My home machine is: C2D E6600 2,4 Ghz (2 years old), 2GB ram. This machine is running a VMWare virtual machine session of Windows Vista Ultimate x86 that is limited to using a maximum of 768 MB of my host OS system memory. This virtual machine runs basic home user tasks such as webbrowsing, media (both audio and video) playback, IM, etc etc without any hitches and I haven't made any changes to the default configuration, I am running all the default services, the stock candy UI and all that, so anyone saying that Vista "needs" 2GB of memory or more to be usable is talking out of his ass.

Yes, Vista uses much more of your RAM than Windows XP even when you have closed all of your applications, this is by design and is a good thing. Let me explain:

Vista uses a tool called SuperFetch, that basically keeps track of what applications you run and how often. After learning your usage patterns, it knows which applications are most likely to be relaunched soon and keeps a part of them cached in memory, in many cases allowing near-instantenous (1-2 second) launch times for a large application. This is what causes the supposed "OMG Vista ate all my memory!". Well DUH, would you rather have your 2-4GB of ram sit there empty and being of no use whatsoever or would you rather take advantage of it to speed up application launch times?

1) Should you launch an application that suddenly wants to use most of you RAM, like a game, SuperFetch will immideately free the memory from the precached applications to make room for the game you are launching.

2) If for some bizarre reason you still want to disable this feature, just disable the SuperFetch service and Vista will fall back to the same memory management patterns as in Windows XP.

3) By the way, most modern operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD have been using this very same approach for many years now. 

These days, I sell consumer electronics. This includes computers. We also offer a service where we install the customer's computer for them, and take care of their software problems afterwards. I do most of the selling, less installing, but I come into contact with these computers weekly.

Having 1GB of memory compared to 2GB of memory means that these computers (usually laptops, mind you) will start considerably slower, and will take a longer time to perform tasks like browsing the web, music, or harddrive contents. Worse still, customers keep complaining that they can't really do anything with their computers since "they're so slow".

However, note that these aren't scratch-built computers, so they include a lot more (useless) software directly from the manufacturer.

Still, my old computer with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz and a single GB of RAM and XP SP2 will start up faster, load programs quicker, and handle basic tasks in a more timely manner than a laptop with an Intel T2310 dual-core and a single GB of RAM. 

Still, my old computer with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz and a single GB of RAM and XP SP2 will start up faster, load programs quicker, and handle basic tasks in a more timely manner than a laptop with an Intel T2310 dual-core and a single GB of RAM.

The laptop with Vista, obviously. 

PC gaming won't die as long as PC sales don't die. It's really as simple as that. 

that PC gaming will get more indie and direct download. No publishers but word of mouth. The big advertised titles will migrate to consoles.

The music industry pays radio stations to play certain music and then people buy those records. That is, if you listen to the radio. I listen only to internet radio, since the analog radio almost never plays any music that I like.

Coca Cola spends probably more money on advertisement and market research than actually producing the drinks. It's all about selling an image.

PC people are probably different targets from what marketing people are used to working with.

The new people need to somehow take advantage of the internet. If you are a band producing something a bit different, maybe you should think whether signing up for a multinational record label is smart. What about games? Producing them of course costs much more than music. But could you pick your direction such that it would not be so costly somehow, and self publish on the internet?
Even id software started with shareware... 

"PC gaming won't die as long as PC sales don't die. It's really as simple as that."

I guess I should define "die" more specifically. By "die" I mean : cease to be a profitable avenue for large developers to sell games.

Yes, you will always have hobbyist games and indie games on the PC but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about never getting ports of big games like Halo, GTA, etc. 

well, its not 'die', more like degrade 

More like 'change'. 

when it arrives 2 years late, looks shit next to all current titles and requires the latest OS just to run when it's amazingly obvious it could run just as well as it did on xbox on a 5 year old pc.

Mind you, I think Gears of War was ported nicely to the PC with new content etc. That's cool at least.

Personally I don't give a shit about publishers/developers like EA making ports of their sports titles and console franchises like NFS etc. They still have their primarily pc titles like Battlefield and the Sims, which strike me as being the only games they make that are interesting.

It would be sad if Blizzard, Crytek, id and Valve went console only, but I really don't think that's all that likely because they would end up being sad shells of the companies they are now. Part of what makes them great is the content they can include in their PC games that wouldn't work so well on console because the market is different. 

"It would be sad if Blizzard, Crytek, id and Valve went console only, but I really don't think that's all that likely because they would end up being sad shells of the companies they are now."

It would depend on the company greatly. Blizzard won't abandon PC because WoW is a money printing machine for them. And you won't see Valve going anywhere because of Steam. They want to own digital distribution.

But id and Crytek? It wouldn't surprise me. Crytek has said that they suffered terribly from piracy on Crysis and they're fairly bitter right now.

"Mind you, I think Gears of War was ported nicely to the PC with new content etc. That's cool at least. "

It was cool but numbers don't lie. It didn't sell tons of copies.

"Part of what makes them great is the content they can include in their PC games that wouldn't work so well on console because the market is different."

Really? Like what? I'm honestly curious because when it comes to games that are released on both platforms I'm not sure what content wouldn't work on the console that would on the PC. 

Aside from the release of dev tools and the ability to mod and tweak? 

You release first on console and then on pc, don't expect huge numbers with the latter for two reasons:
people may have bought it on console already and pc players think it's a console game made for the dumb masses.
Just speculation. 

Aside from the release of dev tools and the ability to mod and tweak?

That's exactly the point, aside from SDK-esque stuff there is nothing that can be added on PC that can't be done with consoles.

Patches, new content, mods, etc can all be easily distributed via XBox Live, et al, just as simply as for PC games in the past (look at the new level content for CoD4 on XBox).

I do think it'd be a shame if bedroom modding became a thing of the past, but I don't think it's a major concern as far as the publishers/developers accountants are concerned. 

And the advantage is that when you distribute new content on consoles, you can more easily stick a pricetag on it what with micro-payments and all, yay!

(Yeah I'm still pissed we never got the extra CoD4 maps.) 

but I guess there is a mouse for ps3?

What about higher refresh rates not possible with teevees? 

it's useless to try to think porting a console game to pc and expecting some improvement, when pc is a different platform.

If you design for console, then of course it works better on console.

Has Civilization been ported to consoles and enjoyed any success for example? (Haven't played civ4.) 

"Next-gen" games now simply cost too much to make.

The culture of PC piracy, and the ability (as Bal said) to easily nickel-and-dime content on a console are both contributing towards the fairly obvious fate that PC gaming has seen coming for a long time now. 

yeah, fuck ps2 

I think that hardware on the PC really is the problem. Piracy, yes, is a big problem but I sort of had a moment of clarity this weekend on why PC gaming is dying when I was watching some old demoscene videos.

Back in the day, part of the success of your game wasn't just that you had the best graphics, but rather that your coders were talented enough to come up with clever ways to do neat things on existing hardware.

Remedy & Starbreeze are both full of former demoscene guys (and both are pretty successful companies) and in terms of graphical prowess I'd say they're arguably two of the best at getting good looking games running on limited hardware. Riddick was out the door a few months before Doom 3 and looking sexy as hell on the Xbox(!)

Another great example of this is the game Zero Tolerance for Genesis/Megadrive. I think people thought it was largely impossible to do an FPS on the Genesis but these guys did it.

Also, I'm sure if you asked John Carmack about why Doom and Quake were so successful, he'd tell you a large part of it was getting (assembly genius) Michael Abrash onboard at id to crunch a lot of the code down and optimize the shit out of it. I'm sure a lot of people probably did upgrade their computers to play Quake, but the point is that there was a great deal of effort to squeeze as much as possible out of existing hardware. I know that this just doesn't happen anymore for a number of reasons.

I'm sure Crysis for example was optimized to at least some degree but when you have a budget, a deadline, and the safety net of having partners in the hardware industry who want to use your product to sell the latest and greatest products, you don't have as much incentive to really get your game running well and looking good on lower end hardware.

It could be too that a lot of the optimization wizards are applying their skills to consoles where it's a lot easier to optimize since you know your end user's environment is always going to be the same.

Regardless of all that I don't think I'm as funereal about the state of PC gaming because PCs will continue to be a major part of 21st century life and people will always want to game on them. The developers who have the best gimmicks and hooks (like Blizzard and Valve) will continue to be the ones who snare the largest share of those people. And sometimes, just sometimes, all you have to do is make a great game (like the Witcher) and success will follow :) 

Blitz they do optimise games. But you just cant get modern looks on 4-years old hardware. Games have to scale to the stone-age tech, and some do. UT3 scales pretty well - you can play it on 2,5 year old cards (like gf 7800) or on modern low end (8600). Do I need to remind you its` PC version sales? - like 130k in USA :( Also that was the game that got released on PC prior to the console release. Didnt help either.

You guys forgot that Valve is not a PC dev anymore - its gone multiplatform too. Dont thik they`ll drop PC support anytime soon, but its a sign of time. PC alone doesnt cut it. And as soon as PC games sales wont even justyfy spending money on porting/supporting a PC version of a game - that will be it. Free casual MMOs with microtransactions...

and whats wrong with consoles... cant customize (some games dont even let you rebind keys), cant mod, controller that sucks for the fast and presize aiming/pointing? (lets hope wii changes it, maybe you can even do an RTS with wii mote controlls) some say that sitting 2 meters from a telly is less immersive than nose-to-monitor
Another thing I really dont like (and it gets overlooked) is the segregation - 4 active consoles (not counting handhelds), each having good exclusive games ;/ ffs

Indie/small games are coming to consoles btw - MS makes XNA more open, Sony will be(or already?) open to small devs as well . 

What you actually want to do is convince publishers that it's cheaper to license user generated content (check it, buzz words) than to pay professional developers to create it so that they allow network integration with PCs, then people could download a devkit to create content and stream it to their console.

Most (if not all) of the network hardware is already in these consoles, it'd just require software at either end (you'd need games that support it ofc).

Assuming the PC content files weren't to heavily restricted you could even have online distribution/'communities' (fairly probable, how else would publishers be able to locate and fleece users?).

And you could do all this without any risk of piracy since people would still have to buy a copy of the game in order to develop/play content. 

XNA 

you have to have both a pc and a console... I guess actually all people that have a console actually do have a pc as well...

It's really weird. Why couldn't you make games for those pc:s that people have anyway for the internet and office work, with integrated graphics and sound. Never mind if they're two or three years old, you can still do a lot with them. 

I wanna play fps's with my nose touching the screen and a mouse and keyboard! I prefer this to playing from my armchair on my xbox 360 and 32" 720p....

I dont really know why, I just feel more in control.... 

I used to feel that way. Now I want to play on my couch looking at a 55" HDTV screen. The control issue is a non-issue - modern games are designed with the controller in mind so it's perfectly fine for playing shooter games. The mouse took some getting used to at first when I turned it on for the first time in Quake. The controller does as well.

Sure, you can't do flick 180 turns or pixel perfect aiming but those things aren't necessary in games that are designed for the console. Also, nobody else can do them either so it's a level playing field.