Dragon Age II Message Board  

am loving in act 3 atm for got my campion armor. for first time ive played a mage first play though

only thing thats botherd me is the lazy dungeons but other than that am loving it gr8 story gr8 chrs (cept carver hes a *****)

Just means I will have to blow up all the factorys that make ps3 xbox's wii's and god knows what else! lol Like I will ever do it. Am more likey to get to the point where am about to push the button and it will back fire on me like willie ciotie. Yeah I remember yer veiws. I still think they should cater for both. You lose the PC's you lose all those modders that really started all the addon type stuff.

Completed the game, dissapointed with ending, could have been loneger the game deserver's 7.2 by my scale

Have you really completed it?

Did you help the Mages? Templers? Qunari? None of them to be Viscount?

There is a lot of potential endings

We know they claim that piracy is the major factor in pushing them towards the console market.

However, we know this to be false. The PC Gaming Alliance's most recent statistics actually show that PC gaming piracy is on the decline. We can see this in evidence with Dragon Age 2 in fact. Despite it's hype, Dragon Age 2 did NOT have a pre-release crack which is a huge indicator considering how commonplace it was to easily find a crack/keygen for a new PC game on release day.

In addition, the profit numbers published by the PCGA also indicated that in 2010 the PC gaming market grew 20%. This is ridiculously substantial growth ESPECIALLY considering the economic downturn since PC gaming is unquestionably more expensive for the end user than console gaming based just on system cost alone.

What contributes to this is probably two factors:

- Greater broadband access -> Digital distribution of games is real and a viable solution now. You also can't pirate off Steam or Direct2Drive or any of the other digital download models (I think Amazon has one).

- Microtransaction model -> We hate this but a company like Zynga made it (curse all you Farmville bastards). Every game has DLC now, even release day DLC to tack on extra profits on the game. With Zynga being one of the most profitable companies in the world (their CEO is a billionaire off the 1 dollar farmville things), you can probably expect this to continue. It's infinitely easier to do this on PC than console. We already know that Blizzard was attempting to open a Battle.net marketplace to actually profit off of custom maps THEY DIDN'T MAKE.

So really, any excuses the publishers and developers throw at us about rush jobs and awful games is bull**** now.

Console gaming saw it's rise when the economy was good and console gaming is cheap.

PC gaming is seeing a HUGE rise when the economy is bad and PC gaming is expensive.

People are more willing to invest in PC gaming. It's about time we stop accepting the bull**** the publishers and developers feed to us about why they can't take the risks to innovate in PC gaming.

We gave them our side of the investment.

It's time they gave us their's.

I'd just like to point out the title. It's not DAO2. It's Dragon Age 2. Origins only applies to the first game.

@Kbernstar - I won't quote your post as it would be huge.

You mention sales have risen since 2010 by 20%, not a surprise since 2009 was a poor sales year. You forget this, sales are not as high as one would expect. So you can't say the 20% increase means what you think it means.

As for your remark about "You also can't pirate off Steam or Direct2Drive".. That is also nonsense, for the case of steam there is some nasty 3rd party apps out there that will amend steam and allow people to download games as if they bought them, Valve know this and are constantly combating it. Hence why some titles in the past from groups like Razor1911 etc had steam emulators and steam content installers in their releases.

As for D2D it is possible to grab the content easily if you know how, doesn't help of course if games require serials, if they do not then it is easy.

I will agree developers and publishers are more interested in the DLC route as they have to run a business and gain money through means necessary.

"Console gaming saw it's rise when the economy was good and console gaming is cheap.

PC gaming is seeing a HUGE rise when the economy is bad and PC gaming is expensive.

People are more willing to invest in PC gaming. It's about time we stop accepting the bull**** the publishers and developers feed to us about why they can't take the risks to innovate in PC gaming."

That is also not true, I can easily name numerous console only titles that saw sales for many developers and publishers rise very high. Halo series will always have huge sales, as does the Guitar Hero series. Then you had other titles like Heavy Rain, Bayonetta, Uncharted, Red Dead Redemption and others (easy to carry on listing them).

PC gaming has been in decline for a few years now, people can carry on saying it is not, the only saving grace is good quality titles still surface from time to time, but the number of quality titles per year has been decreasing for a long time.

Also another wrong statment you made.. "However, we know this to be false. The PC Gaming Alliance's most recent statistics actually show that PC gaming piracy is on the decline. We can see this in evidence with Dragon Age 2 in fact. Despite it's hype, Dragon Age 2 did NOT have a pre-release crack which is a huge indicator considering how commonplace it was to easily find a crack/keygen for a new PC game on release day."

This is wrong... because

1. Just because a game is not released by any groups or by any other P2P groups before the official release of the game does not mean warez is on the decline.

2. DA2 was essentially warez'd on day 1 of the release by a couple of P2P groups who used a modified Direct2Drive binary (.exe), you only have to check most torrent sites to get the stats on the amount who downloaded it on that day. I can guarentee you if you collate it all it would be a huge number.

3. Cracks/Keygens were commonplace years ago, but just because the methods of encryption, wrapping etc for todays protections is tougher doesn't mean a crack will appear on day 1, for instance it took groups a couple of weeks to crack Assassins Creed 2.


Ill stop this long post now, by finishing with the truth, PC gaming is in decline, many professionals know it, the scene knows it, hardware manufacturers like Nvidia and ATI know it (and are pushing newer GPU's to get profits quicker). I still think 2 years or so and it will have declined to the point of no return and next gen consoles will be topping the markets excessively.

Well, I can counter your entire post very simply.

Your first point said that 2009 for PC gaming was a poor sales year.

Unfortunately, it was not. The numbers from the PCGA for 2009 said PC gaming for that year was up 3%.

It wasn't as phenomenal as the 20% rise in 2010, but it surely wasn't "poor". Poor would indicate a downturn. What's more, in 2010 console gaming and portables saw a 13% decline. Wait what? PC gaming with a 20% increase and consoles with a 13% decline and you're saying PC gaming is failing? And the industry knows it? What industry? The one in your head?

So there you go, your feelings on the failing of the PC gaming industry is going by FUD and anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, mine is backed by actual data.

How is a 3% growth in an industry that is supposedly "failing" poor?

It's what the publishers and developers want you to believe.

It's false. It's lies. It's bull****.

Stop accepting it.

[Edited by kbernstar, 3/12/2011 3:52:40 PM]