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Is PC Gaming Set For a Comeback?
An anonymous reader writes "A combination of factors like console penetration, piracy, and the huge inherent variability in PC hardware setups have made the PC a third-class citizen for many gaming genres, especially the kind of high-adrenaline action games that were once the PC's bread and butter. Epic is a company that has been vocal in its shift toward consoles, with many controversial statements dropped over the years in reference to piracy being the reason. So it was with some surprise that we noted Epic's VP, Mark Rein, pointing out recently that the PC is as important as ever. Why the turnaround? This article suggests that the extended length of the current console generation will drive some developers back to the PC as new games push up against hardware limits."
Steam proves that the right games sell well on PC.
"Comeback"? Did it go somewhere while I was playing all these awesome PC games?
crazy dynamite monkey
So what happened epic gears of war sales drop, and you realize how limited the xbox hardware is?
It's true that many developers want to do things that the consoles can't handle. But in the end, money is the driving force of any successful business. The one thing we've learned this generation is that graphics are not the selling factor they once were. From a business standpoint there's little reason to abandon consoles when console sales rake in the money.
The PC is set for a comeback... Until the next generation of consoles is out... Then PC gaming will be dead again.
Not that I think PC gaming is dead or will be anytime soon.
Business-wise, PC gaming is a river that leads to the sea of Consoles. Practically every gaming company starts out on PCs, and at some point tries to make the jump up to Consoles with x10 the install and active customer base.
Therefore, it always continually looks like "all game makers are leaving PCs for Consoles". Soon the river will be dry! Not so much -- the cycle refreshes itself constantly.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
PC gaming will never die completely for one simple reason - market penetration. You can talk all you want about how many PS3's and X-Box 360s are floating around but just about all of these homes will have at least one computer in them. You can argue that high end multi-million dollar PC games might disappear but I am still skeptical about that given how easy the console makers and third parties have made it to port to a PC (or off of a PC). Plus you see games like World of Warcraft that are designed to run on barebones PCs without the need for an expensive gaming rig, perhaps that is the future of PC gaming.
The real reason that people don't buy PC games anymore - at least for the class of people I've talked about - is DRM. And I'm serious. Actually, the combination of DRM + "no demo".
Most of us have been burned once too often buying a game that sucks, doesn't run on your machine even if you satisfy the minimum requirements (and more), and so on.
10 years ago, if a game was awfully short, or sucked, or didn't work, you'd put it on the 2nd hand market and it wasn't so bad. You'd not get your original investment back, but about half of it, a bit more if you did it right. That put the cost of picking a bad apple at maybe 20, often less. Today, with all those options killed thanks to DRM, the price for an error is 50 (prices have also gone up). That's 250% the old value. And then people wonder why less games are bought.
It gets multiplied by a good factor if you figure in that many gamers are now adults, with family. A large part of the "available income marked for gaming" is in a demographic that wants to play with their spouse or kids. Which means the game has to run on at least two PCs, and the network part has to work. You'd think that's a solved problem, but it isn't. For one, almost all games today require you to buy two copies for that - bringing the price of error up to 100. Two, it increases the chance that some part of the equation fails, so the chance for error increases(*). Both cost and chance of error go up. If that happens, you very, very quickly reach the point where it just isn't a rational decision anymore.
Today, even though I enjoy coop gaming a ton, I would not recommend buying any windos game to anyone. Well, maybe my enemies on /. ;-)
Seriously. You want to play a game? Find a torrent.
Yes, I feel sorry for the developers. There's nothing I can do for you guys. Go indie and offer an honest option for me to buy (I've bought a lot of indie stuff, and so far haven't had one regret) or tell your distributors to stop fucking the customer. Because even in that business, "money up front" only works for a short time, and if you want them to come back, the product better feels like worth paying for afterwards.
(*) you'd not believe the amount of total bullshit I've seen with windos network gaming. Like XP and Win7 not being able to communicate via TCP/IP when they're not in the same workgroup. Err... yeah, makes sense. Random failures left and right. Some machines on the network being able to see another machine, but not vice versa (because, you know, your ping reply gets through just fine, but your ping request doesn't???). Network games working just fine if machine A hosts, but not if machine B hosts. And so on.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No, PC gaming is not "back." It never went away. Facebook games are printing money.
Oh, you mean high-end PC gaming of the kind that requires expensive GPU cards? It didn't go away either. You can't overclock your PS3.
PC games will be around as long as there are PCs.
I piss off bigots.
I spent this morning browsing high street computer shops helping a relative to buy a new machine. I came away convinced that the "home desktop" will soon be a thing of the past. The shelf space dedicated to home desktops has shrunk to almost nothing while the shelf space dedicated to laptops, netbooks etc has grown and grown. Most significantly the price of a general purpose laptop is now lower than the price of a general purpose desktop. This isn't going to affect casual PC gaming like Farmville and pop cap games but it is certainly going to shrink the market for serious graphically intensive PC games.
The funny thing is, I have been a PC gamer for over twenty years and there has never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Thanks largely to digital distribution the quantity and quality of games available for the PC at at extremely low prices is just awesome.
The general trend towards laptops over desktops also hurts PC gaming quite significantly. I used to play a lot of PC games. These days I use a macbook + xbox. It works well.
The answer is MMORPG. They realize that they missed a big slice of the pizza, and they want to return back. I still play Unreal Tournament, and there are a plenty of other guys who enjoy this game, and there are a lot of custom made mods, in some sense even better than the original, and we are still playing with 5year old engine!!! It is all about money, and if they don't catch this train, someone else will do it. Especially with all the restrictions and inconvenience that come with all the consoles.
Not a circle, so much as a downward spiral for PC Games... Each revolution lower than the previous. Look at the shelf-space devoted to PC games now in Gamestop or EBGames and compare it to the entire floorspace that was once devoted to them in the age of Babbages and Software Etc. That is a ration that has been in steady decline regardless of the age of the Console generation.
Maybe Digital Delivery is making a dent too. I hope so. I would like to see the EBX line of shops go away. With the availability of drive space and broadband, there should soon be no need for physical media sale for any media (Why I don't own a Blue Ray player)
Steam is the light.
You forgot RTS games which, despite many attempts, still suck tremendously on consoles. There's a little thing called Starcraft 2 that, even if you don't really like it or care about it, will be making a huge impact on the PC market.
Dunno, I'm one of those who never allowed Steam anywhere near my computer (but I'm not going to turn it into a rant about DRM for now) and it still seems to me like I've had no shortage of PC stuff to play.
The "right games" always sold, anyway. WoW still wipes the floor with any of the over-simplified button-masher MMOs that were built to be good for consoles too, for example. The Sims sold 16 million copies. The latest incarnation, The Sims 3, sold about 8 million copies as of mid 2009. And we're talking without the sequels, expansions, stuff packs, and premium DLC haircuts that EA sells like hot cakes in the meantime.
By comparison Epic's "Gears Of War" only sold 5 million copies. And that was one of the top bestselling games for the XBox.
Really, I don't get the 'OMG, consoles are where teh monies are' meme. Don't get me wrong, 5 million copies isn't peanuts or anything, and I can see why someone would want some of that market _too_. But the keyword is "too". Dumping PC gaming as some kind of lost cause seems weird to me. When you compare the top selling PC and console games side by side, the notion that PC gaming is just some kind of drop in the bucket and everyone is pirating it anyway, just doesn't seem to hold any water. WoW alone has more than two active subscriptions for every copy that Gears Of War sold, and probably leads 4 to 1 in copies sold.
Or maybe it's just that if you're Epic Megagames and all you can offer is a rehash of the 1999 UT franchise, and strictly confined to the increasingly overcrowded no-brainer FPS market... well, maybe piracy and number of PC gamers weren't their biggest actual problem.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No kidding. In roughly the same timeframe, Doom 3 sold 3.5 times more copies and was a major commercial success. There are maybe better examples, but I'm picking one that's close enough to the same straight FPS market segment. I never understood how come the supposed problems of the PC market -- you know, not as many gaming PCs as consoles, everyone pirates it, etc -- only affected UT3 but not Doom 3.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"This article suggests that the extended length of the current console generation will drive some developers back to the PC as new games push up against hardware limits."
Let me just say - stop it! Stop pushing hardware limits, especially for graphics. I'm playing Red Dead Redemption right now and it is stunningly beautiful on our Plasma TV. Enough is enough - now please focus on bringing back originality, story, better controls, and please-oh-please split-screen gaming. I heard Red-Dead is introducing a co-op mode but no split screen. BLEH. So much for my boyfriend and I playing at the same time.
I have several friends who are also gamers. In our past we used to get together at someone's house and have lots of gaming options like Goldeneye, Mario Party, etc. Now... split screen gaming is rare- and even when it exists (ie Borderlands) it is limited to 2 players.
You say I'm lazy, I say Steam is less hassle than going to the store.
You say I'm impatient, I say Steam is faster than going to the store.
With Steam, I know the game I want is always in stock. I know it isn't a scratched return that gets sold to me as new. And, without fail, Steam has the game cheaper than any of my local stores (and cheaper than online stores once you factor in the shipping).
My games are always patched to the latest fixes, new content gets added for free (Team Fortress 2!). What's not to love?
And DRM, bah, humbug. Only thing I can't do is sell my games second-hand. Not that I ever did that with physical media anyway.
Can you go on the internet? Check.
Are you heavily restricted on what software you are allowed to install on it? Check.
Does it come in a nice, neat, attractive case? Check.
Is it next to impossible to upgrade the hardware? Check.
Parent is right; it's not a PC. It's a Mac.
But if someone else in the household wants to use the PC at the same time as you, you have to buy/build another PC for gaming. It's not like a Wii console where most of the multiplayer games support one console, one monitor, one copy of the game, and multiple controllers.
And if someone wants to watch TV when you want to play with your console?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I agree with most of what you said but whats with the "capitalistic malware"? Do you work at a capitalistic place of employment? Possibly with capitalistic employees!? I personally prefer socialistic malware or even facist malware.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
And if someone else in the household wants to play a different PS3 game at the same time, you need to buy another console.
So what's your point? That PCs aren't good for gaming because you can't have one person gaming while another person runs spreadsheets?
Let's see you play Uncharted 2 on your PS/3 while your wife watches a Blue-Ray movie on the same system.
The main thing keeping PC gaming from moving ahead is the lack of imagination from game manufacturers, and their dishonesty about the supposed negative effect of copyright infringement. Steam has already proven that people will gladly pay for games if you make it easy and price them fairly.
The PS3 and X360 are getting way old. I was actually playing Uncharted 2 last week and it seemed to take forever for scenes to load. I was watching that spinning dagger go on and on and on. Even the graphics don't look as good as the latest games on my PC. And lord, am I ever sick of third-person games. Consoles have done more to hurt gaming than help, IMO.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Epic's big money isn't on the games they make. You'll notice that when Unreal Tournament started up they didn't really make very many games anymore. In fact GoW was kind of a change back to make more than just UT games. Well the reason is their real business is the Unreal Engine. That thing is in EVERYTHING. Mass Effect, Rainbow Six, Borderlands, Medal of Honor, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Global Agenda, etc. If it's a first person game, better than average chance Unreal Engine is driving it. There's like a 150 games just for the current Unreal Engine 3, never mind UE 2 and UE 1.
Well, a great many of these games are cross platform. PC, 360, and PS3. That's part of the draw of the engine. It has some top flight developer tools, so you can work on your game with great tools in a flexible PC environment and easily get it to both consoles and the PC. It costs big bucks for that, they won't say how much precisely, but it is six figures and likely a percentage of royalties. It is very worth it for many game studios though, because it seriously cuts down on development costs and time.
So my bet is when Epic said "We don't care about PCs!." Their licensees said "Yes you do, at least if you ever want to get our business again."
Apart from Herzog Zwei for Genesis, Command & Conquer for PS1, and Starcraft for N64, there aren't a lot of RTS games on consoles due to technical limitations of the controllers. PCs have no such technical limitations; they take four USB gamepads just as easily as they take a mouse and keyboard. It's just that the major PC game publishers don't want to make a game for the HTPC crowd for whatever reason. I'm trying to pin down this "whatever reason" so I can know whether or not an indie game developer would have a chance at selling copies to HTPC owners who want to branch out into gaming.