$140 if you have four gamers in the household. Conventional wisdom is that not enough PC games offer single-screen multiplayer or spawn installation [wikipedia.org]; each player needs his own gaming PC and copy of the game.
I'll agree with this. We were having a discussion on PCMR about how we would like to see more split screen gaming happen in the PC world. There are some games that do support this (mostly steam engine games with some messy hacks to the autoexec.cfg files), but it seems to be something that is really just swept under the rug for us.
If everyone were to wait for sales, then how would AAA games' production budgets get covered?
Well, I could discuss this another way for you. Steam games are not transferable and we have full digital distribution (no markup from a seller, no artificial scarcity from lack of physical copies). Due to this, we pay less money for our games, whether this be up front or at sales. Now, I cant find any numbers to back this up, but lets say 50% of people who buy Next Big Singleplayer Title sell the game back to Gamestop and its resold to other people at a lower price. This puts the effective price per unit sold to the developer at $45, around what a AAA title goes for for the first few steam sales.
Now lets talk about the other side of this coin - These sales actually increase awareness of otherwise unknown developers. I have bought plenty of games on Sales from random indie developers that I would have never gotten had they not been $2-5 on sale. Some of them I absolutely loved, and I buy the developers new games as soon as they are available.
Other Slashdot users have told me that 30 days is still not good enough for deployed members of the armed forces.
This is a argument about a very small subset of users. We can pick up random cases like this all we want, but can we please stick to talking about what matters to people living in the US. I will say though, that for those deployed, playing consoles is a better choice for them. It almost wasn't with the Xbone though, until all the backlash occurred.
Yet people stopped buying Atari 2600 games in 1983 when there were too many bad choices on the shelves. What keeps another 1983 gaming recession from happening again?
Long story short? Internet reviews. New game from unknown developer comes out, you can check the Steam reviews for the game or go to youtube for your trusted reviewer of choice to let you know how bad or how amazing the game is.
Does this include freedom to use a game with whom you want, including to play with someone else in the same room and to let someone else play after you're done with a game? Does it include freedom from cheaters?
Steam now has library sharing. If I'm not playing anything at the moment, I can share my library with someone else so they can play my games. Basically I can just swap full libraries with someone for a bit so we can play each others games. Also, at my old apartment, we had 3 computers in the living room, so yes, I say we had the freedom to play with someone else in the same room. We mostly played DotA 2, so there would be no reason for us to even consider split screen. Too small. As for cheaters - I rarely encounter them. This is someone with 1k hours in CoD MW2, about 500 total across BF3/BF4, 1.3k hours L4D2, and 600 hours in Blacklight: Retribution. Due to better server side processing, things like asshole kids 'lag switching' doesn't happen. That, and since most of these games offer dedicated servers with admin, you can actually get someone to kick and ban hackers from servers. Can you police online gaming with hackers on consoles? The best you can do is report someone and pray that XBL or PSN takes care of it.
Attempts to duplicate the paradox of choice in other studies have had mixed success. A meta-analysis incorporating research from 50 independent studies found no meaningful connection between choice and anxiety, but speculated that the variance in the studies left open the possibility that choice overload could be tied to certain highly specific and as yet poorly understood pre-conditions.
The point of the PC Master Race is FREEDOM. We can use what we want, when we want. From how you post, I seriously doubt that you are a PC gamer.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
