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PC Game Market 'Becoming A Niche'?
simoniker writes "Gamasutra has quizzed game analysts from Wedbush Morgan, Screen Digest and DFC Intelligence on the state of the PC game biz, with thought-provoking results. From Michael Pachter's comments: 'The PC games market is becoming a niche, substantial in size, but a niche nonetheless.' David Cole also notes: 'When I first started covering the game industry back in 1994, the general consensus was PC games would dominate the market and console systems were doomed.' What changed?" How do you think Microsoft's recent push to treat the PC as the 'fourth console' will affect things?
In the gaming industry, the platform that hosts World of Warcraft and its seven million subscribers is a niche market?
That's the point though... the top end is almost always a niche market. Ferarris cater to a niche market of people want the highest-end sports car, 65" plasma HDTVs cater to the niche high-end home theater market, and PC games cater to the niche high-end hardcore gamer market.
Consoles only seem ahead for most games. But take a look at Oblivion, which clearly looks better on PC than the 360, even though it still looks pretty good on the 360.
The main difference here, thus my preference for the PC version, is the modding. There's so many worthwhile mods out there now that there is no way i could play the vanilla game ever again. If more games were to value the aftermarket effect of moddable games, they'd certainly see sales a year or more after the game first came out. Just look at CounterStrike!
You are assuming that # of subs = # of copies sold. This is not true.
I don't know the numbers, but I'm guessing there were a LOT more copies sold than current subscriptions.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
What I find funny is that every time I hear a report that "PC is a smaller gaming market than consoles", they are comparing the PC gaming market to all the current-gen consoles combined. That's hardly fair, since consoles are completely incompatable with each other and shouldn't be lumped into the same market.
Now, compare the PC market to just the XBox 360 market, or to just the PS2 market...and suddenly it's not a niche at all. It's an alternative.
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The funny thing about your statement is that you fail to realize that 99% of all top-end, ground-breaking First/Third Person Shooters are released on the PC long before they make it to any consoles...
/. on the recent past talking about how all the "PC's are dying" doomsdayers were all wrong and how PC gaming is making a large comeback.
Same with RTS games...and adventure games...and flight simulators...(and MMORPG's)...I could go on and on.
It seems to me like Consoles are a just niche for sports, fighting and racing games...and a lot of those are even released at the same time or slightly earlier on the PC...
There was an article on
Which pretty much sums up the console versus PC debate. But that's not what this article was about.
They asked three industry analysts, three questions:
- Is the PC Game industry being marginalized?
- Are consoles an alternative to Piracy?
- Will Microsoft help PC Gaming? Will Vista help PC gaming?
They all seem to agree that spending on PC games will experience decline. Yet none of them seem to reliably explain why. One of them completely fudged all three of the questions.The Realities of Online Digital Media
iTunes. People were "obtaining" mp3's back in 1996. But it wasn't until last year that a storefront was erected, with the necessary legal and contractual agreements, to actually go and purchase a piece of digital music online. Media organizations are among the most stolidly conservative entities in the business world, the reason is because they are shit-scared. Why? Well, it's like how Esther Dyson put it : "The gatekeepers...which are dependant on putting content into inefficient containers...are going to lose."
Big game companies are no different than other big media, having built their entire businesses around the processes and tools that made their products yesterday. New stuff (ie innovation), makes them nervous. Which is why we don't see a lot of radical entertainment coming into mainstream gaming.
Contrary to doomsayers, I've noticed that there is a literal explosion in gaming (particularly online), in which the PC is the central delivery platform. MMOGs. Simple, easy-to-run downloadable casual games. Browser-based games. Digital distribution (from Game Tunnel to Manifesto to Steam and everything in between). The consoles can not do any of these things (they will one day, but right now they're not stealing anyones cake when speaking about online games).
Even WoW has greatly expanded the online gaming market to include people who have literally never played a game online before in their lives. The trend is now unstoppable. Where are they going to go when the lustre of Epic grinding has faded away? They'll try new games. What about the casual gamers (meaning, your grandma)? Is the ad revenue generated by casual gaming portal sites added into the spreadsheets of the PC gaming industry?
Note that not one of the above examples spells monetary goodness for retail stores. But that's the nature of digital media - the suppliers who put stuff on shelves are eventually going to lose and will smartly move to service-based and value-added outlets.
Not Piracy, it's Standardization
Yes modded consoles really stop piracy. Prepare for DEATH when the latest consoles get hacked.
Consoles are less about piracy than they are about a standardized implementation base, which reduces the headaches of supporting a divergent hardware base. This is where the console is vastly superior to the PC. This is where costs are lowered in the release phase of a game (meaning, technical support and patching), and filtered back into the development phase of the game.
Vista
Perhaps, Microsoft will help PC gaming. A greater emphasis on the OS-level can do nothing but achieve this. I don't think the XNA-XBLA route will be particularly significant for AAA, but the casual space should benefit.
A good reason that Microsoft just recently pushed XBLA + XNA for indies is because they control the tools, the media and the channel. They can afford to grab the mindshare because they'll profit from it any way you slice it up. More developers mean more games. More games mean more consoles. It's win-win for them.
Six years ago people were ringing the bell for the PC's demise. Three years ago, yet again. Two...One...oh whoops, the PC is still here. It's all about the games, and how we want to play them. Right now, consoles and PCs seem to make their respective audiences very happy.
Consoles are for games that have been tried out and refined on a PC first. PCs are for anything new and inventive comes out first for a really simple, obvious, reason: there's no financial barrier. Way back in 94 when PCs were dominating, was about the time consoles were in a rut because there wasn't enough innovation, but PCs had some pretty different, entertaining games. 3D graphics were just being demonstrated as viable in real time (although computers had been doing it a while, it really lept forward around then). Unfortunately because PCs have such problems with wide component variance, they are niche, because only a small audience has the ability to make them work.
Ultimately, some of what PCs did well in that era, drove for new console architectures that put them where they are today. Not all genre's made it, and unfortunately we're still lacking in adventure games and straight up RPGs.
I wouldn't expect PC gaming will disappear, except from EB stores. It will likely shift to primarily online sales, and that sure as hell beats camping out best buy.
Now, if you're really suggesting for a moment that PC gaming is more complicated than it used to be, I might give you that. My gamecube hasn't managed to confuse me too much, so I really don't play PC games any more...
I think you're confused. Games are getting worse across the board. The barrier for entry into "the games market" used to be a few days of BASIC instruction, and some creativity. Now it requires a few hundred-thousand dollars and an expert team, and some of the biggest most successful games these days have budgets that are millions of dollars.
I think we're finding that when it costs so much to even try to make a game, most studios simply put their money where it's already been proven- where they know exactly what kind of return they're going to get.
Really: with less people are trying than ever, did you really expect games to get better?
I must of been too busy playing FPS, RTS, and MMO's to realize that PC gaming is now a niche market.
Since I'm all out of mod points, and you're a friend of mine, I'll "kindly" explain it to you: PC games have moved on. They've already hit the next generation of distribution and are leading the way with online games and online content like Valve's Steam. Heck, I buy all my Linux games online! Who needs shelf space when you can skip the long line of losers waiting outside Best Buy at 3AM and order your game from the comfort of your own home and have it in mere minutes? And where are the consoles in this? They're finally catching up with online multiplayer games and almost getting to the point that you could have a real LAN party with them. Call me when you have more than four people in the same room playing Dawn of War or Quake III Arena on their XBox 360s. Oh, and not getting their asses handed to them by those who are using mouse+keyboard for control.
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