I have to agree, prices are laughably too high (I, on average, only get ONE new title per year, if that, and usually only if I absolutely just can't wait, or am bored with the older games because $60 is just ridiculous) and console ports are damn lazy and buggy to high hell (I'd even go so far as to state a slap in the face for us PC gamers), couldn't agree more with that... and I imagine, by and large, are the culprit for random crashes to desktop without so much as an error message. This has happened to me twice already with Skyrim in the last two days. However, it's even worse with Oblivion and Fallout 3 for me (averaging 3 of those for every 5 hours of play), so seems to be getting better (Skyrim actually plays the best of all of my games on this system as far as performance goes - go figure)... but these issues really need to be addressed.
What ever happened to the good old days, where PC games didn't crash or glitch (at least nowhere near as much as today)? I'd like those days to come back... if anything, they could at the very least tweak the ports so they actually work without crashing to desktop so often. And I truthfully could give a crap-all about pushing the envelope on graphics (within reason of course, I don't want DOS quality back, but I don't need ultra-realistic either - to me, Oblivion and Skyrim etc. look just fine, even on Medium settings)... it's all about the story-line and a long one at that for me (Fallout 3 was mediocre IMO, because the main quest was God-awfully short - and the fact you can't continue to play after that -, as with most games these days! I got incredibly bored with it, and probably won't replay it for a couple years yet unless I just wanted to mess around killing crap).
And the difficulty in navigating the menus while using the standard 12-button controllers really miffs me, especially seeing as most are console ports. And by this, I mean having to mouse over what you want to select in the menus then click (rather than being able to effectively do it much like the console counterparts can, using the D-Pad to move the selections up or down then select with a hard-coded button) - you'll be hard-pressed to be able to get that cursor right over the selection using the joystick. That needs some definite work. For Skyrim, I abandoned the idea of ever being able to use a gamepad with the game as-is... it just doesn't work out (way too many keys to map and mouse sensitivity disparity between the game and menus for that to be feasible).
This all said, I think the best option would be for gaming companies to go completely digital download, and offer a steep discount for that considering all they are paying is the 5-20GB worth of bandwidth to host a single copy of that file on their server (which to these titan companies is nothing), meaning there aren't any shipping or production or reseller costs at all... it's something that has always miffed me, too, that they charged virtually/exactly the same for the downloads as with a physical disk, booklet and case (because again, downloaded games cost them nothing and net them almost 100% profit gain)! If they offered their downloaded games for about $25-35, more people would be able to afford them and wouldn't instead wait until they dropped down to the bargain bins or else go GOTY.
Win-win. But then this is all la-la land of a wishful thinking here. It'll never happen, and they'll all stick with the old, struggling and out-of-touch business model of gouge 'em good so long as we all keep running off to buy them, no matter the price.
And another thing, the securom and other junk they install on your system IMO is total bullshite (as well as most newer games HAVING to be activated through Steam now)! That's among the top deterrents for people to NOT just go pirate a clean game, JUST the game - not all of their little "extras" that will run invisibly on your system, hogging resources. That's actually reason No. 1 that, after I get a game, I download a torrent version and a no-cd crack to avoid all of that trash - but also cover my butt, by getting a legal key and license to use that game/software.
