Lower and lower system requirements for gaming?

I'm about to buy my first new laptop in quite awhile (W860CU!!) and I've been making a list of games I'm been waiting to play.

But while looking at the system requirements, it seems like there's been a trend towards maximizing the number of pcs that can run a game. By this I mean modern games are made so that years old pcs can run games well. I understand how this makes business sense (and that there are the games that run only on high end pcs) but has anyone else noticed this trend towards lower and lower system requirements?

I mean, I'm hoping that my W860CU will play every game well for 2 years, but looking at the sys. reqs. it seems like it will be a solid gaming pc for 3 years, perhaps.

 

Well, it depends on the games you're looking at.

Yes, some companies want to make their games accessible(ex: Blizzard games or the Sims series) to as many users as possible, but others don't really care that much(ex: Crysis, GTA4).

Also, there's the question of the optimization of the game's engine in relation to the hardware. For example, Crysis is a very demanding game yet Crysis Warhead, which looks just as good, was better optimized and runs far better on most machines.

In general though, I've come to notice that Minimum system requirements for games have more or less come to a standstill(seems a 6600GT has become pretty standard for most min. requirements on games for the past year and a half or so). However, recommended system requirements seem to be constantly increasing slowly as games start to take more and more advantage of the newer hardware available.

 

I'd say not. The games I have looked at recently (namely Cities XL, NFS Shift, Sims 3 and Champions online) are recommending a spec of 2.5GHz Dual Core, 2GB RAM, 512MB Graphics card with SM3.0 and a few GB hard disk space. That's a pretty contemporary spec, in fact my Desktop doesn't meet some recommended (but is over all minumum) specs these days.

 

I got the same feeling lately... I recently got The Sims 3 and NFS:S and was suprised to see they are not as demanding as I hoped. I might be getting the new Batman game also, which is not that demanding as well...

Finally they are putting more effort into optimization... Rockstar should be ashamed...

 

Maybe thats because a lot of these games are cross-platform and many developers just dont care enough to do whatever it is they do to the engine to optimize it for more powerful hardware? Maybe not though...

 

I think that minimum system requirements should be kept as low as possible so that most people can enjoy the game. Recommended system requirements should increase as developers put more effort to optimize their games with the new hardware coming out.

Basically, in the best of worlds you'd have something that runs well on a bottom end machine, but runs and looks awesome on a high end one.

 

Forever Melody,
You have just described a pretty unlikely scenario... As much as i would like that to be true, the # of games that fit your description is overwhlemed by titles that spit in the face of a 128-bit bus GPU. Having previously owned a G1S with a Heat-Force 8600m GT, i can tell you that about half of the games out on the market remained a mystery to me until i got my 9800m GS-powered asus simply because they refused to scale and gave out horrific low framerates.
Yes, the Sims is nice, CS:S is nice, so is Fallout 3 and Company of Heroes. But these arent "spectacular" looking games. They employ very little of what the gaming industry offers in terms of graphics and end up tipping the canoe over to the "lower-end PC" side regardless.