One of the guys I work with can't stop talking about a new video game "Chrome Hounds" for his X-Box 360. It sounds like something I might like but I don't have a 360, so I went by a Target store today to see if that game was available on the PC. It isn't, so I looked around to see if anything else interested me.
Now perhaps Target isn't the best place to do a survey, but video games stores don't carry very many PC games, and I didn't feel like driving to BestBuy or CompUSA. And the selection at Target is pretty extensive. There is an entire row, 6 shelves 30 feel long, plus an end-cap. Some of that is dedicated to kiddie games and educational titles. Another section has those little "Jewel Quest" type games for $5-10. About 12 feet is what I would call traditional titles. I counted 20 titles per row, so approximately 120 titles.
Out of those 120 games I counted 5 that were original titles, all the rest were sequels, or affiliated with a movie or TV show, or both. I didn't have anything to write with, but from memory, I counted 7 The Sims titles, 4 Star Wars games, 3 Sim City boxes, 3 CSI games and a Law & Order. Half-Life 2, Quake 4, Doom 3, Diablo 2 (they're still selling Diablo 2 ?!!?) Warcraft 3, Day of Defeat Source (an update of a mod to a game 8 years old), and a remake of Sid Meier's Pirates were all on hand.
Of the 5 original games, old Halo was one of them.
Now I know I shouldn't complain too much about PC gamers getting neglected, because most of the games I have played recently were primarily console games that also made their way over to the PC where I think they were superior. But it is hard to look at a selection like that and not be jealous of those console gamers who have dozens of new titles just this year.
*** UPDATE ***
Okay, so a survey of one is a bit distorted. So today on the way home from work I went by BestBuy. They have quite a bit more games. I counted two rows and they both had 25 titles in them, there were 8 rows. The bottom rows seemed to have slightly fewer titles, so I'd estimate they have 180-200 titles, almost twice as many as Target has. Like Target, Bestbuy has a separate section with those Bejeweled type games and card games and such that sell for 5-10 bucks, but Bestbuy actually had fewer of those.
As you would expect when you have more titles, there is more room for games that aren't blockbusters. I counted 18 titles that were not sequels nor affiliated with a movie or TV show, or about twice the percentage that Target had. But at about 10%, I'd say it is still pretty miserable. Of those 18, there were 7 first person shooters, 1 WWII flying game, two driving games, and a clone of SimCity. So I'd say the truley original titles number about 7, but I couldn't figure out what some of them were about so I can't really say how original they were.
Anyways, yes indeed, the big budgets of many of these titles means that the people footing the bill for development and marketing are, just like the movies, afraid of taking chances so they stick to sequels and hit properties, and copies of hits. I think part of the solution may be in cutting out the middle-men, the publishers, so that the developers get a bigger piece of the revenue and the break-even point becomes a lot lower.
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