IGN - PC Previews 2008

Since the steam is leaking out of the Best of 2007 coverage, a lot of the larger gaming sites are doing previews of this year's upcoming games, including IGN. This one includes all genres, but the link is to the Role Playing category, which covers three games: Bethsoft's Fallout 3, Codemasters' Rise of the Argonauts, and Gas Powered Games' Space Seige. The descriptions are pretty generic and too brief to merit a quote, but the article ends with some predictions that might be worth a look:

Foreign Developers Dominate US PC Market
Over the last ten years we've seen more and more foreign developers gain a real presence here in the US gaming market.... As the talent pool expands around the world, we're seeing more and more foreign PC games scoring huge successes in the US market.
Given that so many of the top tier PC developers here in the United States are moving towards the console as their lead (and sometimes only) platform for development, that leaves lots of room for the less-console focused developers in the rest of the world a chance to step in and pick up the slack..


PC Games Disappear from Shelves
Okay, maybe we're overstating this one just a little but, but digital distribution is here to stay and it's going to have a significant impact on the presence of PC games in traditional enthusiast shops. We've already seen the shelf space for PC games shrink substantially over the last few years and the success of services like Steam and Direct2Drive are going to make traditional retail boxes a bit of anachronism. There are still some old-timers who are attached to the quaint notion of actually wanting a physical product in their hands in exchange for their fifty bucks, but they're becoming a rare breed indeed.

...When you factor in the costs of producing packaging, shipping and paying for retail space and promotion and balance that against the costs of handling that same transaction over the internet, it's easy to see why so many publishers, both large and small, are relying primarily on digital distribution these days.

Fallout 3 Pushed to Early 2009
...Bethesda has a proven track record of delaying games past their originally announced released dates, the most recent example being The Elder Scrolls IV being pushed from 2005 to March of 2006. It happened with Morrowind too, moving from a late 2001 window to May of 2002. We're certainly hopeful it doesn't happen with Fallout 3 because, well, we're very much looking forward to playing another Fallout game, even if it's a far cry from the hex-based original. Please prove us wrong, Bethesda.