Is PC Gaming Becoming a Rich Man’s Sport?

Crysis was released the other day to much fan fair, receiving high ratings on review sites. However, this game exposes one of the major problems with PC gaming today. That being that you need a high end computer to properly enjoy the game. Gamespot noted that Crysis would bring even the most powerful PCs to its knees. From a marketing perspective, this does not seem to make much sense. This severely limits the number of people who can play the game. People who are unwilling or unable to pay $2000+ for a high end, SLI/Crossfire PC with high end graphics cards and processors. Now, I understand that PC gaming has always been on the cutting edge, but perhaps game developers are pushing us to close to that edge, shutting out the vast majority of a massive market.

When asked if Crysis would come to console, Crytek noted that neither the Xbox 360 or PS3 were capable of running the game. Both consoles have much faster CPUs than what you would find in a typical PC and contain GPUs (Radeon X1800 and Geforce 7900 based respectively) that were considered to be high end only a year ago. nVidia still considers the 7900 to be a high end GPU on their website. Game developers need to lay off a bit and start focusing on making their games enjoyable on a typical gaming PC. This was true at one time, it’s time they got back to it. PC gaming should not be just a rich man’s sport.