That’s a ques­tion that has been nag­ging me for quite some time now. PC game devel­op­ers pretty reg­u­larly scream that PC gam­ing is gonna die because of this and that. Lately, they have been blam­ing piracy, phish­ing and cheat­ing for reclin­ing sales. Yes­ter­day, key com­puter hard­ware and soft­ware com­pa­nies have offi­cially announced the newly founded PC Gam­ing Alliance at this year’s Game Developer’s Con­fer­ence (GDC08). The group’s pri­mary mis­sion is to drive world­wide growth of PC gam­ing. They will try to work out ways to bat­tle the afore­men­tioned prob­lems and they’re going to help devel­op­ers to bet­ter under­stand the market.

As if that would change any­thing. Per­son­ally, I’m sick of games that put the gamer into the role of a beta tester. One of the lat­est exam­ples thereof is The Witcher which will even get a new retail ver­sion in May. This will update the game and fix numer­ous issues. OK, they did add some addi­tional stuff but if it is nec­es­sary to re-release a game because it has that many flaws, some­thing smells fishy. I want to buy a game, install it and start play­ing with­out hav­ing to wait for a few patches to make it playable first. As a devel­oper myself I know that it is impos­si­ble to iron out every bug but we’re talk­ing about major issues here.

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