I'm talking about relative sales. I understand there's an economic downturn, but console sales regardless of the economy absolutely dwarf PC sales, yet cost exactly the same to develop. That's the point.
Console game sales exceed PC game sales in retail stores. Actual sales is not apparent, because retail sales only constitutes a portion of actual sales for PC games.
I'm ignoring hardware sales here, because there's honestly no easy way to measure this on the PC side.
So Gamestop et al minimizing their PC game selection is a sign that PC gaming is going strong, and digital distribution is a bad thing. Ok thanks I understand now.
The reduction of shelf space for PC games leads to fewer retail sales of PC games. This is simply one contributing factor to the point I mentioned above.
Also I've said above, MMOs are a separate entity all together. I'm not arguing MMOs aren't doing well, just that its hardly relevant to the future of the Civ franchise or Steam. A world of just MMOs would be equally bad as a world with just console ports. It's games made, to buy in their entirety, that could only be PC games, requiring a mouse and keyboard, strategies and so forth, that are the ones at risk, not MMOs (which are one genre that appeals to one market of gamers) or cross-platform console games (which again, isn't exactly what is meant by 'PC Gaming' when said on a Civ forum.
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See above. Not relevant.
Your post about MMOs not being a part of this was in a later post that had not been made when I began my original post. I've addressed in a followup post, if you haven't seen it already.
Could you direct me to these FPS games that are exclusive PC titles not found on consoles? And in fact were not developed in a cross-platform library purely so they can be released on as many SKUs as possible? Reason more people bought MW2 on consoles is that the console market is about 100 times bigger than the PC market.
PC exclusivity has nothing to do with this. The majority of FPS games are simply 'better' on the PC, due to better support for and by the communities that develop. Counterstrike still has a massive fan base despite its age, and the game is kept fresh through mods and such. There are lots of older games that are still alive because the community continued to support them even when the original developers folded.
Look at the original Halo. By PC standards, it was nothing special; by console standards, it was completely groundbreaking. MW2 follows a similar vein in that it didn't add anything particularly new to the genre, but brought it to the console where there was no market saturation already present. (MW2 for the PC is arguably a step backwards for FPS games on the PC, but that's another discussion)
If 2K decide that its not financially viable to continue a well founded strategy franchise that's been around for decades, then something tells me the reasoning for them abandoning it will probably equally apply to Stardock and others.
If 2K executives decide to make a stupid long-term financial decision, there's nothing that will stop them. Of course, what they see and think is not the same as what we see and think, and there's no way to predict the future, so this entire line of reasoning is somewhat moot.
Lots and lots of games don't make profits. Lots of them. And yes, I do think it will, but a big part of that will be Steam. And 'profits being not as high as they would like' I thought this was the Great Depression?
I understand that not all games fail to make profits. When we're talking about a game like Civilization 5 however, which you claim that we are 'lucky' to receive, I fail to see how they can fail to turn a profit (aside from the aforementioned trainwreck scenario).
The 'profits not as high as liked' bit is referencing the de facto rule that a company should never be losing profits. It's foolish to assume that you can maintain high profits regardless of prior and current circumstances, but that's how most investors seem to think nowadays and there's hell to pay if they think you're 'losing' money (despite still turning a profit).
We've seen several publishers bite the dust in recent years, the only reason Take Two are still around probably has something to do with a certain series of vehicular stealing games released on consoles (with a lazy naff PC port) that probably had the same amount of staff and time to develop their games as Firaxis do. Hey, I'm glad they are still investing in PC games but who do you think they're gonna axe should the money run short? Rockstar North? Firaxis? Is that even a question worth asking?
Take Two has far too many franchises to be reliant on the GTA series to survive, though it certainly hasn't hurt. Their sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL) aren't my cup of tea, but they haven't been failures. Bioshock won critical acclaim when it was released. If you want more games as examples, you might as well visit Wikipedia and take a look.
Bad analogy.
A better would be 'Company A make a few different types of cars in country X. Company B makes a few different types of cars in country Y.
Company B sells cars making $22 billion a year in country Y. Company A sells cars making $700 million a year in country X because country X has a fraction of the people in it.
Company A and B are both owned by parent Company C.
Economic downturn and Company C have to make a choice. Do they keep Company A running or Company B?
Setting aside the choice of numbers involved (are you trying to imply that the fate of the video game industry is reliant on the PC market being abandoned?), this analogy entails the false assumption that B cannot survive while A is running. This may be true in some circumstances, but it is certainly not the case in this one (Firaxis is not holding back the rest of the company).
A more reasonable reaction would be to scale back operations and simply maintain a presence in the area until a later date (and guess what, that's what they just did!). Abandoning a market entirely is not a step to be taken lightly.
And perhaps you should have a look how gigantic the pc sales were for Modern Warface 2 (the figures i saw were something around 10% of all sales - so perhaps 1 million 2009).
) "the most pirated game" and not "games". (btw the 10% was one of the higher figures i saw, unfortunally real pc sales figures for this game aren´t available). But imo 1 of 6 can´t be seen as success. (and for the Goo claim look at - iirc PoM - post some pages ago here)
