Dear Future Gamer

When companies left, right and centre are going bust or merging, something is seriously wrong. If companies like the ones who develop games like Nocturne insist on specs so high that the general public can't run their games and then wonder why nobody is buying them, they can only blame themselves. Not only are developers going bust, but even the publishers are going bust too.

When will developers and publishers wake up to the fact that most PC gamers don't have 1,000MHz PCs with 512Mb memory, and not forgetting the latest at the moment, a super duper graphics card.

If those in the biz actually walked into my local computer emporiums (we're lucky enough to have an HMV, Virgin, EB, Dixons and a really lovely PC World in Oxford), they might see just how much shelf space is left for PC games. In fact, most shops have reduced their PC shelf space and put Dreamcast and Neo Geo Pocket titles in their place, also taking into account that most stores are slashing their stock of N64 titles.


If the PC games industry tried to develop for what people really have and not what they insist people should have, Joe Public might start buying PC games in large enough amounts.

Peter O'Dowd

FG: It's a good point, Peter, and one that developers seem to forget from time to time. We've had this discussion before and I'm still not convinced it's not down to lazy programming. Instead of optimising your code, why not simply up the machine's spec's required to run the game properly? It certainly saves having to do all that horrid work...