Since almost ALL major games are ports of consoles and the actual time involved to port a 360 to PC game is almost nothing ( as can been seen by the lack of DX10/11 support, shader issues, online playability and/or lack of any controller input quality. The whole ' piracy recovery ' argument goes out the door as the PC is at most a ' also ran', like the old days in the late 80's when a PC game would be ported to the mac.. it's all just gravy beyond the consoles. if you doubt that, look at the bonuses that IW was/is suppose to get, but turned out to not be ' enough', they read like top line movie star options or US wall street bankers bonuses. having worked in the business years ago, I can say from some experience that the guys who do the work get paid very little, the guys who are collecting the funds are the ones up the ladder. So the only pirates are the actual executives of the game companies and their publishers. a solid core of programmers, artists and designers make no more then the average employee at a government office.
A good example of a quality 'PC mostly' company is SIMBIN.. polished product, support up the ying-yang and very reasonably priced. Bethesda did a great job with fallout3/NV in terms of support and final product with on going updates..
So unless the game is ridiculously polished and supports a PC properly, I can't personally justify $60+ for a 1/2 assed product on the PC.
[quote]So we pay thousands for our ridiculous rigs and set-ups, but balk at 60$ for a good game?
I remember paying 75$+ for games in the 90's I'm not complaining.
if you're referring to old console games where they're still using ROM chips, then that's to be expected.
I balk at US$60 games because devs and publishers make claims that the increase is to offset the cost of piracy. And it remains to be seen (and judged) if the higher pricetag is also to cover the higher cost of development. Yet I personally do not see the higher cost to be worthy of the cost in development for several of the games (see yearly sports titles and other half-assed games out there *cough*NFSHP*cough*)