Why no sports games anymore?
this may be a dumb question, but i was just looking over a madden 2000 game copy i received (friend who was cleaning out his old software gave it to me), and i was wondering what other people thought on the subject. why is it, with a modern computer that's capable of so much processing, graphics, and different input devices, has the sports game industry (well, EA) gone solely to the consoles? is it purely a money thing?
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Originally posted by rok
this may be a dumb question, but i was just looking over a madden 2000 game copy i received (friend who was cleaning out his old software gave it to me), and i was wondering what other people thought on the subject. why is it, with a modern computer that's capable of so much processing, graphics, and different input devices, has the sports game industry (well, EA) gone solely to the consoles? is it purely a money thing?
FPS, RTS, and perhaps role-playing games are the only kind that weren't born on the console. There was a time in the mid nineties where, all of the sudden, computers had good multimedia (CD ROMs) and networking abilities, so some other genres of games came to that market. But, as they, what goes up must come down. The PC lost its advantage for sports games relatively quickly.
But consoles are interesting because they offer a lot of uniformity, which is intoxicating for any software developer. For a game developer, this means he can fine tune the "gameplay" and only have to write one set of device drivers.
FPS is really the last bastion of PC gaming that offers a fast-paced, input-driven gameplay. That is, the way you press the buttons has a profound affect on whether you win or lose. I suspect that FPS will fully migrate to consoles once it's really easy to network consoles. That is, next year.
RTS and those sorts of games will probably stay on the PC for a while, since they are designed around the mouse, which doesn't appear to be a fixture on the console just yet. Perhaps flight simulators will stay too, but that's a niche market if I ever knew one.
Originally posted by Aquatic
Because it's more fun to play them for real.
sorry... not for my knees. i need to live vicariously through the virtual michael vick nowadays.