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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?
Indeed. Also where is that promised UT3 Linux client, huh? Well? Fsck you Epic! Die in a fire!
Next seconded...
Here be signatures
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.
This is generally the cycle of things. New consoles pop up with fancy new graphics accelerators & all kinds of happy new buzzword technologies & devs flock to them. Magazines, industry shows, etc, call it "the end of PC gaming!!" & the PC lays low for a couple years, mostly powered by the MMO crowd & a few of the better shooters. Then, a couple years later, the consoles start to show a hint of aging & devs flock back to the PC to make "prettier" games. The PC gains momentum until it actually starts cutting into console game sales by which time the new set of consoles is set to launch, inciting fanboy mania once again & the circle starts anew. It's a beautiful thing *sniffle*
Nowadays, most game developers are owned by bottom-line-oriented publishers who prefer consoles over the PC for the reasons listed in the summary. There are very few developers who are enough of hardware geeks to want to push the envelope beyond what consoles can manage -- iD's Doom 3 and Crytek's Crysis are the only ones I can think of offhand, although both companies have sold out to consoles in recent years. Strategy games and MMOs are still PC-centric due to needing a mouse or dozens of keys; if the standard $200 Xbox 360 came with a mouse and keyboard, PC exclusives would be toast.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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.
id and Crytek have abandoned the PC? Is that why they have released every game they have made on the PC? Let's not count the terrible cell phone game id made, I'm sure they want to forget it as well. :)
I'm not so sure that gaming was ever the bread and butter of computing, but then I have nothing to back up my opinion, just as the article submitter has nothing.
There are very few games that are console only, I can only remember a handful games that are PS3 or xbox only, the rest you can buy for any platform you wish to play on. PC gaming is not dead, developers target it just as much as they do the consoles.
did you forget to take your meds?
It has gotten to the point where I can't just buy a game and install it without having to worry about what kind of malware comes packaged along with it. I've got terabytes of space, so I don't want some capitalistic malware forcing me to put a disk in the drive, so that the disk will get scratched and I will have to buy another copy. I also don't want to have to ask the capitalist pigs for permission to play the games after I have paid for them via on-line activation.
Thus, I have decided to buy all games used from now on, to screw the developers/publishers. The only people I will buy new games from are folks like Frictional Games, who offer native Linux games with no disk-checking or phone-home malware at reasonable prices. I will NOT pay over $20 for a new game.
I'm also willing to buy from www.gog.com, because they don't include capitalistic malware in their games. Many games I want are not available on GOG though, so I buy them used. The publishers are losing money here. No, I don't want to buy your latest shitty un-optimized console port.
It's great that PC games keep pushing the hardware and the state of the art, but after decades of PC gaming, it's becoming harder and harder to keep justifying the hardware upgrade treadmill.
I know I could just play older games, and many people do. But then you miss out on some of the social aspects of game playing; e.g., discovering and playing new games at the same time as your friends and colleagues.
I'm sure there are good technical and financial reasons that so many games can't and won't play very well on modest PC hardware that's several years old, but I keep wishing they did.
PC game companies would sure make a lot more money off ME, at least, if they did...oh well.
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
I thing the console builders are to blame. Most PC games don't have hidden costs, and you are the ruler of the PC, more of less. Since Sony's action to remove the otherOS option I'm not fond of the consoles anymore. Customer who are using console have more or less sold their rights to the console maker. In the end they have the power we as a customer has non (by accepting te EULA you've sold your console soul to ...)
They can remove anything they want to and even ask money for something that used to be free.
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.
As a former game pirater, I completely understand if a studio wants to abandon the PC platform entirely. The reason great games exist is that there is the potential for enormous financial rewards. Downplaying the financial aspect of this problem is unhelpful. We can't talk eschew greed without badmouthing the engine behind nearly all the great games today.
Epic said the PC is the realm of farmville for a good reason. Ad-based games or simple labors-of-love are the only types of games that can exist when software is pirated over sold at 20:1. I think Steam is our only hope; Valve smartly used the Apple model of making purchasing as easy as pirating, all while lowering prices and keeping up a back-catalog to take advantage of "long tail" sales. Recently, I've bought GTA4, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Far Cry, Far Cry 2, Bioshock 2 all from Steam because it's cheap, easy, and makes me feel good to support PC gaming.
The PC market stinks right now, but it should get better with Console/PC hardware looking more and more similar, the effects of "iTunes for Games" (Steam), and us PC users growing the F up and acquiring games legally.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Epic Megagames, released for example:
Unreal (Tournament, II, Championship, Tournament 2003/2004, Tournament 3)
Gears of War 1 till 3
And before that (DOS era), a buttload of shareware games.
Next to that, the Unreal engine, which is the basis for a huge chunk of all 3D games released from 2000 till now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games
Publisher wise, not huge, but they really sped up 3D development with their 3D engines.
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.
Developers don't make decisions. Publishers make decisions. EPIC get used to that crapbox360!
I love PC gaming, but I think it's biggest weakness right now is the confusion created by video card manufacturers that makes it a major research project to decipher which codename/model number is actually good. If they would adopt a simple system of making their cards according to their actual capabilities, like CPUs do, for the most part, they could eliminate the confusion. But I think they actually like the confusion they create. The latest nvidia cards have a wide range, with numbers and names ending in GT, GTX, GTS...the biggest sellers now are in the 200 series, but there are also 300, and 400 series cards out, with GT and GTX versions, and some other random letter codes. They've been doing this a long long time. They should get their act together and stop trying to mislead consumers with confusing model names before some regulatory agency forces them to do it.
Piracy is always quoted as the only real factor in disappointing PC sales though most of the multiplatform games were designed purely for use by joypad and with little to no effort to recreate any usable human / computer interface for pc versions. I have personally played PC ports where I was advised in the tutorial to press the square and triangle buttons together! Sigh.
Comparing console vs PC sales for games, for example Dead Space which on the PC had no definable keys and the presets made it impossible to play if you were left handed as well as endless mouse related issues, it is no wonder these corporate goons and their little quarterly sales reports, graphs and pop up colouring books decided after this that the PC market was mostly just a minor but rather vocal distraction. Of course not until they caught whiffs of how well Valve are doing out of all these other publishers incompetence that they all start back peddling.
IMHO the greatest thing Valve have done with Steam is make it easier and a lot less effort to buy a game than it is to pirate it. Something the clowns selling films really should try understanding sometime.
I presume he means recent games, Unreal Tournament 3 was quickly disregarded and I wonder if anyone still plays it nowadays. It's so easy to blame piracy when sales for new products are not as good as expected instead of looking at the product itself and if the current market is waiting for such a game.
Their Unreal 3 engine is pretty popular though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_3_and_3.5
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.
The huge ratio of pirated to games to actual sales is largely irrelevant as it has been repeatedly proven that a pirated counts are in no way equated to lost sales. Theres also mounting evidence that restrictive DRM damages sales more than piracy.
This is a repeat from 2005, 2001, 1995...
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Steam is one of the least-painful forms of DRM out there.
At least console DRM allows lending game discs to friends and resale to GameStop or to eBay buyers, even if it does achieve its intended purpose of shutting out micro-ISV games.
The lack of physical shelf space means that you can sell stuff on Steam for a lot less than in a brick & mortar store. There's constantly something good for sale for $5.
As with WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade.
And that's an awful lot of nicely reusable code for anybody looking to implement multiplayer.
As I understand it, most Steam games need four PCs and four copies of the game for four players. Certain genres of console games, on the other hand, allow for local multiplayer on one machine. Look at fighting games, or Bomberman series, or Mario Party and its knockoffs.
But PCs' big advantages are 1. mods and 2. getting indie games months or years before they show up on consoles.
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.
I would love there to be more games released on the PC. As a relatively young and poor person I am unable to shell out money for new consoles when they come out. However I need a PC for many other endeavors, so games for the PC are my best option. And the best thing about PC gaming are the many interesting independent games that you can buy for relatively cheap. My only grudge is I don't want to have to establish an internet connection to play my game.
Teehee... you believe in promises.
It's not exactly that simple. Whether split-screen gaming is a good idea or not, isn't as simple as just whether it's a PC or a Wii. It also depends on the type of the game.
E.g., if you want to just give another person a controller while you play most Final Fantasy incarnations and derivatives, well, good luck with that. Best I've even seen done was basically that someone can control a party member in combat, but are otherwise just sitting there getting bored when you just run around and talk to all the villagers or grind some minigame.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Get off my lawn!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
which platform to develop for depends on, among other things, where your expertise lie
Which platform to develop for also depends on how large your firm is. Sony and Nintendo, for instance, aren't too fond of micro-ISVs. Until Microsoft introduced XNA on Xbox 360 and got the hardware failure rate down with Jasper, micro-ISVs wanting to develop a "console-style" game had nowhere to turn except developing a prototype for PC and shopping it around to major publishers with a console license.
The console life cycle is too short for the company that only has its graphics going for it. So now Mark wants to crawl back to PC gaming and expect people to buy their boring games just because it requires the latest video card.
Sorry but fuck you Mark, I'll stick with Valve and Id.
So the wheel will complete its full circle until next console gen is release...Shocker. Coming up next, PC will die(Not really...) because of new gen of console until PC comes back, yet again, from the dead. Feels like groundhog day all over again. It all happened before and it will happen again, just ask Starbuck!!
I don't have an intelligent phone, so I need to be.
Only so long as console makers make it difficult/expensive to develop to their systems. Things have turned around in the last generation, with XNA and WiiWare (and probably something similar for PS3).
WiiWare is more like the old Xbox Live Arcade than like XNA/Xbox Live Indie Games. Unlike XNA Creators Club, Nintendo's WiiWare developer program still rejects developers working out of a home office (source: warioworld.com).
Doom is about an experience while the UT franchise is about gameplay. Mark Rein doesn't realize the difference and thought it would be a good idea to wreck the game play for UT3.
Hey Mark, you retard, for games like UT, the 'core community is where it's at. You think it doesn't matter because it's usually just a few hundred players, but they're the ones who host the servers, create fan web sites, drive sales.
PS
You Suck.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
This has always been the case with Epic.
Their Unreal Engine has been one of the most popular engines to date.
"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.
UT3 was quickly disregarded because at time of launch (late 2007), it required a lot more horsepower to run smoothly than the majority of people had. Only in the last year or so, as computers powerful enough to handle the engine have become more common, has it started to pick up steam with third-party developers.
Has anybody noticed how consoles are more and more like a computer? I mean they have HDDs, GPUs, memory cards, USB ports. They use DVDs or BDs and have a fucking ethernet connection!
It's ridiculous to talk of PC gaming death if the consoles themselves are becoming PCs. At some point you'll have to choose between buying a crippled Sony PS computer with overpriced Sony accessories such as keyboards or flash drives and no chance of upgrading OR, for a coulpe hundred dollars extra, buy a complete desktop with decent gaming capabilities, with the large advantage that with the PC you can buy accessories anywhere, from any vendor and you can upgrade it when necessary without having to sell your kidneys in order to do so.
Look at Stardock's Impulse, or Penny Arcade's Greenhouse.
Now, it may be the case that such a system can't be successful, but there's nothing stopping anyone from doing digital distribution without DRM -- in fact, it's much easier to do so. It's just that Steam's DRM is what many people (myself included) consider to be a fair trade.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Previously aquired results are no garantee for the future...
Here be signatures
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.
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 worry that someday I'll pop a disk in PS3 and it will say, "Sorry you must upgrade your videocard to 1 gigabyte to play this game.
It's already happened. The Nintendo 64 had a memory upgrade that was required to play some games. Fortunately, the upgrade was relatively straightforward.
and if someone else in the household wants to whatch american idol at the same time you grind on final fantasy XIII, you have to buy another TV set, which costs more and takes a whole lot more space than a budget notebook.
so... a point, please ?
my point is, whatever you choice for gaming, there's points in favor and points against. decide based on your taste. it's the kind of thing, like religion or favorite sports team, that shouldn't be debatable.
What ? Me, worry ?
Dude I have built decent gaming PCs for less than $300. Here is a dual core AMD kit for $200, go to your local mom&pop shop and pick up a dead box with an XP OEM license (usually around $30-$50, and you can get some good parts like an extra HDD or DVD ROM) and a $70-$100 graphics card and you are good to go.
In a way the consoles dragging their feet on putting out a new rev has helped lower the cost of PC gaming. Both consoles have a 7600 era GPU, which means most mainstream games had to lower the system reqs if they wanted to release on consoles as well. I'm using an HD4650 I got for a grand total of $36 after MIR and it plays everything I throw at it, just got done with a little Bioshock 2 before getting on here.
And finally I would point out that PCs have a MUCH longer life and can be re-purposed after they are no longer your main rig. The Celeron 3.06Ghz I gamed on in 03 and the 3.6Ghz P4 I gamed on in 05 are both being used by my two nephews to play MMORPGs and do that job quit well as well as helping them do homework, and my 1997 733Mhz P3 is now my mom's Internet box. If you build it yourself you'd be surprised how long they'll last. PC gaming is very cheap, not only cheap on the PC itself but with places like good old games I can get the games I missed often for less than $5. You can't get cheaper than that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
PC gaming's biggest problem is that it's been an enthusiast market more than a consumer market. There are still tons of gamers that don't know the difference between 2GB ram, and a 2GB hard drive, or 1.21 gigahertz, to 1.21 gigawatts. For these gamers being a PC gamer is nothing but headache and heartache. The don't have a will to learn about the PC, and probably never will. Before buying any PC game, or hardware most PC gamers do some research. "Is it compatible with my current hardware? Do I meet min specs? Any known problems?" Even veteran PC gamers have trouble with some games, and these are smart tech savvy consumers.
Currently PC gaming is in a good place. If you bought a high end gaming pc 2 years ago it's probably still well above recommended specs. Mostly because the hardware race has slowed cause the difference in new tech and old tech isn't really that dramatic of a change when it comes to gaming. This might be due to the economic climate, or just a natural order of things, but it's really helped out consumers who've been trying to keep up w/ the Jones' (AMD, intel, Nvidia, and ATI). Their hardware arms race is one of a few reasons PC gaming has driven away consumers, and developers.
Piracy is a serious issue for developers in this global tech age. While many tend to blow it out of proportion it's still something you have to consider when releasing on any platform not just pc. The DS, and PSP are two other examples of platforms where piracy seems to be a serious issue. On PC piracy is a problem because often the pirated versions of games are cheaper, easier to obtain, and easier to run. Imagine you're 15 years old and want a copy of Bioshock 2 for PC. First off you can't order it from an online retailer like steam since you don't have a credit card, some stores probably have it in stock, but you're 15 so you'll have to ride your, bike or take the bus. If you happen to get it, and it doesn't work on your PC you can't return it. You'll have to figure out the DRM, and if you have the knowledge to fix a problem with DRM you already have more than enough knowledge to get a pirated version which is not going to have any DRM requirements. Who can really blame consumers when piracy meets all their needs, and legit buyers are left in the cold. Steam might be an answer to that. While it's not cheaper than piracy it is much easier to get games on steam, and easier to run steam games than pirated ones. Consumers have repeatedly shown they will pay more when convenient so it's possible to compete with free especially with the shady pirate community, and the amount of personal information people keep on their pcs.
Some PC games support split-screen gaming. I don't know of many, but TOCA Race Driver 3 does, for example.
Some publishers were as well. For some reason, the media decided PC gaming was "dying". More or less what has happened is that while PC gaming has actually been growing, console gaming has been growing faster. Used to be that consoles paled in comparison to PCs. You could more or less add them all together and they still didn't meet PC gaming revenue. However now they are on even footing. The PC still has the highest revenue of any platform, but only when you take each console as a separate platform. Also the PC's sales are in areas you don't see as much on the consoles. A big FPS console title might sell 10 million on a console and only a million on the PC. However MMOs are casual games are massive on PCs and near non-existent on consoles.
At any rate things have shifted around, as they always do, and this lead some dumbasses in the media to declare PC gaming to be "dead". The decided since consoles as a whole were bigger, clearly it meant PC gaming was going down the drain. None of them ever bothered to examine the kind of money that gets made on PC games.
Now this was helped along by some publishers. The Pirate Bay made it real easy to see just how much your game got copied, and the answer is it got copied a LOT. Turns out when offered an easy, free, way to get a game a lot of people elected to do so. Well publishers made the same logical fallacy as the music/movie companies and assumed that each download was a lost sale. So they got all up in arms about how many millions of sales they were losing. They also deluded themselves in to thinking that there wasn't console piracy. So some of them started doing more console only stuff, doing second class PC ports, and using extremely draconian DRM.
Well, this has kinda swung back. The publishers that did that are finding it is hitting them in the wallet. PC games DO sell a lot, and you make more per copy since there's no royalties. Also while most people will put up with DRM, or more accurately don't really know or care about it, when it gets invasive they get mad. So many publishers have backed off on that (though others have gotten worse) and they've been doing PC versions of games again.
Also Impulse, Steam, and Direct2Drive have helped a lot. Part of the reason some people downloaded wasn't to get shit free, it was simple laziness. It is nice and easy to just click and have a game stream over the Internet. These services offer that, and offer faster downloads as well as 100% availability, not to mention being legal, for money. Many people say "Ya, that works for me."
So as far as I can tell, it has always been bullshit. The PC continues to get new games at a rapid pace. My problem currently is not lack of games, but lack of time to play them. I have games on my drive that I've never fired up yet because I don't have time.
PC gaming will not die, so long as you can make a non-trivial profit porting your game to the PC. If a PC port costs $500,000 and you can expect to make $5,000,000, most companies will do it because extra money is always nice. Even if the console version makes $500,000,000, it is still worth the port. Only if profits drop down to a trivial level, or disappear entirely, will they stop doing PC games.
Plus MMOs seem to suck on the console, and man can you make a lot of money on an MMO.
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.
L4D and L4D2 with a console command and an extra controller too.
And the new Magic the gathering game they just put on steam. And of course all those old emulated titles including arcade classics.
I know it seems minor, but I always hated waiting for my computer to bootup. I usually won't turn on my workstation just to play a game, so the only time I play a game is either at lunch or after work when it's already on (and when I'm tired after a full day of work). Maybe subconsciously I relate PC gaming to work.
Ergonomically, I hate playing on my PC. Some people enjoy playing immersive games with their nose 12" from the screen, but I prefer sitting back on a couch and playing games on a TV.
My main rig is for work, so I don't want to move it to the living room, but like I said I prefer playing on my TV over my monitor. Plus when I play social games I don't like having to cram my friends in my studio.
These little hassles have a cumulative effect over time, and I find myself playing PC games less and less.
decide based on your taste
I like 4-player games (good for console), but I also like indie games (good for PC). What should I choose?
1: Buy game.
2: Update game with patch.
3: Get no-DVD patch from gamecopyworld.com
I do this with every game I buy. It would be a little annoying if I was buying brand new games and had lots of patches coming out, but I buy older games that aren't as expensive. They are new to me :)
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
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."
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?
My complaint is that PCs aren't suited for all game genres because titles that support the use case of one person gaming while another person is playing the same game on the same machine tend not to get ported to PC. What's the PC counterpart to Crash Bash or Mario Party? What's the PC counterpart to terrain-based fighting games such as Power Stone or Super Smash Bros.?
buy a wii and a not-entirely bottom-end pc/laptop.
indie games usually dont have the hardwar requirements of this years crysis, so they will run on your basic office machine with a 50 buck graphics card, or a laptop with the best IGP chip around
People, what a bunch of bastards
Both consoles have a 7600 era GPU
That's another problem with PC gaming. Someone buying a video card can't easily tell high-end from mid-grade from low-end from obsolete based on just the model number. Case in point: I have an old PC with a Radeon 9000 video card from roughly 2003, yet a 7600's capability is well over nine-thou-SAAAAAND.
PC gaming is back for me... I'm thoroughly enjoying Osmos. Best ten bucks I've spent in gaming since getting World of Goo and a bunch of others and some of their code (effectively) in the Humble Indie Bundle for the same amount (hey, I paid nearly twice the average.) And several other parenthesized statements.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can build PCs very inexpensively which can play games. I've also looked at PCs on special at Costco, Best Buy, even Wal-Mart. HP is good because I can pull the core specs of the machine like maximum RAM and other important things. Then, if I find a low end model which is good enough, I just max the machine's RAM, drop in a low to midrange video card, and wipe the OS (getting rid of the shovelware most PC vendors stick on.) This gets me a decent gaming box that can last a couple years without breaking the bank.
From the outset, let me say that I don't begrudge console gamers enjoying their gaming although with my being a middle-aged gamer, I don't see the appeal of the majority of modern games these days.
However, in my own experience, the PC is now the refuge of older gamers who probably buy 2 or 3 new games a year at the most - this doesn't strike me as a market that the big games companies would move back to.
In my particular case, I've been a "mostly Linux" user for years and am now down to one Windows (XP) installation that I keep about just for gaming purposes. Otherwise, I'm now finding that the many older titles I own now work better under Wine or DOSBOX in Linux than they do in XP, where invariably you need to do a lot of tweaking to get older games to run, if they will run at all.
For new games, I really only look forward to releases from Valve, Stardock (Galactic Civilizations & Sins Of A Solar Empire) and any new Fallout games - I don't feel any other new PC games are going to deliver anything new to me apart from better graphics.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Because it never went anywhere.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
high-adrenaline action games that were once the PC's bread and butter
It's more of a confusion than an intended lie, but it's still not true. I always thought that there were two distinct genres - FPS and 3D action games. Or you can call them mouse-controlled action games and gamepad-controlled action games. While the last ones could be ported to PCs, the first ones could not be run properly on consoles. Well, actually with recent innovations in motion capture controllers I guess it's possible now.
Anyway, PCs never saw a big share of those gamepad-controlled (or keyboard-controlled) action games. At least the ones which are 3D.
Actually most big box stores have been.
I know one of the things that drove me to build my own systems, was that Dell and many other big box retailers would refuse to play nice with video cards. Any idiot knows, one of the more important pieces of hardware for gaming is your video card.
As everyone knows that has looked at hardware for more than 5 seconds there are basically 3 categories of video cards. Low end, Mid level, and High end. If you do even a bit of research you will find out that basically low end is garbage and good for playing minesweeper or something like that but not much else. Low end usually goes for 150$ or less, and in the case of intergrated graphic 0$. High end usually starts at about 300$ and goes upwards to over 1000$ if your an SLI crazy. This is bleeding edge technology, that most do not need for most gaming. The mid level goes from about 150$-300$ and is your bread and butter of video cards for games. It is also the best value and most bang for your buck. Many are just slightly different versions or underclocked copies of the high end cards, and sometimes have many of the same high end features enabled.
Now go to a retailer and try and buy a new computer. From my experiance in most instances, you usually have 3 choices: No video card, POS 30$ video card that is barely better than no video card, or a uber expensive 500$ video card. The only rational I can think of why Dell et al do this, is either the margins on mid level cards are so razor thin that they don't want to sell them, or they figure it is easier to really distinguish users as GAMER (with a capital fscking G!) or not a gamer. On top of that the option for the "Gaming" 500$ card will only be available on a 3000$ system full of every stupid bell and whistle and neon green bullshit they can stick in it. SO kids better start mowing lawns and paper routes, or find some rich parents to adopt you!
Anyway what I am saying is over the last 10 years big box computer retailers haven't exactly been kind to gaming. So many upon buying their POS Dell go out and buy the latest copy of whatever game and find that it is underpowered and have to immediately upgrade the video card. Or perhaps that is why they do it, for the upgrades. In any event, lets face it the gray masses don't build their machines, they buy them from Dell, or Futureshop or whatever, and the retail greed is likely having more an effect on what hardware gets distributed, which has likely the largest effect on what PC games people can or cannot run on their systems, or their level of frustration with PC gaming.
Anyway that's me rant. Build your own system and be done with it. Its easy. Everything is color coded these days, fits in one place, and everything is automated or has a wizard. Or hell, pay your Geeky buddy 50$ or a case of beer to build it for you. Most I know would love to have free toys to play with, even if they have to give them away when they are done! :)
One could argue that Steam proves PC games sell well when they can't be pirated.
UT3 was disregarded because it was inferior to UT2004, plain and simple. They took an extremely successful game and turned it into a Gears of War clone. UT2004 looks gorgeous with its bright skies and vibrant colours. UT3 looks like a generic grey-and-brown shooter with a ridiculous overabundance of bloom effects and hdr lighting. When did shiny surfaces become so popular?
UT2004 vs UT3:
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/1154/ut20041mz3.jpg
http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/2244/ut3texturehiworldhipostad9.jpg
Not only did it look inferior, but the gameplay was inferior aswell. End result was a shitty game that didn't sell well.
This happened with the PS2/Xbox generation too, if some of the older (25+) of us remember.
That could be said vice-versa to console games as well. Personally, I can't stand FPS's, RTS's, MMORPG's or RPG's on consoles. Nintendo has that niche which neither PS3 or Xbox360 can fulfil either at least until playstation move and microsoft kinect come out. I liken it to the old pong consoles of the late seventies. It did one thing well and that was pong. Sure Nintendo has their popular IP's, but that's about it aside from party games. PC's on the other hand have the potential to do everything and are only limited by what is developed for it. As soon as my PC can play Wii sports, I will officially have no use for that thing.
I hate what has been happening with DRM also, really I have. I'm also annoyed by the fact that Steam purchases will forever hinge on whether or not Steam continues to stay in business. I dislike not being able to sell, loan, or give away my games. I dislike that *some* publishers decide to tack on yet even more middleware DRM on top of Steam's as well. There are even some that you missed, such as that whether your source is Retail, Steam, or some other service, you often will suffer vendor lock-down if you want to purchase DLC or expansions, as many are only compatible if from the same source.
I do understand your criticisms. I would not pay the full retail price of any game on Steam.
However, that said, Steam does offer some advantages as well. There are some truly outstanding sales and specials available on Steam. Most of the games I've purchased have been for 50% to 75% off the retail. Steam offers many titles with less DRM hassle than the retail versions have (for some titles, Steam is the only way to get the game without SecuROM). It allows for playing games without your DVD drive getting thrashed by disk checking protection. Steam doesn't limit your installs to a certain number of computers (except in the minority of cases where the publisher tacks on more DRM than Steam's), but rather simply based on your account. You don't have to worry about lost or damage disks. Some games even allow you to send invitations to friends to allow them to play trial versions of the game temporarily.
One of the more recent advantages added is that when you buy a game that is available on both PC and Mac, it entitles you to being able to play the game on both platforms with one purchase.
So yes, there are many disadvantages to using Steam, but it's not as bad as most. Also, many of these disadvantages are balanced by quite a number of advantages as well. Steam isn't the perfect DRM, but it does enough things right that I at least have hope that maybe there's at least a chance we might someday see reasonable DRM that actually works for the consumer, rather than against them.
In fact, there are only 3 things I would even want more from Steam: 1) Transferable ownership, 2) A guarantee that ownership continues in the event something happens to the company, 3) install activation/checking only
These days, a decent game in single player may be 5 or 6 hours long, 8 if you are lucky.
Back in the good old days, the average was about 20 hours, and there was an awesome emphasis on storytelling and immersion.
Take SOF for example, good story, a good amount of hours, if a bit repeatable. The last decent game that was long with an awesome story was FEAR.The last game everyone raved over was MW2, which I finished in six hours on hard. Not to mention the Batman game, which was fucking pathetic. The fact that everyone gave it 5 stars is testamount to how low PC Gaming has dropped.
Yes, they have all sorts of mini missions and mission generators, but it just isnt the same as playing an immersive story. Combine this with no dedicated servers and no community mods, and it is just not as appealing a scene as it were even 3 years ago.
As for Steam....it is an awesome service. I only wish they would honror the doctrine of first sale and allow me to sell what I own and paid for....
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
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.
[Offline mode limited to one machine is] pretty significant, and also a restriction Steam doesn't have.
On the other hand, Xbox 360 doesn't limit disc games to one user account nor require periodic Internet activation to play offline. Retail games that use Steam require an offline mode ticket that expires and forbid resale.
there are genres where Internet play doesn't work so well either, such as fighting games.
How so? Why wouldn't that work over the Internet?
Ping times. Nintendo included Internet play in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but it turned out to be next to unplayable if the players aren't on the same ISP.
For a lot of households with children, including my aunt's, money is a factor.
Agreed.
I'm glad not everyone on Slashdot buys into the common assumption that kids don't matter.
Absolutely correct. I have UTIII on both PS3 (was stoked to try out official KB/mouse on a console, yes I know Dreamcast could do it years earlier) and PC (day one purchase, collectors edition). I own every retail UT game made, and I knew instantly that UT III was a turd. At least when UT2003 came out and we hated it they were still in the PC game making business and delivered in spades for UT2004.
Good-bye
When Epic makes any new games worth a damn; maybe then I'll start paying attention to what they think. They may have a popular engine to license, but they haven't put out anything new or interesting as far as I am concerned. I haven't bought any of their newer games since UT3. The best that I can say about Epic, is at least they didn't succumb to the industries overwhelming desire to put out games so far ahead of the average users machines that they loose relevancy to the mainstream gamer. Either way, So what?
L2Empathy people that speak a different language and do not feel like spell checking for internet forums.
Here be signatures
Your not missing much...
UT3 was a bit of a let down in my opinion.
UDK is for basic titles. It has limited modifiability. A full UE3 license comes with the entire source code, you can do whatever you like, as well as support from Epic where support means "You can talk to the people who actually wrote the engine."
Basically the UDK is their way to capitalize on the mod market and indy market. There's a lot of talented modders out there. Some of them may be able to get together a group of people talented enough to make a game, but not from scratch and not one they could sell to a publisher. Well, UDK is for them. They can get a full featured engine for a cheap price that allows for profit redistribution. Also, unlike straight UT3 modding, there is more flexibility to what you can do.
However it's not the full UE3 license. The cost of the full license is not public, since it is individually negotiated with each licensee, but is estimated to be over $700,000.
No. The stupid just won't stop.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
You've been posting the same thing for months
Apart from regulars such as you and CronoCloud, who show up in every console vs. PC gaming debate, I can get different perspectives from the different set of people reading each article's comments. It's redundant in the same way that a large sample in a survey is redundant. Ultimately I'm looking for a defense of one of the following theses:
Which is true and why?
I don't know if I'd go the "Best Buy Special" route, because as a PC repairman I can tell you those low end PCs tend to have seriously shitty parts such as lousy caps, fans, and PSUs. In my experience both buying and building for customers I've found that DIY builds simply last MUCH longer, since the manufacturer of the parts can't hide behind an OEM if they put out a bad part.
I've found the longest lasting builds to be based upon business class motherboards, such as those by Gigabyte or ECS. For example I have sold several of this ECS board as well as using it for the basis of my current gamer rig. It supports all 95w AMD quad Phenom II chips, which a quad can be had for as little as $95, up to 32Gb of DDR2 RAM (and 4 slots which is MUCH cheaper to load up than a 2 slot version) which I loaded up with 8Gb of DDR 2 800, plenty of SATA 2 and USB slots, just a great solid board. And while I picked up mine along with some others in a Tigerdirect bundle, you can buy the new version for just $45 after MIR, and the new one supports DDR 3.
So while you can if you get lucky save a couple of bucks buying the low end "Best Buy Special" I'd say in the long run it simply isn't worth it. By going DIY you'll have a machine that will easily outlast the special by two times or more. I should know as I've had to part out more "Best Buy Specials" than I can even count, whereas the only DIY builds I've sold that I can think of off hand that are dead was one lightning strike and one where the guy refused to shut it off when his AC when out in July and cooked it. Not to mention it also removes a lot of headaches, as those specials tend to develop "weird" errors long before they die, such as data corruption or cutting off by itself. A shitty non popped cap or bad trace can be impossible to see but cause all kinds of hell.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've played Halo over the Internet. I've played Counter-Strike over the Internet. I've played Quake 3 over the Internet. All of these are fast-paced action games, and all of them are perfectly playable.
One difference is knockback. In first-person shooters, taking a bullet produces little knockback. Taking a rocket produces far more knockback, but it's also likely to sap all your HP in one hit. Fighting games are also more likely to incorporate flinching, or a short delay after taking damage when you cannot attack. Knockback and flinch hurt the client's ability to dead-reckon the position in future (unreceived) frames, and the delay between when someone applies knockback or flinch to you and when your screen updates to take the knockback or flinch into account can produce a disconcerting jump-cut, as a position close to the opponent is changed to falling and an attack on the other player is changed from landed to not landed. Knockback and flinch occur more often in a fighting game than in a first-person shooter. So to keep these jump-cuts from dominating a fast-paced fight where both players are doing combos on each other, fighting games just delay the input instead of doing prediction.
Is Smash Bros actually faster than these other games, somehow? Or did Nintendo manage to screw up multiplayer?
If Nintendo screwed it up, Capcom screwed it up the same way. Google finds reports of people noticing lag in Street Fighter IV , another fast-paced fighting game.
The reality is that most PCs aren't attached to TVs in living rooms
With the market shifting to HDTVs with VGA and HDMI inputs and laptops with a DVI output (which contains DVI-D and possibly VGA, and DVI-D is electrically the same as HDMI), why is this still the case?
and games aren't played on them with game controllers.
Why aren't games designed for game controllers ported to PC more often?
Though you certainly CAN do this. I have exactly this setup, I also have several game consoles.
Game consoles which are inaccessible by design to indie developers. For example, if Half-Life were console-only, there would be no Counter-Strike.
A) You can't program a smartphone on a smartphone.
B) The screen is tiny and the speakers suck and they always will no matter what.
I piss off bigots.
Is there ANY reason to think this? Any at all? No device besides a desktop PC does what a desktop PC does.
Hell, even vacuum tubes haven't gone away.
I piss off bigots.