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The Consoles Are Dying, Says Developer

Posted by Soulskill on from the they-hide-it-well dept.

hypnosec writes "While you might have often heard that PC gaming is dying — detractors have been claiming this for over a decade — one developer has a different take: that consoles are the ones on the way out. In a 26-minute presentation at GDC — available now as a slideshow with a voice-over — Ben Cousins, who heads mobile/tablet game maker ngmoco, uses statistics of electronic and gaming purchases, along with market shares of developers and publishers from just a few years ago, to come to some surprising conclusions. The old guard, including the three big console manufacturers — Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft — are losing out when compared with the new generation of gaming platform developers: Facebook, Apple and Google. With the new companies, the size of the audience is vastly increased because of their focus on tablets, mobile and browser-based gaming."

5 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. hardware limits by From+A+Far+Away+Land · · Score: 2, Informative

    Makes sense to me. I see many more people playing Facebook games than they play with their Wii. XBox players are about as frequently seen as Facebook gamers, in my experience.

    The technology is where consoles have often been ahead of PCs, but with tablet computers becoming almost as slick as Star Trek Pads, it's harder to imagine a console being able to process a lot more than a PC or be as portable as an iPad or Android phone.

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    Oh You POS
    1. Re:hardware limits by headLITE · · Score: 1, Informative

      Consoles have never been ahead of PCs in technology. They're nothing but gaming appliances with enough performance to run games decently. How are they technologically ahead of PCs??

      The current generation of consoles is six years old. Still, PCs are only just reaching them in terms of e.g. parallelization (what consumer PC had a six core CPU in 2006 when the PS3 came out?) or the insane bandwidth between CPU and GPU (Xbox 360: 10.8 GB/s each direction, PCIe 3.0 x16: 16 GB/s, but that only became available in the last two years).

    2. Re:hardware limits by Krneki · · Score: 3, Informative

      that's because non of this matter, so the buyer didn't give a crap about multi core CPU or CPU-GPU bandwidth. Why buy 6 core CPU when even today half of the game still don't use more then 2 or why use PCIEx 3.0 when even the fastest card don't saturate the PCIe 2.0? No, the truth is the consoles are nothing more then old PC, sure they have some minimal technical differences, but if they would make a game run faster, you can bet the PC would have it too. PC are the state of the art when it comes to hardware and software development, consoles are lagging behind even when just released, let alone after a couple of years.

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      Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
  2. Re:Ridiculous headline by headLITE · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the slide show he's, however, showing absolute figures that are shrinking.

    He does also argue the shrinking relative market share point because that's, frankly, what you're interested in as a game developer: Where can you make the most money with games? When you can make 10% more year-over-year in one market but 200% more in another then you'll go for the 200% growth market.

  3. Re:What does netcraft have to say about this? by headLITE · · Score: 3, Informative

    In that case... there's a Minecraft Pocket Edition that runs on Android and iOS phones. :)