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11 months ago
in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Confederates in my Hard Drive on The Technology Liberation Front
Sort of in line with this is the relatively recent rise of the PC-based fighting game community. While fighting games like Street Fighter still nurture arcade scenes in some places, for most of the past decade the definite trend has been towards consoles. Unfortunately, some of the most popular games never received faithful translations to home systems (ie Super Street Fighter II Turbo never got a good port despite half a dozen ties), others received faithful translations to now-dead systems (ie Marvel vs Capcom 2 was ported well to the Dreamcast but nowhere else), or received faithful translations with crappy online play (like Street Fighter III: Third Strike), and less popular games have never received a faithful port. The result has been that the scenes for lots of games have really had to struggle to stay alive.
Enter useful and accurate emulation and viable online play with excellent netcode. Emulated games have been around a long time and the ability to play them online against people is some years old as well, but only in the last year have really excellent programs come out. For example, nFBA is a great emulator that supports virtually all of the popular 2D fighting games, and GGPO.net and 2DF Freeplay are both extremely well done p2p netcode programs that allow for very faithful and near-perfect online play.
The result of this is a huge increase in access to good fighting game players and a correspondingly large increase in both the popularity of the games and the levels of play that've grown up around them. And the benefit hasn't just gone to the popular games; older, more niche games like Street Fighter II: Championship Edition and World Heroes Perfect have developed loyal fanbases and very high levels of play, an impossibility until just this last year.
As for the raw numbers? 2DF currently has 8730 registered users and GGPO currently has over 60500 registered users, and both have several hundred players from every continent online at any given time.
This isn't really an example of modding, but it is an example of the creation (or continuation, really) of a dynamic community thanks to the PC's ability to create ways to work with older games. And yeah, it's one reason I can't see PC gaming dying either.
There's no real way to know whether any of this has had any impact on game developers, but it's interesting to note that since nFBA, GGPO, and 2DF were created, fighting game developers have announced the creation of five major 2D titles to be released in just the next year, and some of them, most prominently Street Fighter 4, will be released on PC.
Enter useful and accurate emulation and viable online play with excellent netcode. Emulated games have been around a long time and the ability to play them online against people is some years old as well, but only in the last year have really excellent programs come out. For example, nFBA is a great emulator that supports virtually all of the popular 2D fighting games, and GGPO.net and 2DF Freeplay are both extremely well done p2p netcode programs that allow for very faithful and near-perfect online play.
The result of this is a huge increase in access to good fighting game players and a correspondingly large increase in both the popularity of the games and the levels of play that've grown up around them. And the benefit hasn't just gone to the popular games; older, more niche games like Street Fighter II: Championship Edition and World Heroes Perfect have developed loyal fanbases and very high levels of play, an impossibility until just this last year.
As for the raw numbers? 2DF currently has 8730 registered users and GGPO currently has over 60500 registered users, and both have several hundred players from every continent online at any given time.
This isn't really an example of modding, but it is an example of the creation (or continuation, really) of a dynamic community thanks to the PC's ability to create ways to work with older games. And yeah, it's one reason I can't see PC gaming dying either.
There's no real way to know whether any of this has had any impact on game developers, but it's interesting to note that since nFBA, GGPO, and 2DF were created, fighting game developers have announced the creation of five major 2D titles to be released in just the next year, and some of them, most prominently Street Fighter 4, will be released on PC.
12 months ago
in The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Is Piracy Killing PC Gaming? on The Technology Liberation Front
I'd need a lot more proof to believe that PC gaming is in trouble than just the overinflated estimates of someone with an interest in complaining about piracy and the number of downloads of PC games compared to the number of downloads for console games.
Obviously the number of torrents for PC games is much higher than that for consoles; it takes a lot more effort to download a console game and put it onto a playable disc in a format readable by the console than it does to just download a game playable on the system you're already using anyway. I'm pretty heavily involved in the gaming scene, and I've only heard rumors of people being able to share Xbox 360 and PS3 games via computer and then somehow transfer those files to a disc in a way that the console can understand. In reality, most of the filesharing for console games going on is for previous generation systems like the Dreamcast and PS1-2 that didn't include the elaborate protections and disc types that the newest systems use. As you can imagine, the demand for those games, even when free online, is not very high.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that if the number of PC games being shared on torrents is only equal to the number of all console games being shared, then the problem can't be very big, because there just isn't that much sharing of console games going on. I'd look to other reasons for the rise of console gaming instead.
And anyway, if people are getting their fill of PC games for free via torrents, then how can there be so much demand for console games? Shouldn't some of that demand be lessened by the lure of free games on PC, and shouldn't people be less enthusiastic about buying expensive consoles and relatively expensive (relative to free) console games? Seems so to me, and yet game developers and game buyers are both extremely enthusiastic about consoles.
By the way, the newest game in a famous franchise (Street Fighter) will be released to PC for the first time simultaneously with the console releases.
Obviously the number of torrents for PC games is much higher than that for consoles; it takes a lot more effort to download a console game and put it onto a playable disc in a format readable by the console than it does to just download a game playable on the system you're already using anyway. I'm pretty heavily involved in the gaming scene, and I've only heard rumors of people being able to share Xbox 360 and PS3 games via computer and then somehow transfer those files to a disc in a way that the console can understand. In reality, most of the filesharing for console games going on is for previous generation systems like the Dreamcast and PS1-2 that didn't include the elaborate protections and disc types that the newest systems use. As you can imagine, the demand for those games, even when free online, is not very high.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that if the number of PC games being shared on torrents is only equal to the number of all console games being shared, then the problem can't be very big, because there just isn't that much sharing of console games going on. I'd look to other reasons for the rise of console gaming instead.
And anyway, if people are getting their fill of PC games for free via torrents, then how can there be so much demand for console games? Shouldn't some of that demand be lessened by the lure of free games on PC, and shouldn't people be less enthusiastic about buying expensive consoles and relatively expensive (relative to free) console games? Seems so to me, and yet game developers and game buyers are both extremely enthusiastic about consoles.
By the way, the newest game in a famous franchise (Street Fighter) will be released to PC for the first time simultaneously with the console releases.
