Anyone that has bought a top selling game knows that the issue is about. It's
that 3D shooter that doesn't quite run
on your Pentium II, despite the claims of the box that 200 MHz is all that is
required.
It's the sound that skips every time you are doing anything else but
listening, because even though you have the minimum 16 MB of RAM, it just
doesn't cut it.
The box lies. That is all there is to it. The details that are printed on
the box, do not match what is actually required.
Game designers are always pushing the envelope as far as special effects,
complexity and eye-candy goes. The game developed for today's market, will run
smoothly on the standard computer in 2 years time. In order to run the game with
full effects, the purchaser really needs a top of the line gaming machine, the
type of machine that is upgraded no later than every six months, has water
cooling and is over clocked to the point that components are unrecognisable with
all their cooling fans tripled in size.
But no-one wants to go to all the trouble of creating such a game, and
finding that only a small percentage can actually run it how it is meant to be
run. So you make sure that everything can be run at half the resolution,
without the lighting effects and high quality mp3 sound and music, and then
you adjust the minimum requirements to such an extent that if run on such a
PC, the player can barely distinguish the environment from the enemy models,
but that's okay... because without that 3D graphics card, the screen only
refreshes every 5 seconds, so they have plenty of time to make sense of the
pixels.
It's a huge problem in the gaming industry, something that is turning more
and more people away from the PC market to the consoles, and yet the creators
of these games continue the practice, driving away their market. While the
gamers continue to buy games they cannot run, and no-one does anything about it.