Thursday, September 1, 2016

PC and Mac Games Being Deprecated

UPDATE 4/15/2020
We've added back the most popular PC & MS-DOS games to PriceCharting.

We do not plan to include every PC game ever made (the list is too big), but we do want to track the prices on the most popular games and the most valuable ones too. Please add any missing games if they are popular or valuable. If they are shovelware, please don't add them.


ORIGINAL 9/1/2016
PC Games and Mac games make up 30% of the products on PriceCharting.

At the same time PC Games only account for 0.4% of page views on the site (MAC is only 0.01%)

The sheer number of titles causes lots of strain on our servers. Things like monitoring ebay sales, calculating new prices, and loading all the games for price comparison. The vast majority of PC games are never even viewed by users in any given month.

Because these pages are not popular with our users and increase costs and strain on our systems, we have decided to remove them from our site over the next few weeks.

This will help the site perform better for the other 99.6% of the pageviews. The vast majority of users will have a better experience.

I'm sorry to the few PC game collectors who use our site.

18 comments :

Alex said...

I'm sad to see it go. There are some genuinely collectible PC releases, especially in the popular franchises (Half-Life, Elder Scrolls, Fallout) but there are also a lot more obscure and worthless titles too. I'm not a PC expert myself so Pricecharting was my go-to source for valuing this stuff.

Anonymous said...

@Alex - Thank you for comments. It might be possible to remove a ton of the PC games and just leave the popular/rare ones (like the ones you mentioned). That would solve most of the performance problems and still let users see some PC games.

I'll look into the feasibility of this option in more depth.

Anonymous said...

We use the PC section as well, was a bit surprised to see it removed. Can definitely understand the load and usage discrepancy though. For a quick fix, could you just use the last 10 years of games that have release dates? This should take care of most games people care about. That would cut it from over 12k games to only 1500. I'm guessing that the 0.4% are mostly looking at games within that 10 year time-frame. Could go back even 15 years and you'd still be close to 3k, if your servers could handle it and still be well below the 12k of the original list.

If you could keep some of the recent PC games in the list that would be very helpful for us. Thanks.

JJ said...

Thanks for your feedback. Since we removed PC games only two users have contacted us about it (you two). One of you asked for the popular series, one asked for newest games. So you both want us to keep different things.

Looking at the pageview data, there is no difference in number of pageviews between the 50th most popular game and the 200th. So PC games don't really have a subset of titles that are really popular, there isn't a way to keep a small fraction of games and still retain most of the pageviews.

I really appreciate your feedback about PC games but we have decided the best option is to remove them. Thank you.

Unknown said...

I used your PC section weekly and the Mac section on occasion. Is there a way to get a printout of the last games list and prices for the Mac and PC games. I didn't even see that they were going to be removed until they were already gone, otherwise I would have printed off a copy before then.

Sean

JJ said...

@sean - Send me an email asking for the latest prices and I'll send along the latest PC game prices we have.

Unknown said...

What is the email address? I sent 2 emails but they must not have been to the correct email.

Thanks

JJ said...

sales@vgpc.com is the best. Any of the email addresses listed on our contact us link in the footer will work though. Is that where you were emailing us?

Unknown said...

I emailed that address and another. I will resend. Thank You.

destoo said...

Ok. I guess it's for the best. I'll ask a copy of the last prices too.
(email sent)
Thanks!

James said...

I found "So you want to be a hero" on pc from the 80's for a quarter at a yard sale and sold it on ebay for over $30. The pc side was great because most people overlook pc games at thrift stores.

Shagittarius said...

If something is too hard you should just not do it.

Jay Mehta said...

Pc games are not much in fashion now. People tend to fall for mobile based games nowadays

Anonymous said...

Is it possible to get a separate website for PC titles? Also I've noticed you don't have any info on regional releases, I'd love to see Japanese titles, and some pal releases on here as well.

JJ said...

@anonymous - Yes, it would be possible for someone to track PC prices on another website. It isn't something we are interested in doing though because of our experience with it in the past. There just isn't much demand.

We have PAL games for NES, SNES, N64, PS2, Gamecube, and Mega Drive.

We have Japanese games for Famicom and Super Famicom.

Unknown said...

I'd like to necro thread this and bring up a couple more options.
What about making PC prices available to a higher-registered/premium user?
What about getting prices less frequently or on-demand (user issues a request and maybe a few days later the list is available for download).
Speaking of, I'd like to get that "last price list", so I'll be emailing you.
Would a list of Atari ST / Amiga be feasible?

Unknown said...

I'm sad PC games are gone as well. I'm not a huge PC collector, but having a reference guide when I do find some big boxes would have been awesome!

JJ said...

The most popular/valuable PC & DOS games have been added back to the site.
https://www.pricecharting.com/console/pc-games

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