Sim City 5 is yet another game that exposes an inherent conflict at the heart of the PC, about how connected and app-like or independent it should be. Publishers like EA might be trying to convince PC users to think of their games more as services, but PC users are still as reluctant as ever. So are operating system developers. And so the PC continues to muddle on. → Read More
It would appear that Crysis 2 for the PC has leaked in some capacity. A quick look at some of the more popular sites when it comes to this kind of thing suggests that many thousands of people have no problem downloading Crytek’s unfinished game, which is due for release next month. Well, was due for release next month—who knows how this leak will affect development? → Read More
Direct2Drive, the digital download service for PC games, has started a rental service. It’s $5 for five hours of gameplay, which, doing some maths, works out to $1 per hour. There’s a small catch: only three games are available to rent right now: Grid, Divinity 2, and Silent Hill: Homecoming. The future, Conan? → Read More
Two Nvidia GTX 480Ms! That’s what Origin has stuffed into the EON17, the company’s latest razzle-dazzle gaming laptop. The specs are probably better than your desktop’s. → Read More
Picked up your copy of Final Fantasy XIV yet? (You’ll recall that the collector’s edition was released on the 22nd, with the standard edition hitting stores on the 30th.) Any interest in this, thing, a Final Fantasy XIV-branded controller? → Read More
Good Old Games has re-launched, but it looks like the site is having some growing pains. If you’re lucky enough to get the site to resolve this morning, you can expect to run into all sorts of server errors. Good luck buying Baldur’s Gate any time soon! → Read More
Good news and bad news, folks. The good news: Good Old Games isn’t shutting down at all! The bad news: Apparently Vince Russo is running the site’s PR department, because this type of “swerve” is rarely appreciated. → Read More
Looks like we won’t be playing Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition on the PC anytime soon. (Meh: we’re all busy playing Civilization V and F1 2010.) Capcom blames piracy, as always. → Read More
Well there you have it: digital sales have outpaced physical sales. For PC games, that is. According to the all-seeing, all-knowing NPD Group, there were 11.7 million digital sales of PC games during the first half of 2010. That compares to 8.2 million physical sales. Clearly Steam and others like it are on the right track. → Read More
As if this is a shock to anyone, but StarCraft II is now the best selling PC game of the year. Within 24 hours Blizzard sold 1 million copies, and within 48 hours that total climbed to 1.5 million copies. The game is quite popular, yes. → Read More
You may have read that Blizzard spent some $100 million to develop StarCraft II. Well, that information is incorrect. Blizzard actually hasn’t disclosed how much it has spent to develop the game; that $100 million actually refers to World of Warcraft, which has been in continued developed for like 60 years at this point. → Read More
You know how every month you see stories like “Red Dead Redemption sells X copies, Super Mario Galaxy 2 sells Y copies,” etc? All of that data comes from the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. What NPD never used to track was digital download sales—Steam and the like. That’s why’d you see doom-and-gloom stories like, “PC game sales fall 50 percent last month.” Yeah, because… → Read More
Oh, what could have been. Rahul Sood, of Voodoo PC fame (now at HP), says he’s heard from people in the know that Microsoft was working on a project that would have integrated Xbox Live with a sort of Windows Live. The end goal was to have been console gamers and PC gamers playing against each other on a combined Xbox Live+Windows Live service. The reason why this project never saw the light of… → Read More
Friendly reminder: Steam has a killer summertime sale going on right now, and it runs through July 4. → Read More
Just a friendly reminder that Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City, the stand-alone pack of Grand Theft Auto IV DLC is now available for PCand PS3. As DLC goes, it’s not bad → Read More
The changes in PC gaming mean that, by 2013, “PC enthusiasts” will only account for 30 percent of the dollars spent in the field. Right now, “PC enthusiasts” account for nearly half of every dollar spent, or 46 percent. Enthusiasts are people who read all those hardware sites with meticulous benchmarks and who have no problem dropping $300 on a motherboard or graphics card. I guess that makes me… → Read More
Looks like the Nvidia GTX 400 series GPUs are starting to trickle onto various sites several days before the official release. Take that paycheck and pump it right into Direct X 11 goodness~! → Read More
The World’s video game press gathered in New York on Tuesday for the world premiere of Crysis 2, the sequel to the game whose memory lives in on the question, “Yeah, but does it run Crysis?” It’s no coincidence that Crtyek, the game’s developers, and EA, the game’s publisher, chose New York to show off the game, with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli calling the city “symbolic of the pride of mankind.”… → Read More
God almighty do I have a bone to pick with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which I bought on release day like a mark. The game is doing quite well for EA, having already sold 2.3 million units (and projected to sell 4 million by the end of the year). So that’s ahead of expectations—it’s a hit, have a party. The thing that annoys me (and Matt, for that matter) is the game’s implementation of… → Read More
An idea of how much I enjoyed playing The Creative Assembly’s, by way of Sega, Napoleon: Total War pretty much all weekend long: I just ordered all four parts of Max Gallo’s biography of Napoleon from Amazon France. I don’t even speak French! (Well, a very little bit, but certainly not enough to read a four-volume biography written by someone who’s a member of L’Academie française.) That’s a… → Read More
Fellow PC gamers: it’s time to freak out. You’re familiar with Ubisoft’s newfangled DRM scheme that requires you be online in order to play its games, right? It’s 100 percent as awful as we had thought it would be. PC Gamer recently played Assassin’s Creed II, and discovered what a pain the in the ass the DRM really, truly is. Get this: every time you lose your Internet connection the game boots… → Read More
It’s earnings call season, and while no news is more shocking than the fact that WWE will drop the Survivor Series, there’s something for World of Warcraft fans. And, really, who isn’t a fan of World of Warcraft. Anyhow, yeah, Cataclysm will come out this year. We’ve (and by “we” I mean the WoW community) pretty much assumed as much since the expansion was first announced, but now the money men… → Read More
What’s the opinion on buying pre-built gaming PCs? I’m pretty sure there’s a certain sense of pride that comes with building your own PC, but I also recognize that not everybody has all the time in the world to research motherboards, RAM timings, and all that jazz. Like, say, look at this PC. It’s the Digital Storm Black|Ops (The irony of promoting a black op!), and A) it looks pretty damn cool B)… → Read More
It’s time we start implementing DRM on console games. I mean, look at this nonsense. The Xbox 360 version of BioShock 2 leaked yesterday, a full five days before its official release. The same thing happened with Mass Effect 2, which leaked something like six days for the Xbox 360 before its official release. Since publishers are so keen to treat PC gamers like filthy thieves, I say we start… → Read More
Stupid Steam, making me spend money whenI had no intention of doing so. This weekend’s deal is the FarCry collection, which includes FarCry and FarCry 2: Fortune’s Edition (includes DLC and other bonus items). (Of course, you could have just visited that Web site I mentioned the other day.) It costs $15. Yeah, I can part with $15 to have those two games in my ever-growing collection. → Read More
Steam, Valve’s digital distribution for video games (as well as a kind of “social network” for gamers, though the phrase “social network” makes me nauseous), is really quite successful. In 2009, its fifth year of operation, sales were up 205 percent over the previous year. The service has more than 25 million users, of which 10 million have full profiles. (I’m one of them, by the way.) That means… → Read More
For all of its stupidity, the music industry should be commended for relaxing its DRM requirements. Every single song on iTunes is DRM-free, as are the songs on Amazon MP3 and electronic music specialist Beatport. The Zune Marketplace works a little differently, but many of the downloadable songs there are DRM-free, too. But PC game publishers? They’re still bat-shit crazy, as evidenced by the DRM… → Read More
Hot damn, you guys. Hot damn. Good Old Games — GOG.com — is now selling old Activision games for six bucks a pop. And you know what Activision owns? All the old Sierra games. → Read More
Looks like we have ourselves yet another DRM-related controversy for your amusement. The star this time is BioShock 2, the upcoming FPS developed by various 2K studios. The usual suspects abound: SecurROM, limited installations, and Games for Windows Live. → Read More
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