last night a friend of mine persuaded me and my brother to join him playing world of tanks (i played the beta and knew where this ship is sailing, so i abandoned it like a panicking rat) but i thought "what the hell, lets play this $hit again". after a few rounds me and my brother started a very eye-opening discussion where pc gaming in general has come to and the probable future that lies ahead.
the "pull out your wallets - free to play" grinding plague is spreading fast, with no signs of slowing down. soon all that will be left on the pc besides that are "indie-schmindy" titles like terraria and such, playable on f*cking smartphones, which would also run great on a c64, retarded console ports where you can't even lean or prone because there aren't enough buttons on the controllers, and nobody bothers tweaking them adequately for mouse and keyboard play because those titles sell way more copies on friggin "casual gamer's" consoles than on pc, where it all began, and all SHOULD be developed for in the first place, and dumbed down afterwards for the consoles.
but the opposite is happening because it's more profitable.
there's a few decent developers/publishers left that try to cater to the pc market exclusively, but their efforts aren't rewarded the same way compared to all that multi-platform sh!t. they are struggling with compatibility and performance issues and low sales numbers compared to the "big fish" catering to the retarded "casual" market. arma2 and ro2 are great examples for this phenomenon.
arma2 especially suffers from hardware not being up to the task of delivering decent fps (i mean 40+) in certain situations even several years after release, on hardware that wasn't even on the blueprint when the game was released.
studios like 777 have to take drastic measures to keep them afloat, making their game free to play, selling maps, planes and other stuff for rise of flight to keep the project going and i can't blame them.
the pc gaming scene is on a steep decline and there you have tripwire, delivering a great (but bug-ridden) pc-only fps with features never before seen in such a title, promising free content updates, modablility and (hopefully) long term support.
they sure know they have made some mistakes with their hastily release at a stage when the game was far from polished, but it was a smart marketing move to release prior to codmwX and bfY. that way they skimmed the market before the big fish threw their rewarmed crap there. i hope tripwire have made enough sales to make their past and future efforts worthwile.
shortly after launch the game was doing well, considering that most gamers prefer casual modern warfare nowadays, the player numbers don't lie. i enjoyed ro hos from the first day i got it, i'm still having a great time, even if i have to play on a server where 2/3 of the population are bots. tripwire are improving the game constantly, but sh!t takes time as they haven't got the manpower like ea or actiFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU (i guess there's still the mg36-red dot bug in bc2 (is it? i don't want to reinstall that game just to be most likely disappointed), ea doesn't care, they just crapped another big dump out there that seems to be closer to bf2 than bc2, but still isn't comparable, what the hell, money is flowing! why fix tiny issues with an outdated title when they can ignore them, count the money and plan their next big scam?)
the red orchestra 2 we have now isn't perfect, but the several patches we got over the past half year have improved the performance and gameplay a lot, and the beta plays even better. BUT WHY THE HELL IS NOBODY TESTING IT??? there's so little players in the beta it makes me wonder if those few hundred players that are left have any interest in the upcoming changes, or they simply prefer to grind their classes and equipment to max level instead of discovering bugs, giving feedback considering the changes in gameplay and in some degree influence the future of this great game.
the classic mode won't bring back all the disappointed ro vets that already left, it's a wasted effort imho. what did they expect? they compared it to cod (WTF???), "it's too arcade", "it's not red orchestra anymore" etc and abandoned ship. games change ffs, cod1 was a great title in its time, as were medal of honor, bf1942, doom and wolfenstein to mention a few. times change, games change.
there's two options: cry about how pc gaming goes down the river or stick to what's left and make the best of it!
i wonder how long it will take until developing games for pc will reduce itself to the above mentioned indie titles and free to play "buy your ingame advantage if you're too much of a noob to play properly!" bull$hit. i also wonder how long tripwire will deem putting their resources into rohos worthwhile, when they could be moving on developing killing floor 2 or something, if there's so little interest in their efforts of improving ro2 (ie the beta).
where do you wan't red orchestra 2, and more generally pc gaming to go? moving on proudly, even if it's not the most profitable way to market games, or dwindling into console ports, free to pay bull$hit, rewarmed crap every year for 60$ with no ability to mod it, throwing even more money down greedy publishers throats for a friggin mappack and stuff that should be in the game in the first place, and indie games that don't use the full potential of your hardware?
THAT is the stuff that is profitable, not supporting a game for free over a long period of time, when so-called vets turn their backs because of nit-picking alterations to a game they loved that nobody plays anymore.
