirements, no more no less. Every other argument is in fact non existant. But that doesn't mean it isn't an important factor. In the early days every PC was capable of running games, but ever since the 3D era and the entering of 3D hardware acceleration gaming PC's have taken an increasing distance from the normal PC's. Gaming on the PC always requires the cutting edge, while, as mentioned before, normal tasks like browsing and e-mailing no longer benefit from more powerful pc's.

No normal mainstream machine is fit to play 3D games with decent graphics. IGP is still way behind mainstream graphics from Ati and nVidia. This makes PC gaming actually more expensive then console gaming. But that also depends on the amount of games you play, because console games are structurally more expensive then pc games.

Theres nothing new. It's just like MTV. Bands that know how to play three chords like Fall out Boy and Christina Aguilera, with their sex appeal make it. You'll NEVER see another innovator like David Bowie on there. It is just too financially risky.
Very true. Being an entrepreneur should be all about taking risks, with the chance of hitting a gold formula. But currently the gaming industry largely ain't about taking risks or trying something original. It's about recycling safe formula's all over again. I am sure everyone here is looking forward to The Sims #34

In addition, how do you think these anti-piracy companies get their talent? They recruit former pirates. So the idea that pirates are the source of the problem is just insane.
Also very true, pirates themselves and anti-piracy organizations are almost a synergy, they need each other to survive. A simple cd-check would suffice if there we're no pirates, now complete and complex protections almost as complex as the games themselves are developed to stop piracy, with no real results.

I for one would love to see how to market would look if there was no piracy. I would bet that nothing would change, just the excuses would be different. If piracy is such an issue, why are they still releasing hugely successful games with lot's of profit? I think it's just the fact that companies want to have any penny out there, but scraping those pennies only gets their loyal customers lot's of DRM and rootkits.

And as for console games, it's a huge market but also has to deal with lot's of piracy. But the console market has generally 1 great advantage: the majority of people who play console games usually are casual gamers who don't mind playing sequel number 345 of the game which the pc gamer already played back in 1998. Cheap games with huge profit margins, and you won't hear sony and MS complain about mod chips.

Also it is estimated that the videogame industry is taking over the movie industry market wise, so if piracy was really such an issue ...

Complaining about piracy is like the farmer who is complaining about the weather: it's never ok.

Make smart and good games, and with some decent marketing you'll have your 4 rare Ferrari's in no time. Release the 475th sequel of that game people loved in the previous century ... and blame it on the piracy.

No, they see the necessity of supporting the OS, and are not exactly thrilled at the fact that they now have to support parallel development of DX9 and DX10 rendering pipelines for their games.
Exactly. Keeping DX10 away from XP is hurting the game industry, game companies will have increased costs with no compensation. Going DX10 only for games is simply not an option for the years to come, because the games industry will miss out on the casual gamers who don't see any reason to switch to vista/dx10 cards because of the few games they play.

The solution for the games industry is simple though, support opengl. But that's unlikely to happen.
This comment was edited on Feb 2, 17:28.

Not interested in UT3, I need Unreal 3 based on the Unreal 1 universe.
Hear Hear, the original unreal universe had alot of room for some interesting story lines and worlds, a shame they threw it all away. The whole mining war thingy the trailer showed off looks like an engine showcase without any serious storyline or depth.

Yes, with the latest patch the orginal unreal runs perfectly under D3D.

Speaking of the orginal Unreal, I'd whish they would make a proper single player sequel (awakening wasn't that good) with the new upcoming Unreal engine.

Well, it makes sense. Starforce isn't just some product created by some by a big media company such a Sony or Macrovision. It's prolly some small company dominated by hackers who are all too proud that they defeated the crackers.And if someone says something bad about their product they take it personally, which is ofcourse, the worst thing you can do.

And it's good to see legit gamers finally rising up to the crap called DRM, because as always, the paying customer gets the worst of the deal with DRM.

COD2 rules for the 360
But you forget, that the worst trolls are people who believe in "absolute" truths (nvidia is TEH pwnz!, cOd2 rUl3Z > *) in the gaming world, the ability to let others differ from opinion is quite essential in real life, I suggest you try to learn that skill.
This comment was edited on Jan 14, 09:02.

As much as people like to deny, a controller can effectively be used for an FPS. I don't see how it would be beyond the grasp for an RTS.
The problem with a controller, is that you can't do 'instant' movements, for FPS you can 'can' get used to it, if other people got the same disability too. But for RTS you need to be able to rapidly select units and move across the map, if you do that with the controller you'll have to wait alot for the cursor to be where you want it to be. Ofcourse you can design your RTS arround it, to be slower and more accessible, but it would take the action right out of it.

Everytime a game the quality of FEAR, HL2, FarCry, etc comes out I count my blessings that their are publishers/developers still willing to make the PC a priority.
Well said.
The biggest explanation for the console reign is simply: control.
Sony/MS/Nintendo made sure that game selling and promoting is going to be a smooth businesss. And not just control from the marketing point, gamewise it's all geared towards more centralisation from the publishers/developers. The market needs, in the console eyes, to be readied for consumption, meaning, making money with everything (micropayments/etc).

I just hope there will be developers left for the PC who'll be willing to let the end-user be in control with things, otherwise the modding community will shrink considerably. In the current age of DRM I think it's gonna be a though challenge.

The graphics of the original "Unreal" (not UT) game kicked ass compared to anything else around at the time.
Definitely, I remember playing it on a voodoo2-sli, I was overwhelmed with the kind of graphics engine epic managed to pull off at that time. And today it still looks damn good. But it's not all that, they created an great atmosphere with the game, ofcourse it wasn't perfect, but I can't imagine many games from that time that we're better.
This comment was edited on Jan 2, 19:51.

the original's atmosphere had a strange "dreamlike" quality. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly...but it isn't something they are likely to recapture in their current incarnations with tattooed Skarrj and super tanks.
I wonder how many people remembered the orginal Unreal (not the tournament) MP, although the net code was flawed, it was suprisingly fun, especially the big levels quake1/2 couldn't match. I am glad they gave it a second chance with the tournament version.

I also hope Epic attempts a try at the singleplay of unreal again, the sequel, although not bad, didn't quite capture the atmosphere of the orginal unreal.

With all the fuss about game protection, it's still a fact that the majority of the gamers don't complain about DRM. And this is a worrying fact. DRM for games has been with us for a long time now. The game community could be an inspiring example to hollywood or the music industry as to how accepted DRM can be when everyone has accepted it. (ofcourse acceptance in music/movies area is prone to be diffecult, because people are use to copying there).

But still it's suprising how little resistance game copy protections meet. But the article guy, although a little of a hothead, is right about one thing, the paying customer is always on the losing side.
This comment was edited on Dec 20, 20:06.

I wonder who Hollywood is going to blame when their sales go swirling down the crapper?
I don't see blu-ray pirated that easily, I guess they'll just force everyone to upgrade by making normal dvd's: expensive, come out much later then blue-ray disks or don't bring out normal dvd's at all.