[QUOTE="mismajor99"]It's a game that sold poorly, that's one example. Also to take note is that SS2 came out the same time as HL and Starcraft(HL goes to consoles, but that's a different story, right?), two of the highest selling games in History. The game couldn't have picked a worse time to market, and like I said before which you conveniently ignored, Ken Levine has talked about this in the past a few times in regards to SS2. There are countless console titles that have sold poorly as well. Great PC games for the most part sell very well. Multiplatform development exists to maximize profit, and not necessarily because a PC game happened to sell poor. Halo sells great on Xbox, but MS still releases it on PC because they know it will make further revenues. The third point to make about Bioshock is that 2k Games, under Irrational Games at the time, was under contract to develop for both PC and 360, that was the agreement from 2k (predominantly a console publisher) as Ken had a terrible time selling the game to any publisher. Most companies he spoke with prior to 2k told him that it wasn't an appealing sounding game, which we all know is BS now.
Consoles aren't dumbing down the games, the Mass Market Console Owner(or Parents) is who runs out and buys everything, despite quality, is. To be more specific, I think it's fairly safe to assume most console owners are kids with parents and money to burn, not the average poster on gaming forums. Games have been on a downward spiral for years, and I blame this on the fact that Publishers know they can get away with sub standard games, and also the absolute false notion that PC Gamers are the same type of gamer a console gamer is, that's where problems arise as well.
Grive
I didn't "conveniently ignore" anything. "Great" PC games do not always sell well, just like Great console games don't always sell well. You can find a very notable correlation between "hardcore, non-dumbed-down games" and relatively poor sales performance. System Shock 2 did poorly, and there's no excuse whatsoever. It never picked up, and it didn't even have a good release. Blame Half-Life. Blame Starcraft. Blame whomever you wish, even though system shock 2 was released almost a full year after both of those games: under your argument, a year is not enough time separation between great games on the PC, which would fully prove my point.
The games that usually do the best are the ones that appease the hardcore base while still being accessible and simple enough (at least on the surface) to appeal to a more casual audience, like, well, Half-Life and Starcraft.
What I suggest you do, is get off your high horse, stop pointing your nose up, and start seeing reality. Gaming is not going down. Your nostalgia is going up. Don't worry, it's a very common problem, and I know it's not intentional, even if your nonsensical elitism is. You're just remembering the diamonds among the piles of garbage you forgot about that gets shoveled to the PC year after year, and comparing those diamonds (ah, the great 1998, which had Half-Life and starcarft) against the ugly 2007 (ugh, only Crysis and World in Conflict amongs the mass of casualized garbage!).
Starcraft is a much more hardcore game, especially online, than just about any console game and most PC games for that matter, that's pretty much a given. In fact, just about the whole RTS genre is considered hardcore to most, being that most are casual in nature. To your SS2 point, who's to say SS2 was a failure? You're premise that SS2 was a failure is flawed. Are you aware of how much it cost to dev the game? Of course not, and with the amount of copies it sold, I have little doubt it didn't post a profit for Looking Glass, just not as much as it could have. Selling a couple hundred thousand copies wasn't all that bad, and in order to be called a success, you didn't need to sell a million copies, not on PC at least. Games like HL and SC were just out of this world in terms of sales vs. most other games in comparison. As Levine has said many times, it was a marketing failure. To be more specific, he stated many times that people were confused about what kind of game it was. That's why he constantly referred to Bioshock as an FPS. I wish I could find the article online, it was in an issue of GFW a few months backs, and usually they do put many of their articles on 1up. It discusses exactly what we are talking about.
To your point about being elitist, that's just a BS statement. For one, the console market has definitely screwed up many PC franchises, even though the user base on PC is good enough, Publishers have more pressure to pad the bottom line, and in return, many series are completely butchered or forgotten on PC. This is a valid complaint, not an elitist complaint, I'm not sure where you get off saying that. I guess people can't complain about my platform of choice getting dumped on, that's elitist. God forbid someone prefers to game on PC over console even though they game on both quite regularly, and because it might initially cost more, that's being a snob. What nonsense.
The funny thing is, when it comes to console vs. console arguments, it's okay for PS3/360 owners to bash on the Wii for it's casual influence on the industry, and that's perfectly ok, but when PC gamers complain about PS3/360 having a casual influence on their games and industry, that's a different story, right? Those damn PC Gamers are snobs and elitists, right?
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