The Imagined Future of PC Games

PC Gamer has up a five-part series prognosticating the future of PC gaming. (part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) Graham Smith, Kieron Gillen, and a few other PC games folks make some big-picture predictions about where console gaming's aging sibling is headed. Some of their predictions are fairly safe ("6. The mouse won't die, and graphics cards will get more powerful."), but others may be a bit contentious: "4. Steam and similar services will crush PC piracy. There's been a lot of talk from developers - old rivals id and Epic chief among them - about piracy making it harder for them to justify developing PC-only games. There's so little profit in it, apparently, that the poor fellows are left with no choice but to stray from their beloved home-platform and develop for consoles too. And yet the only games out there with a zero percent piracy ratio are all PC-only: MMOGs. They have a headstart in the anti-piracy crusade: connecting to a central server is an integral part of the game, so verifying that the user's CD key is unique can be done without much fuss. And no one's going to complain that a MMOG requires an internet connection; that's pretty obvious from the concept itself."

Comments

The bleak future of PC gaming

[kornkid606]

6. The mouse won't die, and graphics cards will get more powerful.

I pray to God the mouse does die. If, in ten years, we are still sitting in front of a 2D monitor and using a mouse and keyboard to play our games then video games are officially dead. I doubt most people would complain if the status quo kept up for the next decade, but it is my belief that the true ideal of gaming, PC included, is the holo-deck from Star Trek. Unless we keep heading toward that ideal, games are going to stagnate and if you think you are seeing the same old thing now, in a decade you will see absolutely nothing new anymore. everything will be re-hash with better graphics.

Graphics cards are not the only things that need to change. The fundamental revolution in gaming NEEDS to happen in I/O. I think The Wii is the first iteration of this, but not necessarily the be-all end-all. I/O technology needs to take the hint from the Wii and continue to push the bounds of how we interact with the game on a fundamental level. It may sound like I am talking about VR, but the peak game experience should be much more than this. It should be as though you were stepping into a whole other real world

This is not to say that we NEED the HoloDeck in the next decade, but we need to start making progress towards this or interactive media as we know it will stagnate and die. And the masses won't know that what they once loved is dead until somebody comes along and points out how things could have been and what the original goal was.

Of course, this is all my opinion and I may just be a wacked out nut-job who loves video games too much but, mark my words, if things haven't changed within the next decade then you WILL see the death of video games, no matter what platform. Nobody's immune...