This week's IGN blog on Sins of a Solar Empire focuses on an issue that is rarely discussed in the game industry - the problem of high system requirements for new PC games.

Increasingly, new PC games will be released with extremely high hardware requirements and when they don't sell as well as hoped, it's used as a blunt instrument to say that "PC games are d0med".  The reality is much more complicated.  When you sell a product or service, only those who are capable of making use of it can become customers in the first place.  Too often, game companies assume that people will upgrade their systems just for their game. 

Sins of a Solar Empire is designed to work on both older machines and newer machines. The graphics, of course, look better on the latest machines but the experience on older machines isn't just marginal, it's good.

This morning, we played a game on a 4 year old Dell machine with an ATI 9800 graphics card on it. It didn't just run okay. It ran very well (i.e. extremely smooth). It doesn't look nearly as pretty as it does on say Geforce 8800GTX but it certainly looks pretty good still.

At the end of the day, as much as we want our games to look awesome, we also want as many people as possible to be able to buy our game.

Check out the full blog here to learn some of the technical details involved and other thoughts on the matter.

View: IGN Upgrades