Ill be honest here, i was going to address my question to members of the Steam Community. However, surprise, surprise, my posting privledges are non existant despite having a valid and extensive account with them for quite some time. No matter, their loss is GOGs (finanical) gain :)

So i've started up an ID here at GOGs because i found that the new release games that have a PC focus, are in steady decline. I feel like that cost of the newer games are not in proportion with the quality. They might look great but - in my humble and uninportant opinion - a lot of them in trying to make it XBox, Playstation, Wii and PC friendly all at the same time, it doesnt do any of these gaming mediums any favours and doesnt appear to utilise any platform's full potential. Why have i payed nearly 100$ for a PC game when it was evidently made to be played on XBox. Why have i bought Xbox games who's interface is designed for PC?

Does anyone else feel that gaming for gamers has gone downhill in recent years? That the replay factor for new games is pretty low and we are treated in a similar fashion that National banking corporations use.

No. Gaming is expanding right now, reaching more people every day. That surely is a good thing. (Don't give me the "social gaming sucks")

Indie developers are more and more every day.

Also, e-sports is taking shape, with Starcraft 2 really being on the top. Its SO easy to get into e-sports right now!

You make a point that some games have a lower quality. Well, that depends on the developer / publisher / game in question, there were stupid game before too.

Well, he's got a point when New Vegas is many folks' game of the year and it is a buggy, horrid mess. I'm not saying it's not fun, but I can't call it quality. Bethesda likes to put out buggy games, though.

The Force Unleashed 2, give us your money, sucker, edition was also a bit of a let down. Strike that, I hate Lucas Arts for crapping out this game.

DA2 appears to have been a cash in. The word is The Old Republic is going to be a poor WOW clone despite possibly over 100 million USD in development costs.

Now, I do agree with you in some respects, the indie scene is awesome right now. If you go to PAX you can't help but to be wowed by some of the stuff there. I couldn't give a crap about Final Fantasy 22 X-Factor-whatever, but the indie and small studio stuff, hell some of the big studio stuff, is really good.

I also think the abundance of ways to publish and new platforms to publish to are allowing more, amazing stuff to be done every day.

One more excellent thing, co-op gaming is big right now, it's fun, you can do more co-op play than you've ever been able to before. Co-op play is fun, not everyone may like it, but it can turn a solo activity into family leisure or several other kinds of positive, social interactions.

E-Sports can kiss my arse, though, until they start playing more than one game, the sequel to the game they used to play, in fact, it's not going to be terribly interesting to a lot of folks. Does anyone even play Quake anymore?

Ask developers in Europe and russia and they'll tell you that PC gaming is not dying, but thriving. I guess that in the case of mainstream genres like first person shooters, or online games it's mostly console focused nowadays, but in other genres like RPG's and its many sub-genres, turn based strategy games and such, PC and gamer-friendly games are thriving.

I think you're going to start seeing more of a turn up in PC gaming because console gaming is way to friggin' expensive.

I don't mind games made exclusively for PC (or console) but on the PC end I hate when they attempt to max out necessary system specs only to push out a simple game that they could've sold a lot more if they would've optimized it to run on older PCs.

So did Black Isle. Fallout 2 was an absolute joke at release in terms of stability (just the word "trunk" can send shivers up the spine of anyone who played it at release and saw a huge chunk of their inventory gone forever). Is it really any worse than Rebel Assault? Privateer 2 had a massive budget and several big name actors, in addition to being an entry in one of the biggest franchises of its era. It was worse than DA2 could ever hope to be.

I dunno, I think it's really easy to forget the failures of yesterday because... well, they failed, while noticing the ones of today is easy because they're surrounding us. Crap like Outpost and Master of Orion 3 suckered idiots out of their money back in the day, and those weren't just bad, they were borderline unplayable (and MoO3 continues to be sold to this very day thanks to GoG, ensuring that every game released here can be faintly praised with "at least it's not MoO3").

Edit: You know what I love most about topics like this? They prove that the internet, and people in general, never change. I remember going on AOL boards when Fallout was first released and seeing people screaming bloody murder because it had tainted and dumbed down Wasteland for idiots. It was a good game, sure, but clearly not in the same league and a general sign of the decline gaming was surely in!

And now it is the untouchable golden god from an era where men were men and games were great, unlike the dross of today. I mean, sure, New Vegas is good, but does it really compare...?

I wonder what 10-15 years will say.

The thing is, games need to specifically be made for e-sports. No matter how awesome your game is, if it doesn't have balance in terms of race / unit strength and usability, it is not going to be played in an e-sport event. Starcraft 2 was made with this in mind.

You also have Heroes of Newerth, Bloodline Champions, League of Legends... These games also have strong e-sports support. (just to name a few RTS games that are played in e-sports events)

Good post. This applies to almost everything, not just gaming. Which is not to say that objectively certain things haven't gotten worse in society (many things have) or gaming (ditto), but people have a tendency to long for yesteryear a bit more than yesteryear deserves.

Edit: Oh and I was once one of those idiots who bought MoO3 at its Mac release looking forward to an updated, nay better MoO2 ... ah the heartache.

Haha, I think everyone has at least one horrible, borderline-unplayable game in their past that they spent full price for.

Remember the reign of FMV games and Myst clones? For every Wing Commander III or Riven you had truckloads of Night Trap and Alida. At least today's Call of Duty clones are playable, because those things were high budget garbage that barely qualified as games. It wasn't all Ultima VII and Tie Fighter.

Yes it is expanding but not nessesarily in a direction I like. Very few indie games float my boat TBH and for every new developer who gets on board the PC another one leaves for the consoles. Rockstar were once dedicated to the PC but now they have all but abandoned it. No Red Dead Redemption, No LA Noir and likely no more GTA. I'm sure some will say "Who cares?" but I do.

Hopefully The Witcher 2 can give some faith in modern pc games

It's only one game though. Even if it sells shitloads and goes on to win every possible award the industry will chalk it up to a blip. For cRPGS to make a full comeback it would need a string of games of the same type to be consistant sellers. This is usually what makes publishers say "ME TOO!" and get on the bandwagon. Other than The Witcher 2 (which is really an aRPG) and a few smaller releases cRPG's are all but dead now. Skyrim certainly isn't a proper cRPG and Bioware have all but turned their back on the genre by making their last cRPG into a jRPG. Who else is left?

DA was praised so much. Is DA2 that bad?

I will just do a summary of the complaints.

- The Awsome Button (tm) seems to be faulty. Nothing awesome happens just people explode. That's not awesome when you see it 500 times.
- There is no choice in the game. Almost all plots come to the same conclusion regardless of what options you picked.
- Kirkwall was compared to Liberty City in the previews. It's an empty city with no atmosphere that you are stuck in for most of the game.
-There is no strategy as enemies just attack in waves now, often spawning in the air (!!) and from any direction.
- You can only talk to companions when they want to talk to you. They even removed the context dialogue from Awakening.
- No Persuade/Intimidate now as skills no longer exist. You only get the standard conversations and maybe the occasional companion interupt.
- Areas are reused repeatedly. There is only one cave map, one mansion map and one hideout map. Section are just sloppily blocked off. The area map even shows the full area.
- Only Hawke can equip armor making 90% of item drops junk. 90% of the items you find overall are also junk and they have a handy trash icon to show it.

I could go on but I think I am angry enough. It's safe to say Bioware see no future for the traditional cRPG.

I definately felt that way a while ago, but I think that the trend is starting to turn around again. While right now a lot of games are either abandoned for PC or just a shoddy console port like a few people have pointed out, I think that developers are starting to take notice that gamers are fed up. Blizzard and CDProjekt are still making solid PC games, Bioware, well, I don't know how they'll turn around after DA2 but I'm confident in Old Republic from what I've seen so far. But oh how the mighty have fallen, let's hope they don't follow Bethesda into (wait for it) oblivion. (sorry)

We have to vote with our money if it's all developers understand. Refuse to buy games that seem second rate. I waited till the new Prince of Persia hit $20 (down from $90 here in australia). Maybe I should have held off altogether. Would I buy Alan Wake or LA Noire on a console? I don't think so, and LA Noire looks really good. If developers are going to abandon me, I'll abandon them too. If they bring it out for PC, maybe i'll think about it, there'll be plenty of others inbetween. The Witcher 2, Portal 2, Risen 2, Diablo III, then next year the Starcraft expansions. And a decent cross-platform can be worthwhile - I'll probably buy Dungeon Siege III and Alice Returns for instance, hell we even have Duke Nukem - now that's a confusing one, more like a console game than Call of Duty, yet beloved all the same.

Why are the only decent games at the moment sequels? Any original IP out lately that I'm forgetting? Or are developers just trying to hedge their bets?