skavenhorde, I am with you.I am a kind of half empty kind of guy, remember I have been a PC gamer for 20 years or so, so was around in the heyday that younger gamers look back on but were not there. I subscribed to magazine and read them, which you canno go back to them and do that as a lot of them have gone. I lived and worked in the U,S, for 6 years from 1991 to 1997 and saw the goings on in the largest PC gaming market while keeping an on he European side, then in 1998 I came back and watched the U.S. side while being in the European side. I also have ran a independent games store when it was PC, Amiga ST and still Commodore 64. I owned a distribution frachise selling Commodore 64 games before even that, and in the States for those years I ran a computer games business. So I know this business as someone who has worked in it, been to the trade shows, talked to the developers and media editors and subscribed to the trade mags that told thing consumer mags didn't and all the while I was doing that as my various jobs I was a gamer too - never interested in console gaming, always wanted to play games that used my brains.
Because of my background and experience maybe I have a different slant on the games business, where it's come from, and where it seems to be going than just a gamers who has a 360 and PC at home and has been gaming since 2002. I successfully predicted the the computer game recession in 96-97 by pulling my games publisher business out of retail distribution and making it a direct sell games company, lowering our prices by 40% in the process.90% of small games companies disappeared in those two years. I didn't. What I saw that no one else in the industry did was that everyone and the Uncle was jumping on the CD band wagon when no body had CD-Rom drives in their PC's. Being a gamer and still in the real world, I saw it was take 3years or more for gamers to have PC's with this 'new technology'. It was just not reasonable, as the industry and media insisted that gamers would upgrade. A few would, but the bulk of gamers even today may just about install a graphic card, but would not install a CD-Rom drive.
It's only a matter of being willing to to digest news over the medium term so you can ascertain facts. It's being willing to spend just a few minutes a day educating yourself as a gamer about what's going on. For example, a couple years ago, with the aid of a calculator, I spent about 10 minutes or so adding up all the review scores given by Gamespot the year before, I the divided the total by the number of reviews to get an average. At the end of the current year (at the time) I spent another 10 minutes or so doing the same with that current year. The results were in 2006 the average score was 77% and about 80 games were reviewed, and in 2007, the average score was 67% and about 60 games were reviewed. Anyone can spend 10 minutes and do the same thing for the 2008 reviews, but I am guessing it will be way fewer reviews, because their were way fewer PC game releases and would not be at all surprised if the review percentage went down again to show a continuing decline in the quality of PC gaming.
When I started a thread in Gamespot to give these numbers out, you should have read the excuses gave, from reviewers getting harder on games than before (why?) to me not doing the math right! About 1 in 10 just said 'Wow, I didn't realise' or actually looked at the numbers and had a serious answer.
Now I shouldn't have had to done that. Gamespot should have done that. But nobody is really interested in the facts, mostly th industry, media and PC gamers want to keep their heads in the sand. Well, that doesn't work. You need debate, petitions, complaints, gamers unions, gamers cooperatives, putting pressure on the media an by extension the industry, but we don't have these consumer groups, we don't even have an investigative media. Take away the press release regurgitation and what do you have on most gaming and PC sites? Practically nothing. When digital camera's started taking off, there was a huge debate in photography magazines about the repercussions and what it meant for the consumer, the market and the industry, some of what was talked about was quite unpalatable for certain groups, but it was talked about anyway. Our gaming media just don't do any of that. That's why when the games industry said 'we're going to put PC games into DVD cases, as it will mean smaller publishers will be able to ge on the retailer shelves, the gaming media just went along with it. Even though they knew how the distribution system worked, they knew it wasn't because of lack of shelf space that smaller publishers couldn't get their titles into retail,it was because the big guys had made sure the distribution served their purposes. There cost meant 70% discount to a distributor and a 40% discount for a retailer was within their budget because of their size, but that it kept everyone else out. I knew that, the industry knew that and the media knew that. It was the media's job to tell it's readers this but it didn't. It's because since around 2001 the gaming media has supported the industry, not it's readers. This is why World of Warcraft's 10 millionth subscriber was huge news throughout the media, and DOSBox's news of it's 10 millionth download was not mentioned at all in any of the major gaming press, print or web.
Given the state of the PC games market 15, 10 and 5 years ago, it doesn't take a lot of work to see that PC gaming has declined markedly. PC sales are around 40% of what they were 10 years ago with around 70% fewer PC titles being released than back then. It's got nothing to do with the consoles either, or Microsoft wouldn't have been able to make grounds into the the console market and the Wii could not have done either. How you succeed is simply giving the customer what they want. The customer doesn't want to upgrade every 18 months, the customer doesn't like that a game with 12 hours of gameplay sells for the same price as one that ha twice that amount. The customer doesn't like DRM or buggy game releases and the customer doesn't like his favourite genres being lopped off so that all games can become action/adventure/roleplaying games, that are actually none of the above!
We gamers get the industry and media we deserve, and that why I think the gkas is half empty and the hole in said glass is getting bigger every year.