Which game killed the shooter genre?

[TripJack]

halo is the only god of fps genre destruction, and goldeneye is his messenger

i've tried hard to get into halo but it never seems to grip me. perhaps i'll play it on the second-hardest difficulty one day (someone told me that's the best way to play it) but i don't see why people got into it

people got into it because microsoft marketed the hell out of it once they realized their shit console didnt have any other games

 

[samuraigaiden]

It's worth remembering that Halo was being hyped even before Microsoft bought Bungie. It was first showed publicly at an Apple keynote.



Halo is pretty fucking good for a console FPS from 2001. AI was genuinely ahead of it's time and, while this meant mostly grief for PC gamers, Bungie did figure out FPS gameplay for consoles.

Another thing worth remembering is that FPSs play like shit on the PS2 and arguably on the PS3 too.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Pointing to Halo just seems stupid, if that game had ended up coming to the PC and Mac like it was originally going to people would be jerking off over Bungie's little forgotten cult game with those big open areas you could drive a number of vehicles around in. Halo is kind of funny, because despite it being this huge hit, and other developers trying to make their "Halo Killer," off the top of my head I can't really think of that mean first person shooters that actually had stages and weapons like Halo. Most people seemed to take from Halo is the rechargeable shield as rechargeable health, which was talked about when it came out, but the other stuff, (and LAN parties) was what made that game. The same type of thing oddly enough happened with GoldenEye too.

The shift in the demo didn't happen because of Halo. It didn't even happen because of the Xbox. It happened because the PC boom of the '90s ended. By the mid '90 like every family (at least in America) had at least a family computer, and these were nice ones that could play most anything that came out. But by the 2000s, if they were even getting a new computer it'd probably be a laptop which wasn't built for gaming, (or at least anything that needed some power) and later still it shifted to phones.

The demo shift happened because there wasn't the audience on PC anymore like their had been just a few years earlier. Now maybe the XBOX quickened this more than if the console market was just the Japanese PS2 and GameCube, but it happens regardless because the PC just didn't have the audience it once did at that time. Only thing that changes is maybe more western developers go under, and the target console is the much weaker PS2.

I'm not sure I follow your logic. The problems came due to target audience for shooters moving from nerds on PC to normalfags on consoles. Your post implies that demographics didn't change, just the platforms.

You're saying Halo is to blame. I'm saying that if you look at it like you were talking about then the blame isn't a game, it's the death of the PC market. Halo, no Halo, that doesn't change anything because the '90s PC Boom is still coming to an end in the early 2000s. The market is still shifting to console because it has to. It's a bigger issue than a game. If Halo had stayed on PC nothing changes, the PC boom is still ending and the market still has to switch to survive, you'd just be pointing at like some Metal of Honor game instead. Hell, just apart from the whole '90s PC boom coming to an end you could point to the addition of the left analog stick on controls as having a bigger impact than any one single game

The audience also was much the same. PC gaming wasn't some niche thing, some genres may have been, but the FPS sure as shit wasn't. What, you think Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem and Half-Life were like some fucking hardcore niche things? They had Doom setups in Walmarts in the '90s, most everyone that played video games also played some Doom on something and most everyone that played video games in the '90s probably played at least one version of Doom on PC. I didn't know one person after like '95 that played console games that didn't also play PC games.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Pointing to Halo just seems stupid, if that game had ended up coming to the PC and Mac like it was originally going to people would be jerking off over Bungie's little forgotten cult game with those big open areas you could drive a number of vehicles around in. Halo is kind of funny, because despite it being this huge hit, and other developers trying to make their "Halo Killer," off the top of my head I can't really think of that mean first person shooters that actually had stages and weapons like Halo. Most people seemed to take from Halo is the rechargeable shield as rechargeable health, which was talked about when it came out, but the other stuff, (and LAN parties) was what made that game. The same type of thing oddly enough happened with GoldenEye too.

The shift in the demo didn't happen because of Halo. It didn't even happen because of the Xbox. It happened because the PC boom of the '90s ended. By the mid '90 like every family (at least in America) had at least a family computer, and these were nice ones that could play most anything that came out. But by the 2000s, if they were even getting a new computer it'd probably be a laptop which wasn't built for gaming, (or at least anything that needed some power) and later still it shifted to phones.

The demo shift happened because there wasn't the audience on PC anymore like their had been just a few years earlier. Now maybe the XBOX quickened this more than if the console market was just the Japanese PS2 and GameCube, but it happens regardless because the PC just didn't have the audience it once did at that time. Only thing that changes is maybe more western developers go under, and the target console is the much weaker PS2.

Halo's effect was not in how it shaped game design but in how it shaped the approach to game making and marketing. Before Halo the philosophy in practice was something along the lines of "Better games sell more" after Halo it became "Better marketing sells more". Halo proved that even a deeply flawed and sometimes frankly terrible games can sell like gangbusters if you apply the proper marketing spin to them. Since then the design strategy revolves more around "wooing" people into buying your crap rather than making something actually good.

Spoiler

Check out my post on page 3 of this thread if you want more details on that. I linked there an article by Dan Vavra detailing how this whole thing was handled in the case of Halo 3.

I'm not even sure how you came to this wrong conclusion. You think Halo came up with marketing something well? You know Medal of Honor and GTA3 came out before Halo did? I'm not even saying those are the first video games that did what you're talking about, just that they did it and had done it before Halo ever came out. I also don't really remember any kind of big marketing push for that first Halo from Microsoft. There were magazine ads, but then there were magazine ads for that fucking terrible Asurik game too. Apparently were was a tv commercial, (and it's not impressive) but unlike the DoA3 one I don't remember actually seeing it on tv. I feel like DoA3 and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee got more of a push.

halo is the only god of fps genre destruction, and goldeneye is his messenger

i've tried hard to get into halo but it never seems to grip me. perhaps i'll play it on the second-hardest difficulty one day (someone told me that's the best way to play it) but i don't see why people got into it

people got into it because microsoft marketed the hell out of it once they realized their shit console didnt have any other games

This is just wrong. Halo was a thing being shown off in PC magazines before Microsoft ever bought it up. I think the first time I ever saw it was in '99, and then after that in PC Accelerator. It was the Myth guys new game, PC magazines covered it before it became an Xbox exclusive.

There was other stuff on the Xbox when it came out, Max Payne was in there. Also had the best versions of Silent Hill 2, Project Gotham Racing, and Dead or Alive 3.

 

[schru]

Also had the best versions of Silent Hill 2 ...

It did not. A much inferior fog effect, lower-quality cutscene videos and sounds, simplified music system, and maybe some other problems. A better torch effect and higher resolution can't make up for these.

 

[Ravielsk]

I'm not even sure how you came to this wrong conclusion. You think Halo came up with marketing something well? You know Medal of Honor and GTA3 came out before Halo did? I'm not even saying those are the first video games that did what you're talking about, just that they did it and had done it before Halo ever came out. I also don't really remember any kind of big marketing push for that first Halo from Microsoft. There were magazine ads, but then there were magazine ads for that fucking terrible Asurik game too. Apparently were was a tv commercial, (and it's not impressive) but unlike the DoA3 one I don't remember actually seeing it on tv. I feel like DoA3 and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee got more of a push.

How did you even manage to get that from my post? I never claimed "Halo came up with marketing something well". Halo simply proved that strong marketing(these days we call it "hype") can massively compensate for a game that is factually bad. GTA and Medal of Honor were genuinely great games, Halo was at its finest a mediocre shooter with some neat ideas. If that game was not pushed by Microsoft as the "next big thing" it would have quietly released on MAC and maybe PC to little fanfare and the would have ended as one of those obscure shooters from the early 2000s that only select few remember, like Pariah or Infernal.

 

[Zeem]

You're saying Halo is to blame. I'm saying that if you look at it like you were talking about then the blame isn't a game, it's the death of the PC market. Halo, no Halo, that doesn't change anything because the '90s PC Boom is still coming to an end in the early 2000s. The market is still shifting to console because it has to. It's a bigger issue than a game. If Halo had stayed on PC nothing changes, the PC boom is still ending and the market still has to switch to survive, you'd just be pointing at like some Metal of Honor game instead. Hell, just apart from the whole '90s PC boom coming to an end you could point to the addition of the left analog stick on controls as having a bigger impact than any one single game

The audience also was much the same. PC gaming wasn't some niche thing, some genres may have been, but the FPS sure as shit wasn't. What, you think Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem and Half-Life were like some fucking hardcore niche things? They had Doom setups in Walmarts in the '90s, most everyone that played video games also played some Doom on something and most everyone that played video games in the '90s probably played at least one version of Doom on PC. I didn't know one person after like '95 that played console games that didn't also play PC games.

I think you're conflating the market in general with a particular genre. If it wasn't for Halo crafting a handful of mechanics that made playing a fully 3D FPS on a console not instantly miserable we might've never had the console shooter boom. Rather the genre would stay on PC and would probably avoid the massive decline that came with normalfag invasion in the late 00s.

 

[octavius]

"Environmental storytelling", lol. Best part about Duke3D are the exploshuns.

Best part was the quotes.
You face, your ass, what's the difference?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

"Environmental storytelling", lol. Best part about Duke3D are the exploshuns.

Best part was the quotes.
You face, your ass, what's the difference?

I once got into a verbal altercation with some random guy in the parking lot of a pet store, and after things had escalated, the idiot offered one final parting insult, "Hey, buddy! How would you like it if I cut off your head and shit down your neck?!!" as he walked very briskly towards the safety of the store entrance. I burst into laughter when he said that because that's one of the original lines of Duke3D (though it may not have made the initial releases but some modder did find it in the unused files or something and reinstated it).

 

[octavius]

"Environmental storytelling", lol. Best part about Duke3D are the exploshuns.

Best part was the quotes.
You face, your ass, what's the difference?

I once got into a verbal altercation with some random guy in the parking lot of a pet store, and after things had escalated, the idiot offered one final parting insult, "Hey, buddy! How would you like it if I cut off your head and shit down your neck?!!" as he walked very briskly towards the safety of the store entrance. I burst into laughter when he said that

It would have would have been a perfect opportunity for "time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of bubble gum" (assuming you're not the Don Knotts or Woody Allen type).

 

[Nifft Batuff]

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

You're saying Halo is to blame. I'm saying that if you look at it like you were talking about then the blame isn't a game, it's the death of the PC market. Halo, no Halo, that doesn't change anything because the '90s PC Boom is still coming to an end in the early 2000s. The market is still shifting to console because it has to. It's a bigger issue than a game. If Halo had stayed on PC nothing changes, the PC boom is still ending and the market still has to switch to survive, you'd just be pointing at like some Metal of Honor game instead. Hell, just apart from the whole '90s PC boom coming to an end you could point to the addition of the left analog stick on controls as having a bigger impact than any one single game

The audience also was much the same. PC gaming wasn't some niche thing, some genres may have been, but the FPS sure as shit wasn't. What, you think Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem and Half-Life were like some fucking hardcore niche things? They had Doom setups in Walmarts in the '90s, most everyone that played video games also played some Doom on something and most everyone that played video games in the '90s probably played at least one version of Doom on PC. I didn't know one person after like '95 that played console games that didn't also play PC games.

I think you're conflating the market in general with a particular genre. If it wasn't for Halo crafting a handful of mechanics that made playing a fully 3D FPS on a console not instantly miserable we might've never had the console shooter boom. Rather the genre would stay on PC and would probably avoid the massive decline that came with normalfag invasion in the late 00s.

There were already big FPS games on console before Halo. The difference is there's still a booming PC market in '97 when GoldenEye 007 comes out.

If the question is what killed the FPS, and your anwser is the FPS moving to consoles, the symptom is larger than any one game. It didn't happen because of Halo. The FPS didn't move to consoles because Halo did well. It moved because it had to, it had to because the '90s PC boom was a bust by the 2000s, and the market wasn't there like it once was. Also, with that generation of console games a modern FPS that has you aiming was viable with the introduction of the right analog stick. The genre was never going to stay on PC, it couldn't, and look at what happened to genres that couldn't make the jump; stuff like adventure games (although adventure games kind of did, just not western developed ones) and real time strategy games never successfully did what the FPS was able to and they basically died, and many of those studios shutdown. If Bungie had never been bought up by Microsoft nothing changes besides the game you're pointing to if you're pointing to a game as the cause; like Red Faction came out before Halo and was a big deal when it out on the PS2 that same year, it's just Halo ended up being bigger.

The twin stick controls first person shooter use today first show up in that Alien Resurrection game (the year before Halo on the PSX) that was done by the Star Fox team...the ones that created Star Fox. Once duel analog sticks became the standard a Halo was bound to happen on consoles. Microsoft also made the wise decision for their console to have four controller ports right out of the box, (which is one of the reasons GoldenEye and Perfect Dark were so big on the N64) and to let you system link them.

 

[Morenatsu.]

they moved to console not because there was no more PC market (bullshit), but because there was suddenly now a console market for normies (rather than nerds and children), and because microsoft made the xbox specifically for the purpose of making it easy for PC devs to get normiebux

even so, all the major FPSes were still developed for PC up until the mid-2000s, with only some crappy ports available on consoles. it's only when the Xbox 360 came along that everything suddenly became multiplatform. am I supposed to believe that PCs died overnight of entirely natural causes?

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Unreal, the PC boom of the '90s was ending in the '90s. 1999 specifically. Xbox doesn't come out until 2001. The Xbox is not why first person shooters went to consoles. The collapse of a PC market is why. There was a boom period in the '90s where year after year PC sales were up from the year before. But at the end of the '90s that stopped. People just weren't buying powerful PC's that could play all the latest new releases like they once were, (this is why Warcraft 3 had a major scaling back from the better looking open world RTS RPG version they originally showed off, they were worried they wouldn't be able to sell enough) they were sticking with their old hardware, and laptops sales were starting to go up. Declining PC sales in '99, along with the announcement of the PS2 are probably why you even get the Xbox from Microsoft; no reason to go into the console market to competition against Sony if PC sales were still what they used to be.

The PC market had fallen into total disrepair in the 2000s, and was basically sustained by the 2004 release of War of Warcraft. PC game sales didn't really bounce back as a mass market until Steam becomes a major force in distribution, and that doesn't happen until sometime in the early 2010s; until then, at least in America, (South Korean MMOs were making money that made WoW look like nothing) the market would be dominated by a single monolithic release like WoW and then later Minecraft, with some things like The Sims series doing well.

The PSX is still one of the best selling consoles there's been, (the original Xbox didn't even sell a quarter what it did) so the idea that there was finally a market for normies with the release of the Xbox has to be the dumbest fucking point you could make. Xbox wasn't even the big seller of its generation, the PS2 was. The PS2 also had first person shooters before the Xbox ever came out, big ones too. The Xbox could have never been a thing and you're still going to have first person shooters going to the consoles, they're just being made for the PS2 and GameCube instead. Hell, without the Xbox they're probably being specifically made with the PS2 in mind instead of being developed for PC and Xbox. GoldenEye also already showed back in '97 people would play a FPS on console; the N64 sold pretty terriblely, yet GoldenEye still ended up being one of the best selling (maybe the best selling) FPS of that time...Half-Life's total sales were a million higher when Valve released figures in 2008, (and at that time it's still Valve's best selling game) but that's also 6 years after the N64 not being a thing anymore.

If you're going by sales numbers it could be argued the only major FPS released in the early 2000s is Halo on Xbox. That isn't a quality statement, but it's the only early 2000s FPS release selling millions, and it's the only one that will sell millions year after year. The three biggest PC first person shooters pre Halo on PC are Half-Life in '98, and Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena in '99, but none of these will sell what Halo does in it's first few years, and Half-Life is the only one selling in the millions. Rainbow Six 3 comes in 2003, and it's numbers are in the millions, but it's also out on all the consoles...must have done better there too, because the series will shift to being a console game after that.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Dude, shut the fuck up about sales. It's not about PC sales ‘declining’, it's about console normies being able to provide even more money regardless of that. And of course Microsoft would want to be involved, they're interested in dominating all the markets. It doesn't matter whether they might think one is better than the other when they can just have all of them. And they were in fact interested in consoles before that, you know.

I didn't say the Xbox created that wider audience, I'm well aware the PSX can be blamed for that. But the Xbox was the only one made for getting PC developers to work on consoles, and it at least managed to set the precedent for the next generation if nothing else. Dumb shit like Deus Ex: Invisible War would have never existed if there was no Xbox. And all those non-Xbox FPSes are irrelevant, they're created by console-only developers and weren't ever going to be replacing PC games by themselves. And then the next generation had the expensive and frustrating-to-program PS3 and the useless baby toy Wii, neither which would be worth bothering with over the Xbox 360, so it still comes down to it being the Xbox's fault.

The only reason ‘sales’ are the cause is because developers and publishers are universally retarded. The end.

 

[Beans00]

the N64 sold pretty terriblely, yet GoldenEye still ended up being one of the best selling (maybe the best selling) FPS of that time.

That may have had more to do with the poor N64 library. I owned an N64(and goldeneye), most of the games on that console were brutal.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Dude, shut the fuck up about sales. It's not about PC sales ‘declining’, it's about console normies being able to provide even more money regardless of that. And of course Microsoft would want to be involved, they're interested in dominating all the markets. It doesn't matter whether they might think one is better than the other when they can just have all of them. And they were in fact interested in consoles before that, you know.

I didn't say the Xbox created that wider audience, I'm well aware the PSX can be blamed for that. But the Xbox was the only one made for getting PC developers to work on consoles, and it at least managed to set the precedent for the next generation if nothing else. Dumb shit like Deus Ex: Invisible War would have never existed if there was no Xbox. And all those non-Xbox FPSes are irrelevant, they're created by console-only developers and weren't ever going to be replacing PC games by themselves. And then the next generation had the expensive and frustrating-to-program PS3 and the useless baby toy Wii, neither which would be worth bothering with over the Xbox 360, so it still comes down to it being the Xbox's fault.

The only reason ‘sales’ are the cause is because developers and publishers are universally retarded. The end.

It's all about sales. It's a fucking business. If the audience is no long what it once was you have to go somewhere else. And the audience wasn't what it once was in the 2000s, PC sales were declining, that's a fact, it's fucking weird anyone would have a problem with this very true statement that was being talked about at the time. This whole thing of trying to position the FPS, even on PC, as some kind of fucking hardcore thing is also fucking odd. Everyone played fucking Doom. Doom was big. The Doom series sold very well. Doom came out in a time when not everyone had a PC at home and yet most everyone still ended up playing it. Fucking normies played Doom too. Some of you guys are talking about first person shooters like they're fucking Gold Box games or something.

Microsoft's interest in the console market specifically seems to stem from Sony's aim of beating the PC with the PS2. If PC sales were still going up in '99 and expected to keep growing (as opposed to the opposite) as they did in past years they'd have no reason to enter the console market like they did with the Xbox.

Invisible War would've just been a PS2 game if the Xbox never existed. If you truely think it would've been developed for the PC if the Xbox wasn't a thing you are truely a fucking moron. The studio even had PS2 experience from porting the first Deus Ex; they went with the Xbox because it was more powerful, but in lieu of the Xbox being a thing Invisible War is a different game specifically developed for the PS2.

Volition, The Red Faction developer, was not a console only developer. They're the creators of the Descent and FreeSpace series. They're literally one of the old school PC FPS developers. They were a PC developer, and they moved over to consoles with Summoner on the PS2. Summoner comes out the year before the Xbox is released.

 

[Morenatsu.]

If PC sales are declining, just fucking sell them better. People are retards, you can convince them of anything. But I guess that contradicts their existing programming to love their TEEBEES!!

Also yes clearly Red Faction, the sole exception, proves everything. Also yes clearly Microsoft would have no interest in consoles if it weren't for the PS2.

This like excusing crime as being the result of lolpoverty. Sure, whatever, they did it because ‘sales’, but that's not the reason they made the particular decisions that they did.

 

[Lyric Suite]

PC sales were declining, that's a fact

Is it though? The success of WoW says otherwise.

I got the impression their rationale when they entered the console market was, why not both? This means it was never their intention to ditch the PC but of course if you have to make a game for both platforms the lowest common denominator wins and certain genres got murdered as a result.

 

[mediocrepoet]

If PC sales are declining, just fucking sell them better. People are retards, you can convince them of anything. But I guess that contradicts their existing programming to love their TEEBEES!!

Also yes clearly Red Faction, the sole exception, proves everything. Also yes clearly Microsoft would have no interest in consoles if it weren't for the PS2.

This like excusing crime as being the result of lolpoverty. Sure, whatever, they did it because ‘sales’, but that's not the reason they made the particular decisions that they did.

You're a complete retard, kid.* The entire market for gaming was shifting in that era, PC gaming almost died completely. Stores went from walls of PC games to either nothing or a tiny section. There was no digital distribution yet. PC gaming started to be dominated by mostly MMOs and anything else, the PC port would be the shitty one and you'd have to get a console to have the real experience.

Things improved incredibly since then, but there was a period where it looked like PC gaming would disappear entirely and there would be no market for enthusiast PCs.


* Given how stupid most of this is, I have to assume you're too young to have actually lived through the period being talked about and are just mouthing off.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I honestly don't remember any of that. Neither the empty walls of games or anything else that pointed out the PC gaming scene was dead. The only thing that i do remember is that the quality of the games themselves started declining at some point, and things weren't any better on consoles.

Maybe the media was pushing this notion the PC was in trouble precisely to sell the whole console craze gaming studios became fixiated about and you guys fell for it.

 

[Morenatsu.]

If PC sales are declining, just fucking sell them better. People are retards, you can convince them of anything. But I guess that contradicts their existing programming to love their TEEBEES!!

Also yes clearly Red Faction, the sole exception, proves everything. Also yes clearly Microsoft would have no interest in consoles if it weren't for the PS2.

This like excusing crime as being the result of lolpoverty. Sure, whatever, they did it because ‘sales’, but that's not the reason they made the particular decisions that they did.

You're a complete retard, kid.* The entire market for gaming was shifting in that era, PC gaming almost died completely. Stores went from walls of PC games to either nothing or a tiny section. There was no digital distribution yet. PC gaming started to be dominated by mostly MMOs and anything else, the PC port would be the shitty one and you'd have to get a console to have the real experience.

Things improved incredibly since then, but there was a period where it looked like PC gaming would disappear entirely and there would be no market for enthusiast PCs.


* Given how stupid most of this is, I have to assume you're too young to have actually lived through the period being talked about and are just mouthing off.

That doesn't even contradict anything I said. Of course PC gaming declined because they were ignoring it for consoles, but he's saying it the other way around. And I just don't believe that these decisions were really necessary. It's all the choice of some dipshits who want more money and don't even care about games. Why should I give a shit what you think they thought of their sales.

And again, look at all those shooters that were made for PCs first, right up until the release of the Xbox 360. I know you guys hate Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 and shit like that, but those are big games for a supposedly dead market, in a genre that supposedly already moved to consoles, supposedly.

 

[Grauken]

Half-Life killed the shooter genre. Jumping around, retarded puzzles, it was the beginning of the end

 

[mediocrepoet]

If PC sales are declining, just fucking sell them better. People are retards, you can convince them of anything. But I guess that contradicts their existing programming to love their TEEBEES!!

Also yes clearly Red Faction, the sole exception, proves everything. Also yes clearly Microsoft would have no interest in consoles if it weren't for the PS2.

This like excusing crime as being the result of lolpoverty. Sure, whatever, they did it because ‘sales’, but that's not the reason they made the particular decisions that they did.

You're a complete retard, kid.* The entire market for gaming was shifting in that era, PC gaming almost died completely. Stores went from walls of PC games to either nothing or a tiny section. There was no digital distribution yet. PC gaming started to be dominated by mostly MMOs and anything else, the PC port would be the shitty one and you'd have to get a console to have the real experience.

Things improved incredibly since then, but there was a period where it looked like PC gaming would disappear entirely and there would be no market for enthusiast PCs.


* Given how stupid most of this is, I have to assume you're too young to have actually lived through the period being talked about and are just mouthing off.

That doesn't even contradict anything I said. Of course PC gaming declined because they were ignoring it for consoles, but he's saying it the other way around. And I just don't believe that these decisions were really necessary. It's all the choice of some dipshits who want more money and don't even care about games. Why should I give a shit what you think they thought of their sales.

And again, look at all those shooters that were made for PCs first, right up until the release of the Xbox 360. I know you guys hate Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 and shit like that, but those are big games for a supposedly dead market, in a genre that supposedly already moved to consoles, supposedly.

Thanks for clarifying your point.

 

[Ravielsk]

I honestly don't remember any of that. Neither the empty walls of games or anything else that pointed out the PC gaming scene was dead. The only thing that i do remember is that the quality of the games themselves started declining at some point, and things weren't any better on consoles.

Maybe the media was pushing this notion the PC was in trouble precisely to sell the whole console craze gaming studios became fixiated about and you guys fell for it.

PC dying is a shitty meme I have been hearing about since 2004. Its been predicted multiple times, either because of consoles or "muh piracy" but it never happened and usually any decline on the PC scene was the result of entirely external factors that had nothing to do with PC as a platform. Stunts like delayed PC launches, buggy unoptimized ports or always online DRM that made the games unplayble at times(looking at you AC2), interfaces and input tailored exclusively around 360 gamepad(and no other). Things like that were the reason why it seemed like the PC market was dying, its like with a pet if you dont feed it and generally ignore its needs what is going to look like? Probably not well fed and happy.

Its just another case of executives creating a self fulfilling prophecy. Nothing more, nothing less.