[vox] a dual-boot system?

[Jeffrey J. Nonken]

On Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:46:12 -0800
Bill Kendrick <nbs at sonic.net> wrote:

> I'm curious, though... how big is the PC gaming market these days?
> (As a percentage of gaming in general.  Across computers, consoles,
> handhelds, mobile phone games, etc...)
> 
> I realize there are some PC users who can't live without their games,
> some gamers who can't live without their PC games, but neither of
> those things seem like driving forces in the computer market as a
> whole.

No idea. Poking around in search engines left me with no real hard
numbers, just a feeling that consoles are more popular than PCs. I
think those predicting the imminent death of PC gaming just don't know
what they're talking about. I think those who assert that one platform
is definitively superior to the other are just engaging in gaming
platform equivalent of OS wars. I do know that there are a lot of PC
games and a lot of stuff is still being developed. 

Even just looking at my own preferred genera there's an
impressive number of players still active on the older games -- I play
Half-Life Team Fortress Classic, which is based on a game almost a
decade old and runs on an engine about 8 years old, and is itself
nearly 7 years old. I never have any trouble finding populated servers.
It's been updated over the years, and Valve is coming out with with new
games for the platform all the time. More significantly, there are
people generating their own mods for the platform. Same with some of the
id software games; I'm associated with a group porting Weapons Factory
to Quake 4, and I've played some stuff based on the Wolfenstein engine. 

And that's just a tiny slice of the pie, the perspective of one person
who is focussed on a miniscule subset of PC gaming (class-based online
multiplayer first-person shooter Capture The Flag and Capture Point).