The 2007 Review - a Year of PC Gaming
2007: A Year of ReviewsStrictly speaking, it wasn't a full year of reviewing for us, because YouGamers officially opened for business in March, and our back catalogue of content covered plenty of late 2006 titles. There's also the important fact that we haven't reviewed every PC game released in '07, partly due to the size of the team but mostly because of the hardware testing we do per game. This can take over a week to complete, especially if there are multiple shader models or DX levels being used. All in all though, the list below covers 76 reviews, the bulk of our coverage.
How about some stats? 41% of the games we reviewed achieved overall scores of 80% of higher (that's in our "Good" and "Superb" categories), where 43% of the titles were rated between 60% and 79% ("Average" and "Above Average"). This is really encouraging: it's ample evidence that PC gaming is anything but dead. Obviously we didn't cover all of the PC games available in 2007, and I dare say that the percentages would be quite different if we did. However, that's actually irrelevant because at least 30 of the games are absolutely worth buying; enough to have two new titles each month and still have a few left over at the end of the year! Pity publishers don't release them like that though! Best & Worst of Publishing: 2007Speaking of publishers, we can use our review stats to see how they fared. Although this isn't an exercise in pointing out good or bad publishers, it does offer some pointers as to what are successful marketing strategies for the PC platform. There are two lists because there some cases where we covered just a single title from a publisher; the first list, though, is ordered on the basis of two factors: the average overall score from their titles, and the spread of marks amongst the releases. Thus a company that issues games that score only reasonable marks, but consistently so, would "rank" higher than a publisher that punts out 3 fantastic games, alongside 5 lumps of dross.
On face value, the charts seem very unfair - for example, Sierra released the fantastic World in Conflict, so one might question their position. Unfortunately, from our reviewing perspective, it was spoilt by the awful Empire Earth III. The same goes for the likes of Codemasters and EA - both have released good and bad games, and the positions reflect this. The main reason why the chart is headed by Valve, Midway, et al is the consistency of their releases. However, although publishers fund the development of most games, and set their creation schedules, it's the coders themselves that are ultimately responsible for how the game actually turns out. Best & Worst of Developing: 2007For our developer chart, a bit of pink-faced honesty is required here: the ranking is simply based on the accumulation of the game's overall and technology scores. The latter indicates how well the developers have got the best out of their code, as well as reflecting the level of bugs, concessions to PC gamers, and so on. Technology for technology's sake, though, is pointless if the game itself is pants!
No surprise about who tops the chart - all the big names are there: Valve, Epic, Infinity Ward and Crytek. What is disappointing is the sheer range in scores, with the top place achieving double the "points" of the bottom place. Console haters should also note that although the bottom place is a port (and a particularly bad one at that), the majority of that section are PC only. There's little to discuss here, really; not only is making a good game hard, but so is getting a title to run well on, and get the most out of, a typical PC. It also suggests that the release of DirectX 10 this year was too soon: if so many developers are still struggling with DirectX 9, think how matters would go if they all started working with both APIs.
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