Today when I woke up and turned on my pc this morning, a thought ran through my head as I looked down on the pile of games stacked rather neatly by me monitor. "What do I want next?", this was not really a question of what game I should buy or be looking forwards too, but more what I want to see for the PC gaming platform.

After some pondering of this, I looked through the newer games I had in the stack and noticed a few trends that sum up problems. These problems aren't with the games themselves, as most of them are amazing, but with the market for pc games.

As a dedicated PC gamer there's one thing that tops the list of what I want, and that's PC exclusive titles. The other platforms all have many of their own exclusive titles, but many of the title that used to only fill the PC market are now been produced for the other platforms too, more annoying is that some of these games can no longer be found on the PC at all or have to wait for it's own version. Yes most of the exclusives on the PC are great, with games like Crysis leading it's genre to new levels, but there's just not enough of them. Even then a lot of them are exclusive to PC because the other platforms couldn't run it, but I don't really care if they can run it or not, I want exclusive titles because it's a kick ass platform and not because it's the only thing it'll run on. Game publishers need to stop thinking about the profit and more about the gamers and fan bases.

This leads to the second point on the list, Variety. There just isn't enough of it on the PC, the market is really filled with FPS, RTS and MMO and not much else anymore. I love FPS but after playing so much of it I long for something different. Yes there have been some good console ports lately like Gears of War, but not enough and a lot of ports are poorly done and take too long to come to PC. But I'd rather they take their time and really work to make them as good on PC's as they where on their original platform, than them releasing a half arsed version of a good game. Saying about games taking too long, why are we still waiting for the PC version of Assassins Creed, this was meant to be launched alongside the console versions months ago. If they've spent this time making it run and play extremely well then I'll be happy they took so long, but it does kind of look like they're releasing it as a money spin with the extra content and the shiny case.

Back on topic and the last point I want to make is on Games for Windows Live, because the games that use this service aren't really Games for Windows but Xbox 360 games they ported. This isn't really a problem as the idea behind Live is great, but has been poorly executed. All they've done is take the 360's Live and added it too a few games, but if they want PC gamers to buy into it they should have worked on making separate version for the PC. The design of it looks like it's been ripped straight out of the Xbox and shoved into these games, it was designed for a console and to be displayed on a TV, it looks rather ugly on a PC monitor. It's missing a load of features that the Xbox version has and I hate the fact you have to be in a game to view who's online and to message people. I hope Microsoft are going to really improve Live for Windows as I like the idea, but at the moment I'm not going to pay for such a crap game service.

I love PC gaming and the platform still has some of the best games out, I just would like to see more done for the PC fan base and see more companies like Valve, who have real commitment to the PC gamer community.