Which is pretty awful. It's unfortunate I get reamed by my cable company as it is, high prices, higher prices if I don't have TV with them, very slow uploads, marginal downloads and now the idea of a cap. How exactly is this going to help digital distribution?

Maybe.  I'm waiting to see what happens with 4G.  I don't think 'unlimited' is actually in the cellphone companies vocabulary, but 4G might not have the severe limitations 3G does on the server side of things.  Normally I can find the info, but it's new tech so I don't know if its out there yet.

I doubt DSL or cable will go that route, unless the caps are fairly high.  Some people transfer obscene amounts of data.

Bandwidth will cease to be an issue when the providers finally figure out that Fiber Optic Networks, although pricy, can be sold and then how much bandwidth an individual uses will be only as deep as their own pocket books.

We have Fiber in our downtown Core (Banking district) and I would kill to have it become available in my home. How much would you pay for TerraByte/minute up and download speeds for your Internet use? 

They speak of the Cloud? Gaming in the "The Cloud" will be totally useless without proper bandwidth access. The kind of bandwidth that only Fiber can offer.

I don't think anyone really wants gaming 'in the cloud.'   OnLive so far hasn't impressed anyone all that much.  Cloud assisted gaming, certainly...it's already shown itself in several places.

Any wireless technology is bad for multiplayer gaming due to lag.

That said, broadband caps are something we as consumers are going to have to revolt over, and maybe even literally revolt.

A lot of people don't exactly have options, and 3G/4G do fine for gaming as long as your signal and ISP are good.

I am not really looking forward or even want cloud anything. I don't know that a cloud-based OS is something I want either.

I definately appreciate savegames+config changes being held online (when it works, of course...heh New Vegas.)  Then when I reinstall or load a game up on a different system, I don't have anything to worry about.

Mind you that is rarely an issue since I don't use my laptop for much anymore but it's nice to have anyway.

Note that Steam, Impulse, and MMOs are all 'cloud' services.  Not all using it for the same things, of course, but anyway.

Well I can appreciate that, but I am referring to the so-called service where if the connection is lost, the game, the saved data, whatever it is is simply not available. I don't man a tandem offering, but if it's cloud or simply non-functioning quasi sort of DRM approach, no thank you.

To those talking about hardware: BULLSHIT!!! You know as well as I do, that most of the problems with Elemental had nothing to do with hardware. The problems, was lack of balance, lack of content and great ambitions that wasn't yet fullfilled.

I have one of the absolutely worst PC platforms imaginable, but still I've been able to play (on release date) the last two year: Overlord 2, Spore, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. All games that tax the hardware worse than any other game I play. Oddly enough though they are the most hardware demanding they have been the smoothest playing experience.

I am however a strategy fan, and have also tried: Hearts of Iron 3: Semper Fi, Victoria 2, Distant Worlds, Star Ruler, and Elemental. Every single of these hardware light games have been unplayable at launch. The reason is that the scope and ambitions of these games excede that of any console game, and the companies behind these games does now have the resource that the makers of Fallout or Dragon Age does.

So less resources, bigger ambitions: It has to come back and bite you somewhere. I still buy the games and support them, but I don't expect any of them to be playable until 6-12 months after release (I actually had my hopes up for Elemental, but it seems to be universal across the board).

Hell, take this as a reminder. I am using the same computer today to play Dragon Age, that I used to play Civ IV (the first release) with, and it took 5 months before NVidia (not Firaxis) released a new driver that stoped making Civ IV blue screen my computer. Gal Civ II took 1 or 2 months before Stardock released a patch that similarly stopped bluescreening my computer, but I've not had hardware problems with Elemental, all the Elemental problems have been gamedesign problems.

Obviously, you don't know enough. While Elemental has those problems, the first couple of patches were pretty much exclusively focused on solving hardware related issues (crashes, OOM, etc).

Lack of balance amd content are not bugs, so your point is moot. We are discussing why they do not work, and not why they are not as good as the classics.

Star ruler. and Element are both good examples...star ruler is abit better. of Good game development.

Element is having slow but large patches. star ruler is updated practically weekly. Both are becoming better at an ever increasing rate.

Edit: Just to clarify. I do agree their buggy are start. but still they are getting better so  thats abit better then it just getting worse or not being fixed.

I guess that is a question of point-of-view. If a game is fun and addictive enough, I will actually keep playing it dispite having to reload the game every few hours due to memory leaks (Victoria 2), or that the game overheats the GPU and blue-screens the computer (Gal Civ 2). The "bug" with elemental was that it wasn't fun enough. It might have had technical issues, but they never bothered me as much as the gameplay issues. Fortunately Stardock seems to fix both, 1.0x series all the technical stuff, while the 1.1 patch will largely focus on patching gameplay issues

I thought Elemental was pretty fun for a while.  It was crashy as all hell on my box though.

I agree that star ruler was less buggy, but star ruler also had a ton LESS content than Elemental. So it's not a great example because one of the key points above is that games are much more advanced nowadays, which frankly, Star ruler wasn't.

@OP: you are off by a few years. Last time it was only PC games was years ago...

In 2011 it is "Games no longer work on release". The Xbox360, PS3, and the Wii all have internet update capability, allowing developers to release unfinished games that don't work and patch them later (if ever).

This is something I complained about for a long long time. That being said, some companies are listening, even some of the big players like blizzard now take their time to finish the game. And games actually start advertising "actually a complete game, with polish and playtesting" as a feature. So things today are better then they were, say in 2008. Where 9/10 games was unplayable on v1.0 release

my thoughts exactly.  15 years ago they didnt have these standards.   Hell you had to deal with ISA cards PCI and AGP plus many other factors  that werent standardized yet.  Should be much easier now.

Most companies in the U.S. have already slid in caps under the radar. They are just high enough the average user would never hit them. 100-250 GB a month is high enough most people didn't even notice they were capped. Like most people I signed up for unlimited years ago and only found out I was capped after doing a bit of research, charter like most companies stuck the change in service terms  in the fine print that came with my bill every month and i didn't notice it.

Good news with charter is once i hit the cap they don't charge me per GB like AT&T or others.

DirectX does not solve the compatiblity issues, as not all drivers/hardware comply. And some times you have to check individual features to make sure they will work, or at least if the driver claims they will.

Though I hear DX 10 and above are better about it.

We sometimes get too fixated on the technology and tend to forget that much of the overall problem is a very human one. There are way more game developments out there than there are good programmers. In recent years, senior executives from major players like Microsoft,Apple, Sun Systems et al have come to Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada (sometimes Bill Gates and Steve Jobs themselves) practically on their hands and knees virtually begging the graduates there to come and work for their respective companies, offering million dollar bonuses for doing so. All the more difficult then, for smaller companies to compete. I'm sure both Frogboy and Kael would agree that finding good people is very tough and is a crucial part of their jobs. When they find a good one, no doubt they say to themselves, "This must be my lucky day"! These days, the industry is awash in would-be developers who took a six month course with some fly by night game development school. I don't think any game company goes to it's backers and says, "We want to make a really crappy game that nobody will buy" and have the backers say, "Sounds great! We hope you lose us a ton of money."

I've been seeing games lately that REQUIRE DX10 or 11. Why can't we start having games that require a 64bit OS? That would alleviate the memory problems for games that are poorly coded.

It's true that many games take big shortcuts these days, but they did in the past as well. However, I blame high speed internet. Games release buggy knowing they can patch them. As we are well aware they often underestimate the difficulty fixing the bugs.

I think the last game I played that didn't require any patching was X-Com Apocalypse. The old gold box TSR games didn't have any serious troubles either. Heh, that's going back a ways.

Speaking of Elemental specifically, crashing wasn't the worst problem, it was "fun". We'll see how that turns out.

I agree with the OP though, there are a lot of corners cut in today's gaming market. Don't blame it on PC specs, look what has happened to the console releases since they can patch over the internet as well now. Consoles have way less variety in their specs, yet games put out on them still require patching a great deal of the time these days.

Is it greed? Is it that we underestimate the budgets? Most property developers can sell units during completion, I guess the equivalent of pre-orders, in order to complete their projects. However, they can do the finishing touches in units nobody lives in. Well, the game developers just can't take those shortcuts.

Because Microsoft was stupid and created 32 bit versions of Vista and Windows 7. Your average user has no idea which version they have.

It'll happen eventually now that few people are putting the 32 bit version on new installations, but we're not there yet.