$750

[weimar_republic]

recentley, after finding out my computer was not good enough to play Civ III, I went out and bought a new one that did, it cost me $750 canadian {$500USD}
it always seems that things need new computers, after about 2 or 3 years, your computer becomes usless. I visit the underdog site often, its a site with old games {from the 90's and 80's} that used to run on Dos on computers with the word TANDY on the front. I have to admit, those games are fun.
my question, why must games be made to play the best of the best in computers, isent there some way they can make them fit smaller computers?

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Civ3 is not designed for state of art hardware, far from it.

 

[CornMaster]

Hey weimar.....long time no hear.

They don't write the games for the newest computers....or you would need a P4 2 GHz. The P-2 300 is fairly low, for the requirements....

But that's just my opinion....

 

[weimar_republic]

ok, so maybe my computer does suck {P2-200} but why do older systems cost so much? "MY" computer {as opposed my this, my grandmothers computer} is a P2-350 and I bought it for $500american. meanwhile I see on TV they are selling new IBM's P3-1000's for $750american or less. I cant help but feel that I am being ripped off. Thundy told me to check egghead.com, but they had this system, p2-200 for sale for MORE then we bought it for in 1998!! there has gotta be some chaper way (this is when someone says, at _____ you could have bought a P2-350 for $100)

 

[G-Man]

You guys are lucky. In Israel a good new computer costs about 5,500 NIS (about 1,250$).

 

[BlueMonday]

SHITDAWG! I was wondering when we'd see you around here again, weimar. I had my money betting on early August, but I was wrong apparently.

For the topic: Game publishers don't create games for the fastest and biggest and best computers that are on the market. Instead, they practice "Market Maximization" in which they do extensive market research to find out the statistics of computers on the market. Then they ask themselves how much game they can put together that would run on enough machines to make a profit. If it were entirely up to the computer nerds who do the nitty-gritty of making these new games, then we would in fact have to always be running the biggest and fastest computers on the market because these guys would just go nuts with how much they can do with a new system. Fortuneatly, the business people in the production studios tell them, "Hey, these are the limitations on the Game: blah blah blah..."

Right now, I'd guess that late generation Pentium Threes in the 600-800Mhz range are the most common computer systems. Therefore most business people in the game publishers are going to shoot for games that can still fit on one CD and run at 600 Mhz. Some games are going beyond that though, wasn't it "WWII Online" that reqiured something like 512MB RAM and a 1Ghz processor as the minimum?

Now comes the wonderful question of "How do they figure out what eveybody's standard computer is?" Answer: Some of it is true market research and some of it is sales analyses but the majority of the info they get for this stuff is spyware -those wonderful little programs that get installed on your hardrive without even asking your permission and then suck up your bandwidth transmiting your specs back to Timesink, Aureate, Radiate, Onflow, Savenow, Webhancer, Doubleclick, and Cydoor.