I agree 100% with the above, games back in the 80s worked 100% better than those today. Games that flat-out won’t even install or flat out don’t even work if you do install (after having met the system reqs) is definitely a more recent phenomena. By the way, you might be interested in the video of this link ..

http://dotsub.com/view/a34fba0d-4016-4807-b255-021b58dbc9a4

If you got an hour and a half to burn, it’s well worth your time. It perfectly describes our economic society today, the corporate greed, and the idea of “planned obsolescence” in an economic system based on “cyclical consumption.” The crap I see with modern pc games (not just games but pretty much any computer app) in comparison to the way they were back then. I could also cite hundreds of examples from my own life, one comes to mind are portable cd/tape players. Tape players back in the 80s worked for many years and were significantly higher in quality: I frequently get caught in the rain while jogging, and I’ve never had a tape/cd player fail to work if it got wet. I Bought one of the typical “crap” cd players more recently (perfect example of “planned obsolescence”) I’d didn’t even realize it was raining (just a light drizzle) before it starting flaking out: this was day #3 out of the box. I bought another one and it was like 3 months before it flaked out, not even in rain! The crap coffee makers they make today, ggrrrrrrr. 

I understand that a lot of posters here are Devs/programmers  or whatnot and see things from your particular narrow POV. You have a certain hurdle that has to be jumped in order to create a working quality product, and you claim that the fact is that it’s more difficult (given everything ya'll have said in other posts, i.e. multitude of modern hardware configurations make it hard if not impossible to create a quality working product).

But the fact is, this is reality now. These things are just that .. problems that need to be solved to create a working product.  And you need hire whatever people or add whatever resources to solve these problems.

If I buy a computer game which claims to work on “X” OS with “Y” microprocessor and “Z” RAM which requires “W” hard disk space on the back of the game' box, then the game should work on my system which matches X,  Y, Z, and W, period.  No exceptions. My system is as specified as it should on the box. When I buy eggs at the supermarket, I expect them to be fresh and not past the expiration date. When I open the carton, I expect to find eggs not walnuts. And, when I make scrambled eggs from them the next day, I expect to not get sick if I've cooked them properly.

There are some very basic expectations that consumers are entitled to:

1) The item in the box matches the description on the box when you open it & all the parts should be there.

2) If a consumer’s (computer) system matches the required specifications, the item should work as described on the box.

3) If the user properly installs the item as to the step-by-step process given in the manual (and there should actually be a functioning manual supplied in all computer games, if not in physical form then pdf. And if pdf, I should not have to read it first before install, since obviously no human would be capable of reading it first without installing the app.), the game should work properly.

Along with 3 above ..  Many people buying computer games are just kids or perhaps people buying presents (Xmas, birthday, etc) who don’t know much about computers. Consumers of computer games should not be expected to have the knowledge of “developers” or “cs majors” by the game designer/company whatever to install & get the game to work. So, for example, “available RAM” means “RAM installed on the user's system” (as 90% of the people on planet earth would define the term) and not the more narrow “CS major or developer” specialized definition: “RAM that is leftover unused after all system resource needs are met.” An “average” computer user would not know how to figure out how much RAM was leftover unused even if they knew this more specialized meaning. To me, it’s arrogant of computer companies to use this type of terminology knowing full well that most buyers are just “average” people. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s borderline “misleading advertising” (I can’t think of the correct technical/consumer/legal word right now, it’s on the tip of my tongue) for example to claim a game requires 100MB of “available RAM” when in fact it required 150MB because the system resources use up 50. If different configurations or hardware use up different amounts, then this needs to be taken into account: i.e. make the minimum 300MB to cover all possibilities (I’m just using MB for purposes of this example, I know we’re in the GB ranges now).

Frogman used the example of video cards that range in cache memory from 512 to 4GB, and that there was no way a dev could be expected to “predict” all the possible memory problems associated with smaller cache. What needs to happen in this case is that a requirement under the “system requirements” on the back of the box needs to be added that clearly indicates what is needed for the game to function properly, say 2GB of video cache RAM that can be checked under hardware settings on the consumer's system before purchase. At that point, it would be the consumer’s fault if his system does not match the specs, otherwise it’s the devs or game company’s fault if he matches specs but it still doesn’t work.

I agree with the quoted post above, and in fact this is how I purchase 90% of my games in today's world (I didn't always do this, I was pretty much forced to due to reasons Femfatal mentions). As far as the other 10% of the time .. I just tend to get excited sometimes for a new game that perfectly matches the type of games I most like (I like strategy games a lot, so recent examples that fell under the 10% for me were Dominions III, Distant worlds, and this game .. the excitement got the better of me).

So, the world is more complex and there are more hardware configurations .. it makes no difference. This is in all reality an excuse for poor quality. This needs to be addressed by the developers in whatever form or fashion they need, in order to overcome the problem (whether hiring more QA, more beta testers, or more specific “system requirements” which are clearly indicated, or whatever). If a company cannot produce a game that works on all hardware configs, then the hardware configs it *does* work on need to be explicitly stated on the system requirements which should be clearly defined on the back of the box so that consumers don't buy something that doesn't work on their particular hardware configurations.

Bottom line: a game that claims to work on a system specified on the requirements on the back of the box should work on a consumer’s system meeting those requirements, period.

I'd wager such statistics don't actually exist but I'd be interested in hearing what percentage of PC gamers are -routinely- upset by the content of the games that they pick up on day one.  Perhaps there's a whole genre of genuinely awful games out there that I've accidentally been avoiding all my life but games that don't work still surprise and upset me because, in my experience, they're few and far between. 

The prevailing suggestion here seems to be that 'most gamers' don't realize they're beings screwed somehow.  I can't help wondering if 'most gamers' aren't complaining about new releases en masse because they (whether lucky or simply less demanding) are generally satisfied with what they're buying. 

IMHO, the Golden Age of Gaming was the days of the Comodore 64/Amiga, the Atari 400/800, and the Apple IIe; as soon as the PC entered the gaming world, it went downhill in a hurry!

Although the Intelivision was pretty cool in its day as well 

You got that right. The C64 and Amiga 500 ruled in both gameplay and graphics compared to the PC. Just go back and play some of those old PC games on any PC and then play them on a C64 or Amiga 500 you won't want to go back and play them on a PC. I was a diehard C64 and Amiga consumer, but, the developers of games I wanted started moving to the PC and ABANDONED the C64 and Amiga 500. I had to have Master of Magic and there was no port of it to be found. I had Civilization on my Amiga and Warlords but then Warlords III came and I had to have that also and then my C64 and Amiga 500 gaming days were pretty much done for. Other games like QQP's Conquered Kingdoms drew me over to the PC. I cursed developers for abandoning my precious Amiga 500 and C64. I still curse them today. They make sloopy games today and release them and get away with it.

I won't go so far as to say that 90% of modern pc games don't work out of the box (depending on how you define "don't work"), but as far as personal recent experience goes: I've bought probably 6 to 8 computer games over the past couple years or so, three did not work out-of-the-box on my older xP system (matching the system specs), and one of those three did not work on my new windows 7 systems (that also met system specs). I was able to get one of those games running working after considerable time with tech support, the second game I was unable to get to work with tech support (there was no mouse cursor at all & tech support coudn't fix it). The third game I never got to work (Elven Legacy), simply would't install. the other two games were Sins of a solar empire and Lost Empire. Other games that worked all had updates or patches, but did in fact work out-of-the-box. That's roughtly a 45% fail rate for me as a consumer, so I wouldnt' say 90% as per the other poster, but 45% is certainly significant. The best game out of the lot of recent purchases was Distant Worlds. Although I would classify EWOM as able to work "out of the box, " I would also classify it as the most clunky as of release version.

I've been routinely upset (or burned) enough so that I *mostly* wait for games to be out over a year before purchase, as I will now with civ5 after reading all the comments about it. 

Just today.......Fallout  New Vegas...patches on the way already.  Lots of bugs.

This is ridiculous.

10 out of 10 games work perfectly fine on my old computer put together by myself with various pices of aged hardware and a 5 year old installation of XP 32 bit.

There's a PC for people who are clueless, it's called Xbox. Available now at a store near you.

Although the Intelivision was pretty cool in its day as well 

End of quote

Yay! Utopia was kickass... I still remember the "pling" sound when your fishing boat caught a fish.

*shrug* Well, for what it's worth, I've been regularly playing hours-long Civ5 matches with a friend online since the week after release.  No notable incidents to report on that front. 

Sea Battle kept myself and a friend captive for endless hours.   Loved those little pt boats.  Utopia, I remember dreading the storms and rebels.

I think this is a huge part of the 'problem', we've also got more hardware and software that can conflict then before. However, technology, 'best practices', and knowledge have also progressed at, I assume, a reasonable pace to counter all that.

After playing some of the recently released games I just have to question many businesses "best practices" and methods for game development. It's not just that the games are glitchy and have performance problems it's that they are sometimes missing the "fun" elements that made them enjoyable. Empire: Total War is my example, it takes up WAY too much memory and I couldn't get it to run right for about a year. Once I finally got it running I just didn't think it was nearly as enjoyable, playable, or as fun as either Rome: Total War or Medieval: Total War II. I think I'm done with the Total War franchise as a result...

Civilization 5 and Elemental are other good examples. Elemental's launch sucked and, for me, Civilization 5 just isn't fun. I don't know how Elemental got through QA or why they removed so many fun elements from Civilization 4. Recently released games just seem to tend to want to focus on graphics and take a step back on gameplay. I don't like the direction the industry is heading at all.

While I agree with you in theory, as a programmer I have to say that inexplicable things tend to occur when you are dealing with that multitude of variables and variety, even if the layer that you access things through is supposed to standardise the conversations.

But even if that wasn't the case, it doesn't change the fact that the new functionality in the next iterations of graphics cards must be utilised in the new games being developed, which in turn will start to alienate machines that aren't even that old. It also doesn't change the fact that an anusload of system configurations (i.e. system and video memory, cpu speed/cores) need to be considered when balancing assets, complexity, quality, and performance.

So as you said, the roll out is pretty quick, and that alone causes a multitude of problems that can be solved with actual standardisation, where system configurations are fixed for a strict period. The more I think about it, the more I get convinced of two things. Firstly, that it would be a much better system, and secondly, that it will never happen.

Not really. There are some things that make it easier, but some times they have pit falls that can make it easier than ever to have a problem and not notice (e.g. garbage collection, even with it you can have memory leaks). If you do not know about the problems then you are likely to have them occur in your code and it will be harder to find.

Then there are tools and libraries to help, but they can be as problematic as the stuff normal users get (Visual Studio, and as I stated earlier DirectX and the Windows API can and do have issues).

Things have come a long, long way.

i've already commented on the pains of writing for graphics cards in the old days, so i'll skip that

developer tools have improved substantially, yeah you occasionally have to hunt down that missing semi colon because vc++ points to the wrong source file and gives jibberish for an error, but this is alot rarer than it use to be. Being able to step through code, watch variables for their initialization and value changes, assign break points, monitor where your code is slowing down, using source safe to keep up to date versions, being able to organize your code into clean projects.

Heck if we are going back to the "glory days" of the 80's, then just having a descent text editor is a monumental achievement. you have no idea how great color coded text is until you've coded without it, being able to see what is a comment and what is a key word just by its color. Gawd, to have all the time back i wasted because i wrote 'while' with a capital 'W', etc. now those kinds of pissant errors just pop.

but back to the present day, and a little more advanced,  you have design patters and organizing tools like facades and factories, etc. yeah you can screw them up, but that is true of anything, and now days you have a number of really good and detailed books that show you the pitfalls of using these devices, and the whens and whys you would use them. not too mention the developer networks, which while they have the occasional loud mouth moron like any forum(btw, that is not directed at anyone here, so please do not infer that it is) they have quite a few intellegent individuals in the industry ready to help.

yeah its ture its pretty easy to get memory leaks and crashes, whatever, but there are alot of tricks out there for tracking these down quickly. memory leaks, for example, you utilize a factory to create all your new objects, then you can derive all your dynamic objects from a common base class that can be stored in a masterlist, when your application shuts down, you check the master list, and if it isn't empty, you have the objects inside log a brief description of themselves. test this till it works like a champ, enclose it in compiler statements to prevent if from being compiled in the release version so it doesn't slow everything down except when you are testing, and then just check the log files for leaks. it sounds a little simpler than it is, but this stuff works, and there all kinds of tricks like this depending on the specifics of your projects.

the real problem, as i have stated before, is a failure to use these tools, standards and tricks. It is ridiculous the number of people who fail to even comment and document their code, much less do so in a useful fashion. it is amazing the number of people who fail to organize their code into an easily legible manner, and the number of companies that condone this behavior.

still further is education, its only recently that actual programming courses have started popping up, (as opposed to simple language courses), to say nothing of game programming, which is a different beast altogether. I've taken quite a few classes in various langauges over the years and i gotta tell you, "hello world" doesn't prepare you for much, yet you rarely see anything but this kind of crap, as opposed to a relevant application of a system that can drive home the whys and whens of it all.

for those of you who don't know, "hello world" is a programm taught at begining and sadly even intermediate programming classes that does nothing more than display "hello world" to the screen. it is meant to familiarize you with whatever requirements that language has for displaying, the problem comes in when you are trying to teach things like object oriented design, code documentation, or how to use things like factories, etc,  and all you get are these cookie cutter applications. when this is all you teach, people develope the mentality of "why document anything when i can figure it out in less time than it takes to write the comments", or "why use this approach when i can easily track all my new and delete calls". which is truely detrimental when you have a massive project like a game.

edit:

that was "when i can easily track all my new and delete calls, not "which can easily..." sorry about that

I just want the game to work as described on the box if my system matches the system reqs as denoted on the back of the box.

As a consumer, this is a very basic expectancy that anyone buying (any) product should receive in return from their  purchase. 

I was not saying that it has not become easier to write programs, just that such improvements have not kept pace with the complexity of applications*.

* Only the ones that are 'cutting edge'. When comparing now and then for programs of equal complexity, it is easier to create it now thatn it was then.

Well, at least that puts to rest the idea that console games aren't buggy as hell.

I have purchased hundreds of games since May 1993 (MoO) ... and most of them did not "work just fine". 

Your experience & my own experience only represent very personal & particular cases.

If you infer general principles -- by induction -- based on a very limited number of particular cases, you get fragile hypotheses -- not solid proof.

In more emotional language :

I am tired of people who dogmatically declare that because games run fine on their computer, those who experience problems must have "really bad luck (or crappy system[s])".

I do not remember the 1993-1999 period as a "Golden Age" of PC Gaming.

Elemental is not worse than most DOS, Win95 & Win98 games I have played in the 1990s : I would not go back into that ugly & buggy past. 

By the way : I haver never owned a "crappy system".

But ... that is merely my own, very particular, experience.

Well I will add to his, most my games work fine out of the box, and the ones that don't stick out, especially the dev/pub is usually not far behind making excuses. I will tell you this, back when I was playing games in the 90s, I didn't have access to a lot of patches  as we weren't even online for a period of that time and when we were finding patches and getting them on dial-up was a pain in the ass. You bet if that sucker didn't work out of the box, it was going back to the store.

I would say they are crappy at using their computer and learning from earlier experiences. If you want to be a PC gamer you need to be a bit more interested in how computers work and good at problem solving. It's not a console.

When I reinstalled Civ4 and Fall from heaven last time it didn't work so I had to use Google, and eventually I got it to work. Of course, I could instead have posted threads whining about how it was crap and didn't work on various forums. But it's not that the game didn't work, because obviously it did for thousands of people, it was my system that didn't work with the game!

And 90% of games not working is, statistically, bullshit. If that was true, I would have come across many more non working games.

I also remember the 90's with different boot disks for each game, endless configuring of autoexec.bat and system.ini files.. To say things are worse now is ridiculous.

This is utterly ridiculous. A game that claims to work requiring x, y, and z systems should work on x, y, and z systems, period. A computer game buyer should not require any amount of "specialized" knowledge at all to install & run a game. A 12 year old should be able to walk in to a computer store, read the back of the box, and match the home computer to the proper version of the game. The game should work "immediately" when the disks are installed in the drive & run with the minimum of installation pain (perhaps just clicking yes to the license agreement). The game should then function "as described on the box," period.

It's unbelievably arrogant to me that you devs assume all PC game purchasers need to be "CS majors" just to get a stupid game to work properly as it is described on the box. ... I have another theory: that most devs & computer companies are just cutthroat, greedy, corporate types that are all just one click removed from Enron: cut costs (QA, beta testing, whatever) to the largest possible amount and then mass produce & shovel whatever crap to make the largest possible profit .. the line of thinking is probably along these lines: we'll get our game to work on 70% of the most "common" configurations (because this is what we can do with the least cost, say, (for example purposes), with a minimum 30 QA and 50 beta testers), and screw the other 30% because that would require a doubling of our current corporate resources thus minimizing profit .. oh, and by the way, we can just get some of the game-playing "devs or cs-majors" who really liked our game to help improve the game for free with mods & future patches. We can assume that 25% of that 30% that don't work will return their game for a refund, hence we’ll make $w,xyz,000 in profit in the end.  

.. it has nothing to do with "crappy systems" or consumers who are "crappy at using their computer and learning from experience" .. it has everything to do with crappy devs & computer companies that create apps which claim to work on x,y,and z but don’t.

I said it before; I'll say it again:

A game or computer app should work as described on the box if my system matches the system reqs as denoted on the back of the box.

When the system requirements on boxes start listing specific chips, along with all the other crap and peripherals you might have - maybe then you'll have a point.

I do have a point exactly as I've written it, and it's 100% spot on.

To cpl_rk, For the record, magog_AoW, if he is a game developer, isn't one on this game or he'd have the stardock tag. infact with the exception of about what, 2 comments by frog_boy, this thread has been free of anyone with anything to do with this game, i'd wager most people in this conversation aren't even programmers, much less game developers. so don't let it get you too riled up.

Regardless of the source of the problems with this game, hardware compatabilities or programmer error, they seem to be striving to correct the problem, and while the developers have said things i take serious, serious offense to, i haven't seen them tell us we are SoL. they've essentially said "shut up and leave already" a couple times to the more vocal detractors, and other unpleasantries, but they aren't saying "fix it yourself or deal" or anything of the like, not that i've seen, mostly they just say "be vewy, vewy quiet, we are hunting wabbit"... you know, bugs... as in bunny. sorry haven't slept in a long while,

Feel free to hold them accountable for releasing the game in this state, but its not them telling you that you are on your own, don't let that get to you, if it is infact, "getting to you.", maybe i'm just reading more anger in your post than there really is.

personally I am curious what problems magog_AoW had with those two games during a reinstall, and how he addressed the problems. as i would love to be wow'd by his computer savy.

     Game companies can get away with putting out unfinished/or multiple patch needed games now because the internet allows them to update when/if they want. During the 80- 90's they couldnt get away (or did) with this, the PC GAMER CD with updates/patches  with it's six month lead time.

Dude, you need to read the posts, the topic of the thread is "PC games" no longer work at realease. It's a very broad topic that covers pretty much all PC games of all genres (sp). I didn't single out particular games, unless I did so in another post. And, those were in fact game failures out of the box on my system which matched the required specs.

It's not hard to figure out which posters are developers or cs majors if they've talked a good bit about coding in other posts. I don't actually need for someone to say "I am a dev" in order for me to figure it out from the content of their posts. There are a lot of devs or people with CS knowledge on this forum, I'm not going to put an exact % number on it because it's not worth taking the time to figure out.

Frankly, I don't care if the other guy was a dev or not. It just pisses me off in general when people actually defend games that don't work out of the box & put down the consumer as "stupid". I've bought many games that fail to work "out of the box" over the past years, 45% in the past two years as I pointed out in my other post, and when someone says of (us) when a *game* fails to work after I matched specs after shelling out the bucks, that: "they (we) are crappy at using their computer and learning from earlier experiences," wtf!! because one of those "they" is "me." Am I suppose to lie and tell you I'm happy after reading that? Hell no, I fire back .. it's just my way.

It's very simple: I'm only saying this one thing that consumers are entitled to: 

(any) game which is specified to work on x,y,z system that matches a consumer's system who has x,y,z should work on that system as described on the box. I'm talking about any PC game (hell any game for that matter) in general. The topic of this thread is *PC games* no longer work at realease (i.e. I translate that to mean: "games that do not work out of the box"). I'll even give (any) devs some slack when it comes to patches & updates as long as the game functions after I've installed it, and I haven't counted that as a "out of box" failure. I've been a longtime strategy game player (both board and PC) and I can't even count all the PC games I've bought over the past 30ish years, but I can definitely say with 100% surity from my own personal experience that modern PC games are much more likely to fail "out of the box" than games that were made in the 80s & early nineties. In fact, I can't even remember having a game fail back then, but it's happened way too much to me in the 2000s personally. In fact, so much so that I *mostly* buy games after waiting a year, just like some other poster mentioned in another post.

... I understand the "why" this is so, based upon replies from devs in other posts. But, it doesn't change the fact that it's still something that has to be addressed by the dev or computer company in making the game .. "should" be addressed anyway.