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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
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.
Hearing Epic complain about the PC market is like listening to a farmer that planted no seeds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I'm not sure on how old the hardware you want supported is, but you can easily the run the latest game releases on hardware that is three generations old at medium-high settings. The latest releases do require high-end computers to run with everything maxed out at higher than 1080P resolutions spanning multiple monitors and enabling 3D, but the current state of the console market has kept system requirements low. Both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have graphics cards that are four generations old when compared to PC hardware and people are still drooling over the new games that are coming out for them. The trick is that the console are only running at a 720P and in many cases lower resolutions and being up-scaled. If you run games with those settings on a computer you'd be very surprised at the hardware that work.
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.
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."
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.
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.