Attention PC Game Publishers: Stop printing games on a zillion CDs when we have DVD available.

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Less is More (or Too Many Bloody CDs)

These days, when someone buys a new PC game there’s a certain feeling of dread as they pick up the box and notice that it’s awfully heavy. With a tip to the side a deluge of discs can be heard sliding about, culminating with a mighty thunk as they crash against one of the walls of the box. These are the telltale signs that a long, dull session of disc swapping lays ahead, as the gamer is forced to sit like a robot on an assembly line feeding discs into their PC. The person has to sit in front of their computer through the whole installing process instead of doing something more productive with their time. Usually you can’t even post on your favorite message board to rant about having to install six GCs on your PC. Shameful.

At this point, it’s not so much the doldrums of installing the game that is frustrating, as that is something we’ve learned to live with. The aggravation comes in trying to figure out why on earth the industry hasn’t wholeheartedly switched to DVD format for PC games after all these years.

Almost every year, we see newer, faster, stronger video cards, processors, and memory that game developers are eager to utilize to make their games that much fancier. However, they can’t take a moment to put the thing on DVD instead of CD? Odd. It’s not even a matter of it being that not enough people have a DVD player on their PC, as most PCs on the marked now come equipped with one, and those who buy a low-end unit with no DVD player likely don’t care about the latest and greatest games in the first place. On top of this, there are plenty of PC gamers quite happy to spend several hundred dollars on a regular basis for video cards and the like. Surely they would have no problem forking out a few extra bucks for a DVD player.

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What makes the situation all the more mind-boggling is that many publishers of PC games also make at least a few console games, and these games made for the home systems by and large are pressed on DVDs. However, the PC games released by the same publisher are pressed on so many CDs that the titles should be sold with a complementary wheelbarrow just to get the damn game home.

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Of course, at this point the question is floating around more and more as to whether or not we’ll see PC games forego hard copies all together, and go the route of Valve’s Steam set-up, or something similar where gamers can just get what they want over the Internet, but that’s another discussion for another time. Whatever the case, something needs to be done about the ridiculous number of CDs games are coming out on in the PC market. Most people have much better things to do than sit at their computer swapping discs for what feels like an eternity. While all of this may seem very trivial, it by no means makes the fact that we have to sit by the computer whistling Dixie for the duration of a game installation magically not suck. On so many other platforms DVD has become the norm for their respective storage medium, and even higher capacity discs like HD DVD and BluRay are on the way, yet PC games are still coming out on CD. For an industry that prides itself on embracing technology, it seems a tad hypocritical that this is the case.

Jeff Nash

February 22, 2005


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