Is Guild Wars 2 the last major game exclusive to the PC?

Two completely different segments of the video game industry. Revenuewise, the casual/indie market is much smaller than the big budget wide release market.

 

Zynga did pretty good in the Day 9 AHGL Starcraft 2 tournament as well

 

I'd also like to point out: When was the last time you saw a Triple A title on sale for less than full price on opening week on a console? I can buy Skyrim for $53 right now for PC.

 

You're going to argue that facebook games can't compete with the wider gaming market, revenuewise? Zynga is valued at how much again? How many hundreds of millions do they make a year? If you want to directly compare the same exact games between platforms, then yes, consoles win outright as far as revenue is concerned. But the fact remains that there are more choices and more revenue streams in the PC marketplace than consoles.

 

A quick google search will show that Zynga makes nearly a billion a year in revenue. How much do you think they spent on development compared to Activision on MW3? To ignore such a HUGE chunk of the overall market is ludicrous. There is nothing like browser based games on consoles, and nothing that really approaches games like WoW.

 

It's like people can't even read. Good for Zynga. They brought in 850 million and they represent a massive chunk of that market. ATVI brought in 3 billion. EA brought in 3.6. Casual games are still small dollars.

I'm still not sure what your point is, considering we're talking about completely different market segments that have almost nothing to do with each other. If you're a big budget publisher putting out AAA releases, the business activities of a company a third your size that exists by ripping off other people's games do not concern you.

Zynga and EA/Activision both have WILDLY different business models and target markets, so I'm afraid your argument doesn't make very much sense.

 

Are those numbers gross revenue or net revenue? Because the R&D to make Farmville (or whatever their latest facebook blockbuster game) is inconsequential compared to the R&D to make Battlefield 3. Probably 1/100th the cost. So if Zynga is making 1/5 the profits with 1/100th the overhead, you tell me who is sitting pretty.

Casual games are NOT small dollars anymore.

 

Net revenue is irrelevant when talking about the comparative size of market segments.

 

No it's not. I'm not saying I totally agree with the other side, but this is simply false.

 

Okay, then how about these numbers? 32 million daily users, 110 million installs.

Way too many people play FarmVille, PC Features | GamesRadar

I don't like Facebook games, but we can't ignore them as an exploding segment of gaming.

Going back to another point made in this thread, as for the argument of the price of a console versus the price of a cutting-edge GPU, what percentage of Americans have a TV ready to hook a console up to? What percentage of Americans have desktop machine that could be a cutting-edge gaming rig but for a new GPU? I'm guessing the former is about 90% and the latter is about 5%, but I can't prove it.

 

I will never care about Farmville.

 

The Total War franchise has been and likely always be for the PC, no console is capable of delivering the performance required to get that kind of game to run. The developers rare foray into the console world wasn't too successful either so they stuck to what earns them revenue.

CDProjektRed may have been interested in bringing the Witcher 2 to the console, but for the time being that matter looks like it's not on the horizon and the franchise remains a PC exclusive. At any rate the developers for that game will only develop from the PC as a base rather than from the console.

These are two examples I can think of that are definitely PC-exclusive as of time of writing, sure they may not be the OP's idea of "major games" but I dare say it won't be the last time we hear from both franchises in the next few years.

 

I think someone already mentioned Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, but I'll mention it again, because SC2 is kind of huge.

 

I paid $40 release date for Gears of War 3 (Amazon).

The console version of Skyrim was $60 with a $10 giftcard on Amazon, pre order.

I bought Modern Warfare 3 for $52 + $25 off XBL card.

Console games go on sale a lot. On the topic of why buy PC, well the PC offers a better graphical experience, and in life if you want a better experience, you generally pay more. Plus you can do more things on a PC like run Altium/Solidworks that you can't do on a console that also require that power. Finally, there is a huge selection of PC games if you are willing to play older titles especially. RTS and MMORPG do not exist on the console (or anything AAA in those genres). Neither do DOTA style games etc.

 

Net profits mean more then profit percentage.

Would you rather earn a 90% profit rate and have sales of $100,000 or a 20% profit rate and sales of 40 billion?

 

If that we're the case, I'd take the 8 billion.

This is fun!

How about 90% of 850 million vs. 10% of 4 billion?

I agree that net profits do mean more (everything) than profit percentage (nothing). If I'm making 90% of my total income as my profit, and that's all the information I have, then it's completely meaningless. That said, I think you're point, if you had one, escapes us.

 

You get a 20 dollars gift card for skyrim (only 360 and PS3) at toysrus. Yea I was so sad.

 

I dont have faith in ncsoft. Lineage is arguably their only successful project and even then its mostly because it was one of the first decent mmorpgs. And yes, i played Aion and everything else they thrown at us. Its nowhere as polished as blizzard products and basically silly from every perspective.

 

Nobody says it's not a big market, it's just not nearly as big REVENUE-WISE as console and major PC releases. Plus it's completely different. I'm not even sure what the point you guys are trying to make is. Zynga games are successful, therefore the PC market for a game like Modern Warfare 3 is just as big as consoles? Is that the conclusion here? Makes no sense.

 

Yes it is. If you're talking about the profitability of a certain market segment, then yes, obviously net profits make a difference. But I don't understand how you can't see that net profits are irrelevant to how many dollars are available for taking in a certain segment.

 

Pretty sure Guild Wars was successful. Also NCSOFT doesn't develop these games, they're simply a publisher. ArenaNet developed both GW and GW2, and are pretty damn good developers if you ask me (they consider the community a lot).

That's like me saying every EA game is crap. While that might actually be true, it has very little to actually do with EA (except that they try to bleed customers dry with every game).

 

Well we can only hope that it will be good (i didnt play GW so i dont know).
On the other hand after playing WoW its hard to consider playing any other mmorpg that is less refined, big, well thought and polished. Unless by playing we mean casually having fun for few weeks or so.

Closest one for me was Warhammer -- its BG leveling was really fun (back then wow didnt have one) and group quests were awesome, but they just didnt have content past level 35 or so. Same with Aion except for it was more of a stupid pve grind to level up, kill 200 elite wraths or 2000 non-elites. Literally, thats to get 45 to 46.

TBH skyrim really surprised me with storyline and quest variety just recently. I hope some company can make same stuff work in mmo. Since everything we seen recently was moderately fun at first and no end game content.

 

Just a different crowd Lieto. WoW is a western MMO, NCSoft are Korean MMOs with different play style and aimed at diffferent gamers. That's all it is.

 

Guild wars was really successful, not sure why you doubt it. And as ACU mentioned, ncsoft doesnt make them, they distribute it.

Guild wars 2 is on several whole new standards compared to guild wars 1, just simply basing off how GW2 will play based on GW1 isnt wise.

 

If by different play style you also mean 50 times LESS content then ye, i agree.

 

At this point I would jump on the bandwagon and would say that content at launch is almost irrelevant in this case. The new system being implemented is what matters here when comparing it to the first Guild Wars. And if it is after all about content, then GW2 will be bigger at launch that GW was at launch.

There is no reason to think that Guild Wars 2 won't get bigger and bigger as time goes by. So far, the game exceeded my every expectation and it continues to raise the bar as time goes by. It will be a triple A MMO at launch and will probably exceed everyone's expectations. I have great confidence in Anet.

 

I could care less if games were PC only if they would reverse the way they make them. I would like to see it get back to games being designed and built around computers and then a version dumbed down and optimized for consoles. If game developers went back to that way of doing things they would still have good console games, but the PC versions would be much better than some that we currently see.

 

i am not trying to mock the game that isnt out yet btw.
By content i mean that you are killing thousands of same mobs over and over to level only to find out that eventually you killed all mobs and there is nothing else to do.

 

Guild Wars 2 is a special case in my opinion. I actually cannot identify any Korean "signature" on it. Anet is their biggest player and they have complete freedom in their development. I wouldn't call GW2 a Korean MMO. This was valid for the first title, but not anymore.

 

Yea...that's not how GW2 is going to be at all.

 

Guild Wars 2 blow Rift, Warhammer or any WOW clone out of the water. In fact the original GW1 was the #1 free game while WOW was the $1 pay game.

In fact GW2 is not a wow clone, the two game are completely different. That is what make GW2 so unique. It won't lose fan to WOW but it has the ability to get all of WOW fan to GW2 since there is no monthly payment.

 

Its not new, its a week old but finally some new stuff to look at.

Eric Flannum on the Guild Wars 2 G-Star Demo – ArenaNet Blog

Char customization looks really nice, so do the graphics from screen shots.

Much better than the other RPG's out now or out soon.

 

Just by looking on screen shots you should be able to identify a korean game.
1. All characters look like they escaped from beauty and the beast and Backstreet Boys band.
2. The way character is running — even if the game isnt anime-ish it still feels like he ran away out of some anime
3. Whenever you are casting something or doing special attacks he yells something like ORIGAMI! ORIGATO!
4. Most monsters are either some wild bunnies and deers or escaped from half-life2. I mean you will rarely meet skeletons or knight-captain traitors or some goblins / gnomes.

 

Good thing I like all those things

 

Some programmers and artistic devs are Koreans and I can see where your view is coming from, but that doesn't make it a Korean game. The non-human characters are the only things that are out of proportion and may have given you the "beauty and the beast" impression. But then again you are talking about western MMO's and... sorry WoW is far from having a normal looking character. In Guild Wars 2 Human/humanoid characters are the most proportional models I've ever seen in an mmo. I really can't identify a "korean walk" among them... I'm not even sure if that is something to compare MMO's to. As far as voice casting goes, again, I didn't notice any "korean yell". It could be an adaptation, but the voice overs have a darn good american accent if you ask me.
Again, "wild bunnies and deers" are mobs that bother you, and yet you are talking about WoW.

 

I am pretty sure there some limitations in China / Korea that restrict killing humanoids in games / draw red blood and censure is strong in general when it comes to skeletons and other horror attributes. Something along these lines.

In wow you dont kill bunnies btw. I mean there are bunnies and you can kill it but you dont get exp for it.

Anyhow i just watched some GW2 game videos and it doesnt look too korean indeed.

 

Yeah, I am just not interested in this game.

 

Aside from some character's running, i don't see how the game could be korean-ish. The game is developed by arena net, a US based studio and backed by a korean publisher. Blade and Soul and TERA, now those are what you could define as games with a strong korean feel.

I'm not aware of limitation depicting humanoid violence in china and korea aside from maybe and i stretch maybe things that are blood related. China is more about violence against pandas censorship (panda like animals got removed from GW Factions for that reason). There is definitely violence against humans in GW, but no blood and the game was launched in china and korea...

I'd bet Australia has worse censorship than both those countries .

 

China has weird laws. For example, they required Blizzard to cover up the exposed bones at the joints on the undead models in WoW. Also, dead players, instead of leaving a skeleton, leave a nice neat gravestone.

 

Thanks for letting me know, i looked for korea censorship, but didn't take the time to look for censorship policies of china.

 

This is an interesting discussion... I live in China and play games (albeit purchased through my US Steam account where availability and prices are both better), but I have no knowledge of gaming regulations in China. I do remember there being some kind of fuss with one of the WOW expansions and the government wanted the China-based WOW service providers to ban the expansion in question and possibly shut down mainland WOW service entirely, but I don't know if that was due to content or (more likely) the ongoing attempts to weaken Western internet companies' presence in China in favor of keeping the money at home (ala restrictions placed on ebay.cn [defunct] and google.cn, among others).

It doesn't really make much of a difference, though - the market for licensed games is probably less than 1% of all PC gaming in China. Why pay $60 for BF3 when you can pick a cracked copy up in front of the local supermarket for $1 and nobody will look sideways at you for it? As a result of that, regulations for pretty much anything but MMO's are pretty useless here, since everybody else is just using a cracked copy from who knows where.