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Hardware Manufacturers Making PC Gaming Too Elite?
Thanks to AVault for its editorial discussing whether PC hardware/graphics card manufacturers are fragmenting PC gaming too much with constant hardware upgrades, thereby "making it a sport for only the serious few." The author argues: "With the impending release of Valve's Half-Life 2 and id's Doom 3, we're looking at the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history... the reported minimum requirements for these two heavy hitting titles include fully DirectX9 compatible video cards. This demand excludes all low-end and many medium-level computers out there today." He discusses the "partnership" of "hardware manufacturers turning over reference equipment that won't see the retail market for some time to software developers to use in the creation of their games", and queries the "expensive process of habitual upgrades" by suggesting: "If everybody turns to an Xbox or a PlayStation for entertainment, who's going to need new PC equipment?"
He says that this is the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history (boldfaced lie), then implies that consoles don't have this problem? Excuse me?
Rob
we're looking at the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history...
The hell we are, this happens at least once every two years, games are constantly pushing technology, what else would? Who cares about the "little companies"? Millions of people buy(and anticipate) these high-end PC games for a reason.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
I haven't, and won't spend money on PC hardware just so that I can play a new game. I still play the original Half Life, and haven't upgraded my video hardware past my TNT2.
The high prices he is complaining about are the price you pay for the biggest and the best. His comparisons to console systems are way off the mark.
People buy consoles for the steady stream of games w/o hardware upgrades, knowing full well that the state of the art will leave them behind.
People buy PC gaming hardware so they can keep up with the state of the art, at their own pace. If I want to plunk down $$ for the latest video card to play the new games, I can. But I can also be like a console owner and stand by and watch my equipment slowly become obsolete.
I guess the author doesn't remember when 3D shooters stopped offering software renderers and you were required to own a 3D hw accelerator to play.
Gamers, as a market group, want progress regardless of whether or not that helps line the industry's pockets. We WANT games that inspire and utilize new hardware.
If any particular software company leaves too many people behind with a game, then they are taking a risk with their product (by possibly making a poor prediction about how many potential customers will want to upgrade their hardware), not engaging in a conpsiracy to manipulate consumers.
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An upgrade from a 486-SX 25 to a P-1 133MHz cost $2000; an upgrade from a Geforce 2 GTS and an Athlon 1.2GHz to a Radeon 9800 and an Athlon XP 2500+ is what, $600? I'd much rather spend less money than more money, neh?
I have to disagree with your insight. The components are cheaper these days, but the benefits from upgrading are nearly entirely game focused, whereas the benefits of upgrading in 1994 covered everything you did with the machine.
Going up to 32 megabytes of RAM from 8 megabytes ten years ago would mean you could play the latest games, but it would have also made your PC feel like a new machine! Upgrading from 512 megabytes of RAM to even two gigabytes of RAM these days wouldn't make Windows feel significantly different at all.
And in the CPU department, too.. you can run Windows XP and have most general apps feel instantaneous on a mid-range 2.0GHz Pentium 4. Why upgrade to a 3.4GHz machine? There's no point except for gaming, and many new games will make use of that extra CPU power (try busy bot matches).
I think is going to become a sore point quite quickly. You just don't need expensive 256MB graphics cards, 3.4GHz processors, and a gigabyte of DDR RAM to do 99% of what you want on a PC now.. it's just the games that are demanding it. So.. people will drift to the cheaper options like buying an XBox, getting XBox Live, and knowing their games will work okay.. and have an el cheapo PC for the Internet and word processing.
Heck, I was a die-hard gamer in the 90's, but all this upgrading is doing my head in, I think I'm going to do the above!
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What saddens me about PC gaming is that the only boundary which is regularly pushed is the graphics. What happens then is that you need to buy a new $300 graphics card every year to be able to play the latest games nicely. My GF4Ti4200 is pretty much useless now, even Far Cry at 1024x768 is basically un-doable.
Half Life was an amazing game, but it wasn't because of the graphics. It's because it had a good story, it led you through the story well, the graphics weren't awful, and it had good playability. So why didn't we see a lot of games try to be like Half Life? Instead, they all tried to become graphics-fests. If some games with the depth (and graphics) of the original Half Life came out now, but at, say, $20, they'd sell like hot cakes! In a way, I'd say Return to Castle Wolfenstein almost did this. It took the old Quake 3 engine (which was a couple years' old by then), and wrapped a game with improved AI and playability around it. Result.. worked good on old kit, and was a good game.
Let's see boundaries of AI, playability, story, and concept being pushed, rather than just graphics all the time!
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Let's take Civ3. The AI in that game made using larger maps with slower computers pretty unplayable, but the normal sized maps were very playable. So if you bought a brand new computer today, you'd get extra playability out of this game (which, coincidently will run on a Pentium 133 on smaller maps (Min sys req P3 450)). My point is the game scales.
So what's different with FPS? Well, for starters, the genre's physics and basic premise hasn't really changed since Quake (where they added rooms on top of rooms, jumping, and free look). While graphics are nice, good graphics are certainly not required to make a great game. (Tetris anyone?)
Though not meant as a blast to FPS people, the genre doesn't require huge ammounts of processing power except for the friggin' graphics. As an analogue to the Civ scenario, people with worse GFX cards should still be able to play the game with worse graphics. Unless there's some sort of wiz-bang AI or complex physics, I'd hope processor power wouldn't matter too much either.
People played the original Half-life on P2 300s and they still play it on Athlon64's. All I can say is I hope the new Half-life will try to be as accomedating as the original and provide the same evolutionary gameplay that made it a classic.
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As a software developer, I actually don't want to have to produce a game with that much eye candy. But I feel compelled to concentrate on that, given that gamers and press go (in part) by screenshots and aesthetics.
Regardless of what I'd like to concentrate on, I think the hardware vendors, the software developers, the press, and the consumer are all in cahoots together. You, me, everyone -- we all want to see prettier games.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
...don't buy it. Vote with your dollars. If nobody is willing to upgrade to some next-gen hardware, then it's not going to work. However, if everyone but you is willing to upgrade, this is good news: tha means the prices on the previous generation of cards will plummet, vastly increasing the value of the second-tier hardware for those constrained by budgets.
People buy games that push the envelope because they want the next big thing. If you want to stay back in the Q2 era, go ahead. There's still plenty of great games from that era that you haven't played yet.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
CD Rom drives.
Sound Cards.
VGA cards (like DOS was using it).
Color Monitors.
Joystick ports.
All of the above upgrades were essentially driven by gaming. What use was a sound card before Roberta Williams started supporting them in King's Quest? What did a CD Rom drive do before Myst? Sure, windows would eventually come to rely upon 2D graphics processing, much like the plan is to integrate 3D processing into Longhorn, but the cart in this case did not lead the horse. All of these were driven by gaming, with the operating system and applications expanding to take advantage of these new additions.
If anything, this upgrade generation is the first in the past few years that has been driven by gaming because people started jumping on the Internet and buying machines. People had a more compelling reason to upgrade for a while: I.E. was a dog, and you need really fast hardware to run it satisfactorily. Now, I won't say how Firefox or Opera might fit into this equation more cheaply, but this did mean that people were upgrading their hardware and it had little to do with gaming. We are, of course, back on the gaming upgrade cycle.
It's not a new phenomenon, it just took the back burner for a little while.
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