Will Consoles Merge Back Into PCs? 356
GamePolitics is running an interview with Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, discussing the future of gaming on the PC and the console. Stude has some interesting thoughts regarding the long-term viability of stand-alone consoles:
"The guts of every console should tell you that the capability is there for the PC to act as the central point for all the consoles. If you bought a PC and as part of that equation you said, Okay, when you're on the phone with Dell, 'Hey, Dell, on this PC, this new notebook I'm buying, can you make sure it has the PlayStation 4 option built into it?' Well, why not? Why shouldn't that be the case? [Sony is] certainly not making any money on the hardware. I mean, can't they create a stable enough environment to specify that if Dell's going to sell that notebook and say that it's PlayStation 4 [compatible] that it must have certain ingredients and it must meet certain criteria? Absolutely they could [do] that. Are they going to do it? I don't know. I predict that they will. I predict that all of the console makers over time will recognize that it's too expensive to develop the proprietary solution and recognize the value of collapsing back on the PC as a ubiquitous platform."
No.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Never gonna happen.... I simply can't see that ever happening. It would at least partially mean that companies like Sony or Nintendo need to build components and allow interoperability with what is essentially an open platform. It means releasing control, they won't do that.
Besides, consoles are mostly played at the TV and installed in a fixed way like a DVD Player. It is simply convenient. Connecting a laptop to your TV? Cumbersome!
I personally think that PC gaming is on the way out except for a few niches. My brother bought GTA4, and we simply can't get to run it on his 2 year old PC. He now faces the choice: pay about 1500€ for a new rig in order to play GTA4 at acceptable rates. Or spend +/-450€ on a PS3 and buy the game again....
I recommended him to get the PS3.... Throw in a USB mouse and a USB keyboard and he can play like he is used to.
Re:No.... (Score:4, Informative)
GTA4 is known to have a terrible PC port. Most recent games would run just fine on a couple-of-year-old pc.
A surprising number of games even run on my parents' TIME (who've now gone bust) pc from 2003, and that has integrated graphics (admittedly it's an integrated geforce 4, not a via or sis crap).
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Why does it have to be a PC port?
Look, I'll admit, I didn't RTFA (hey this is /.!) But why COULDN'T Microsoft create a VIRTUAL X-Box as either an application, or as part of a "Games for Windows" add-on in Win 7? (Maybe call it the V-Box?) Then all you need is a Reasonably new PC, and an adapter for your old X-Box controller. Just slap in your game and away you go!
I mean, MS already has a Virtualization division, why not just put them to the task of making a dedicated virtual machine that exactly emulat
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Because the xbox 360 is a 3-core power-pc cpu - based system, you couldn't virtualize it on a desktop, you'd have to emulate it. And to emulate, you need a machine at least 4 times as powerful (for a mature dynamic recompiling emulator) as the original machine.
PCs that fast just don't exist yet.
The original XBOX could be done easily, as it used a Pentium 3 cpu, instead of something more exotic. There was even an experimental xbox -> pc recompiler at one point, but IIRC it only worked for one game.
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My understanding is that the Power PC chips are actually SLOWER than x86-64 processor, but run much cooler, so MS went with them.
And are you telling me that a Quad-core x86-64 machine couldn't emulate a TRI core power PC system? I find that hard to believe, even with the difference in instruction-sets. Let's keep in mind, Virtual machines are ALL emulation already. They are emulating a specific type of hardware that your system may or may not already have. The only limitation is core amounts. You can't
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My understanding is that the Power PC chips are actually SLOWER than x86-64 processor, but run much cooler, so MS went with them.
I don't know the details, I just dev for the thing.
And are you telling me that a Quad-core x86-64 machine couldn't emulate a TRI core power PC system? I find that hard to believe, even with the difference in instruction-sets.
Yep, that's what I'm telling you. Even better, you can't magically parallelize code, so having more than 3 cores wouldn't help much. So instead of getting the 4x performance you need for emulation by having a 12-core 3.2GHz cpu, you'd need a 3-core machine running at 12.8GHz.
And even that might not be enough, as the theoretical performance of the 3-core Xenon cpu of the xbox is actually twice that of the fastest quad-core desktop cpu.
You're not going to emu
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Let that be a lesson to your brother to stop preordering things!
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Re:No.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have one thing to add to this.
MMO's are preferably played on PC's.
The multitude of abilities are more easily accessed via keyboard and mouse, and there is a guarantee of enough space for patches/expansions/what have you.
For every other genre though, i agree a console is better.
Re:No.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Plus, of course, some first person shooters, roleplaying games, and real time strategy games allow fan-generated content, and it's sure as hell easier to mix and match new features and new levels with a keyboard, mouse, and multi-window editor and file explorer at your disposal than a game pad.
A console is less work to set up and has less hassle for operating system maintenance, firewalls, and anti-virus. It's also cheap. And when a generation of consoles is relatively new, they also have
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There are two console MMORPG's, Everquest Online Adventures: supports keyboard and can be fully played with just a keyboard, stores patches on memory card and Final Fantasy XI: supports keyboard and mouse, uses (and requires) the PS2 hard drive for patches/expansions.
EQOA came out in 2003, FFXI in 2004, where have you be
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That would do a lot for it, but just think about the environment though: a gamepad for a console is great to just kick back on the couch with just as you'd watch TV. You hold the hold controller in your hand.
Now imagine a keyboard/mouse. While I certainly hold my keyboard in my lap sometimes, I pretty much need to be at a desk to use a mouse. And couch+desk doesn't work well. Office chair (a comfortable one) + desk does.
Also, given the amount of text in most MMORPG's, they'd either have to scale it up
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Keyboard and mouse support on consoles would be great, especially if a large number of games supported them... Unlike various addon controllers like the steering wheels you can get, which only work with a small handful of games.
Having a console-like device that connects to the TV, has a keyboard and boots games directly by inserting the media is far from a new idea... The Amiga did that, and damn well too.
Console companies are missing a trick here, my parents bought me an Amiga because it could play games a
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Did anyone ever try to connect your regular USB keyboard and mouse to a PS3? Most Unreal engine games will recognize them out-of-the-box, for example. See, even Age of Empires for PS2 had keyboard and mouse support.
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What the hell are you talking about? There's only a handful of games on consoles that support both mouse and keyboard. Giving a few examples doesn't suddenly mean a multitude of games already have the support.
There's reasons why the support isn't there. Biggest being the advantage in online play. Second biggest being that they aren't standard input devices with the consoles. It's just a waste of money to implement support for those devices in your games if only a handful of people have said input devices.
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Half-Life, Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament, Red Faction, all PS2 games with mouse and keyboard support. There are other games that support one or the other, you never really know unless you try. Did you know that Gran Turismo 4 has keyboard support for menu control? Found that out by accident.
Any PS3 game that uses the standard PS3 text entry API supports keyboards even if you can't use it to control the game. Oblivion is a good example of this, you can use a keyboard to name the spells and items that you en
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And yet you've only named a handful of titles for the last gen console, which while is still selling nearly as much as the PS3, is largely irrelevant on a topic about what is perceived current generation.
And no one in their right mind would consider limited support fully functioning support, which is what is implied throughout this topic.
As far as most people having mouse and keyboard, who knows how many are USB or not. Furthermore, we don't know how many PC's a person has in their home, and to what extent
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I named PS2 games because I don't have many PS3 games to test!
USB keyboards and mice are cheap, it's not a major obstacle.
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It's an advantage yes, but hardly an unfair one.. Everyone else is free to use a keyboard and mouse if they so desire. You can buy joypads with rapid fire and macro support too, are these devices also unfair?
You don't force people to use them, you just provide the option for those who want it. Other people can simply ignore the option and use the existing pads.
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When slashdotters said stuff like that I used to do this:
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Imagine sitting on a couch, with the keyboard on your lap, and an optical mouse sitting beside your right thigh on the couch.
It's been done, not a big deal.
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Yep it does put a little more strain on the wrist. I found that raising the mouse a bit, by using a large book/object, say a copy of the 1st edition AD&D dungeon master's guide, helped. Lap pads/desk pads work too. Or some of those little tables with the base that slides under the chair designed for less mobile folks.
http://www.walgreens.com/search/search_results.jsp?term=table&wsection=P [walgreens.com]
I must admit that I normally had the PS2/have the PS3 sitting on a computer desk (because I have Linux installe
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Why would the keyboard and mouse require a different server? Do you really think there are no people playing PC games with different controllers? Game pads, joysticks, custom gaming keyboards, foot pedals, gaming mice with multiple programmable buttons and more can be hooked up to a PC and the PC gamers don't generally bitch about the difference.
Re:No.... (Score:5, Informative)
Keyboard + mouse is a lot more accurate in an FPS than a game pad. It's as if a top athlete were to participate in the Paralympics: not fair.
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The biggest drive that ships with a PS3 is a 160 GB but you can replace it with any 2.5" SATA drive you want.
And what card are you using to drive that 2560x1600 monitor while still getting decent framerates in, say, Crysis?
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Yeah, the resolutions there, especially considering console developers are very very good at making efficient use of the screen space they have (chat windows in EQOA and FFXI shrink and grow as needed) and tend to not keep UI on the screen when it's not being used.
1080p is 1920×1080, 720p is 1280x720. The TV I have my PS3 connected to is a 1080i/720p model with a native resolution of 1440x900 so GameOS runs in 1080i, I run Linux on my PS3 in WXGA VESA mode which is 1280x768.
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Really? [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, really. I said "mouse and keyboard", not just a non-standard mouse designed to work for only a few games.
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Really? [wikipedia.org]
The XBox 360 has mouse and keyboard out of the box. Check it out [gizmodo.com]. And I know that's a peripheral/hack, but hey, it works. At any rate you can be surprised. :) Or at least entertained or intrigued if you like. Whatever works.
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I'd be surprised if a console game had mouse and keyboard support.
Animal Crossing: City Folk for Wii uses the rawther mouse-like pointing feature of the Wii Remote, and it lets players chat with a USB keyboard.
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You would probably be fooling yourself to think it's common practice. One of the biggest reasons to not have it implemented is for the online play in FPS's. People who would use the mouse and keyboard support would find themselves doing leagues better than the people using the controller.
It can obviously be done, it just won't be standard practice any time soon. Once consoles start coming with mouse and keyboard as a standard input device, then we'll probably see it happen a lot more often.
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There's no proprietary USB format on the X360 -- it's just standard ol' USB 2.0. In fact, I've used my keyboard on the Xbox a few times, especially when typing passwords.
Keyboard/mouse suck on console! (Score:2, Insightful)
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People used to play on Amigas and C64s connected to their TV all the time...
PC gaming is an unnecessary hassle, too many variables to contend with, poor longevity of the hardware (before it becomes obsolete for running new games, not before it fails), hassle configuring and maintaining the os and associated software including fighting against drm schemes, too many different incompatible types of hardware and their drivers, background processes hampering game performance etc.
If you have a machine solely for
Indie games don't run on console! (Score:2)
If you have a machine solely for gaming, then it may as well be a machine thats guaranteed to play all games released for it,
So how does a new company without a prior published title for Windows release games for it? The market failure as of 1985 to the present is that virtually all machines designed solely for gaming happen to use cryptographic techniques to make sure that only established companies can publish games on the system.
Where you position the console is up to you, as is what type of games you play on it.
If a hobbyist can't break out gcc and make his own game for a console, is the latter really up to me?
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Players per machine (Score:3, Insightful)
And where exactly would a person use a keyboard and mouse in their living room?
And where exactly would people use four keyboards and mice around one monitor? There are a lot of families that can afford one console and one HDTV, and one PC (with integrated graphics) and monitor for Firefox and OpenOffice.org, but not four PCs, four monitors, and four copies of each game.
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Try using a good sized hardback book. or one of those "lap pads/lap desks" with the cushion on the bottom and flat surface on top.
http://www.nextag.com/desk-lap-writing/search-html [nextag.com]
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Multiplayer among gamers in one household (Score:3, Insightful)
1500[credits]? I'll advise you to do some more research, as I've done recently for a potential new gaming PC. You can upgrade your entire system to a decent new rig for under 600[credits].
How many players can play at once on a 600[credit] system? Where I live, I can buy an LCD TV + Wii + three controllers for 1000[credits], compared to 2400[credits] for four gaming PCs.
Also, PC games are generally cheaper.
Not if you need four copies for four players, the way most major-label PC games are set up. I can buy a WiiWare game for about 10[credits], and I can play it with neighbors/cousins that I happen to be babysitting.
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Besides, unlike Sony or Microsoft, Nintendo is selling their Wiis at a profit - and they're still in short supply, not having dropped their price by even one penny since they were first introduced, unlike the other two.
Thursday,Decem [slashdot.org]
How is PC to TV cumbersome? (Score:2)
Connecting a laptop to your TV? Cumbersome!
With a console, I need to plug one end of a cable into the multi-out port and the other end into my Vizio HDTV. With a PC, all I need to do is plug one end of a VGA+audio cable into the VGA and headphone jacks of the PC and the other end into the same TV. So what makes connecting your PC to your HDTV is no more cumbersome than connecting a console? Or are you assuming SDTV?
NO dotdotdotdot! (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhhh in October I built a PC that can run GTA4 smoothly for about 550.00 USD. I could have easily brought the price down and still run the game "at acceptable rates". I dunno where you pulled that exorbant price figure from, but you can see the recommended system specs here - http:/ [wired.com]
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pay about 1500€ for a new rig in order to play GTA4 at acceptable rates.
Slash that 1500€ in half and we can start talking. 1500 is way excessive for a recent dual-core CPU and mobo, 2 gigs of RAM, an ATI Radeon 4850, a harddrive and a case...
I know I paid less than 600€ for an Intel Quad Core, a Gigabyte mainboard, 2 gigs of RAM, said ATI Radeon 4850 and a new PSU a few months ago. Sure, I had the hard drives, DVD drive, case, keyboard and mouse from my old box already, but those aren't expensive either.
np: Boy Robot - Loving You Makes Me Nervous (Glamorizing Corporat
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Except that for the PS3, there will still be games made for it in 5 years. A 5 year old PC? Upgrading? I don't think so. So, yes, I could upgrade the graphics card for 100€ and not be sure that it works correctly. That's the main problem: I have no idea if "just buying a GeForce 9800" will do. Nobody can guarantee me that.
My brother buys his
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You keep assuming the problem is with the format, not the porting of the game. The game is ported horribly. It's an unoptimized POS. There are plenty of games which do more and look better that can run on older hardware. The platform is not at fault here. The developers are at fault for not doing a proper job.
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I was thinking along the lines of X2 6000+ / 8GB / 4870. Which is do-able for under £500.
I certainly wouldn't buy nVidia hardware at the moment due to all the noise about high fail rates.
PS3 also wouldn't be my 1st choice of console. There's only 2 platform exclusive games that look to be worth playing on it, compared to about 12 on the 360 and over 25 on the Wii.
In fact you could get a 360 AND a Wii for the price of a PS3... I'd even recomend that combination over a PC if you were just looking
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Yes, me too, considering that the PS2 port of the original Half-Life DOES have such support. It's just a lazy port by lazy devs.
I don't think it would happen... (Score:3, Insightful)
I honestly could see the reverse happening though. Hell, it already is happening to a degree with the PS3 (although most people never use it as a PC and that certainly isn't a major factor in PS3 sales). The only major player I could see not doing it (at least for a while) would be Nintendo, since they are traditionally (not counting the networking features of the Famicom) conservative about adding non-gaming related features to their machines.
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Nintendo also have the least reason not to merge them...
Sony manufacture PCs, making the PS3 a fully functional computer would harm sales...
MS make software for PCs, so a fully blown xbox computer would also harm their sales.
A fully functional browser, email client and simple writing/drawing apps on a console would result in a lot of people not needing a separate computer.
Sony could do this tomorrow, they already offer linux compatibility on the PS3, all they need is to provide a simplified distro such as t
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Does Sony make desktop computers? I'm just asking, I've never seen any.
Yes: http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/RM6/ [sony.co.jp]
Pretty unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
Ironically, though, the biggest weakness of consoles (that they are "closed boxes") is also their greatest strength and, I believe the reason why this article is wide of the mark.
After all, with a console, you buy a game, you go home, you stick it in the drive and you play the game. Even with Sony's best efforts to thwart that on the PS3 by demanding firmware updates every 10 minutes, the system hasn't changed much. By contrast, two of the last 4 PC games I bought (Spore and Far Cry 2) have required me to faff around with drivers before they would run. Now, sure, I'm a reasonably advanced user by the standards of the general public (though a veritable neophyte in slashdot terms), but this is awkward and irritating.
There's also the price issue. A console will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you then don't need to replace it for 4-5 years. A gaming PC will set you back at least twice as much (and frequently more) and will generally be obsolete within two and a half years, unless you're willing to sink a lot of money into interim upgrades.
Now, even if you get around the ease-of-use issue by basically putting a console inside the PC (anybody remember the old Mega-PC, which had a Megadrive/Genesis inside a PC case?) you are still going to be in a situation where the thing is locked into a piece of hardware with a far faster obsolescence cycle.
This is before you even start to get into ergonomic issues, such as the fact that the general usage pattern is that people use PCs with a monitor at a desk, but play console games on their TV while sat on the sofa.
The greatest strength of consoles (Score:2, Insightful)
now we know who funds malware (Score:2, Insightful)
So its the console makers funding the malware bot networks to make PCs so crap :) ahhhhhhhhhhhh
Closed system suck tho. And making a PC with cheapest parts + $99 video card can be done cheaper than a ps3, especially outside USA, and thats the key here, OUTSIDE usa, where its a known fact that those corps like to sell in USA low, and over charge outside to make americans feel special.
I can think of a few reasons why it wont happen (Score:4, Insightful)
1) The games industry is already shifting away from the PC to closed platforms like consoles because they claim they make more profit due to not having the piracy issues they get on the PC. To them, this would be seen as a step backwards.
2) If one company manages to screw up the latest console plugin does the company want to be associated with that- Microsoft owned up to the original RROD problems and put money aside to deal with it, they've resolved the issues but to this day get slated for the problem. Would they really want to put themselves in a position where the latest Dell notebook has poor venting around Dell's hardware design is making their component fail and they get the blame for it? It's one thing if it's their fault, but if it's a 3rd party's fault and they risk the blame?
3) Do they really want to spend money offering support to the various hardware developers that want to implement their addons? Do they want to deal with compatibility issues? Do they want to spend and money time keeping their systems secure whilst keeping them open enough to integrate?
Consoles as the secure PC platform (Score:5, Insightful)
PC's are too "open" for the comfort of many industries. By moving focus to more restrictive consoles, companies regain their control. Once they have control, the ability to push ads you can't block, monitor what you're doing for marketing, and limit what you are allowed to do or not do with media, consoles will eventually come full-circle so that users will eventually be using them for the same things PC users have been, only in safe, friendly, controlled environment.
Suckers.
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PC's are too "open" for the comfort of many industries. By moving focus to more restrictive consoles, companies regain their control. Once they have control, the ability to push ads you can't block, monitor what you're doing for marketing, and limit what you are allowed to do or not do with media, consoles will eventually come full-circle so that users will eventually be using them for the same things PC users have been, only in safe, friendly, controlled environment.
Suckers.
that's what mod chips are for.
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biggest problem is that if all the hardware out there is in the form of consoles then there is nothing but consoles for all of those enterprising individuals who love to tinker with software and hardware(read pirates). you would quickly see people jail breaking, as it were, their consoles with additional hardware or software upgrades to use the systems as the end user wants, not how Sony/MS/Nintendo wants.
The hardware is in the hands of the enemy and you'll have a hard time preventing anyone from cracking o
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It's not the "security" aspect of consoles which makes them attractive...
Piracy occurs on consoles anyway, just look at the mod scene or go visit thepiratebay and see how many consoles games are available to download.
The advantage of a console is that the hardware is static... Games developers are not saddled with compatibility middleware, they can bypass it and take full advantage of the hardware, and end users have the convenience of knowing that any game they buy for their console will work out of the bo
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biggest problem is that if all the hardware out there is in the form of consoles then there is nothing but consoles for all of those enterprising individuals who love to tinker with software and hardware(read pirates). you would quickly see people jail breaking, as it were, their consoles with additional hardware or software upgrades to use the systems as the end user wants, not how Sony/MS/Nintendo wants.
of course, only the evil pirates ever want to tinker with stuff. No one ever likes to tinker with stuff unless they want to break the law obviously
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So people who upgrade their video cards are pirates now?
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PC's are too "open" for the comfort of many industries. By moving focus to more restrictive consoles, companies regain their control. Once they have control, the ability to push ads you can't block, monitor what you're doing for marketing, and limit what you are allowed to do or not do with media, consoles will eventually come full-circle so that users will eventually be using them for the same things PC users have been, only in safe, friendly, controlled environment.
Suckers.
We're witnessing that same dynamic with cell phones. The whole "walled garden" phenomenon is going to have to be dealt with by government trust-busting because there's no way the consumers would ever have enough power to force it on their own.
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What is more likely is that consoles will become general purpose computers. I can surf the web on my Wii now, check email, etc. They even have people porting Linux to them for free now, so creating a "game" or mode that is a simple OS would be pretty trivial.
In the year 2000... (Score:2, Interesting)
First of all, there will always be gaming on desktops/laptops. People who say that PC gaming will collapse and end are absolutely wrong. For as long as there have been computers, one of the many uses people have put them to is gaming. As long as there are computers, there will be games for them.
As for the console market collapsing back to PCs, I don't know. Anything is possible. And it's impossible to tell the future. But he makes a very good point.
The projected longevity of the PS3 is what, 10 years? That'
Consoles are already becoming PC's. (Score:2)
The other way around (Score:4, Interesting)
The far more likely situation I would think is that you'd have a DRM locked console with a virtualized PC running on top where you could run anything you want. You'd have a simple "game mode/PC mode" switch to not mess with what they already have. It wouldn't do much for gaming, but it'd run pretty much all the basic utilities of a home PC without needing a separate box.
I think it could be a valuable supplement to those that only have a laptop, which is quite many these days. Sure it might sound a little odd writing a letter on your huge livingroom TV but I'd rather go with a 40"+ TV and a full-sized wireless keyboard than the laptop. Obviously if you have a proper desktop that's better, but many don't.
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The default desktop environment on YDL, E17, is slow for some reason. Even Gnome or KDE is faster, let alone XFCE or fluxbox.
This goes back and forth (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going to be like the whole debate with thin client and fat client, centralized vs. decentralized computing, etc. It's always going to go back and forth.
Back in the PSX and PS2 era, it became stupid to try to keep up with PC gaming. A really good video card would cost as much as a proper console and the console would remain playable far longer whereas the computer would become outdated far more quickly. Game on consoles, work on computers, no-brainer.
With this generation, the consoles are getting too damn expensive. By the time you factor in accessories, you easily spend as much on them as PC's now. It's actually getting back to the point where if you already need a PC, it's just cheaper to spend extra to turn it into a gaming machine rather than gettin a work PC and a gaming rig.
Xbox 360 - was around $299
Extra controller - $50
Charging kit for a controller - $30
wireless adapter - $75
if you decide the 20gb drive is too small, you want the 120 - $200
memory card to serve as a backup to the hard drive - $50
headphones so you don't wake up the read of the house at night - $75
$779. And if you decided to upgrade the TV from the ol' CRT to a proper HDTV to look nice with the console, $1000 and up.
Re:This goes back and forth (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post almost makes a good point about spending money on a gaming PC instead of a console except the total is not $1000 and up. It's simply the price of the console. $300-$400. Current generation video cards alone will meet or double that cost. Really, it was a stretch to try to include all of those accessories as a TCO for a gaming console when really it is just the cost of the console for the average gamer.
As stated many times before the main strong point of consoles (used to be at least) that they just worked. Buy game, put game in console, play game. No drivers, no wacky DRM raping your dataz and privacy, no "oh wow I really need to upgrade my videocard!" moments. There will always be a place for PC gaming but to think it will extinguish the market for consoles is foolhardy.
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But consider...
Extra controller - only if you want 2 people to play on one console at the same time, is this even commonly done on a PC? I've never seen that so it's an unfair comparison.
Wireless - assuming you want to use the networking capabilities wirelessly, many people are perfectly happy with cables, my xbox is under the tv and the phoneline terminates next to the antenna socket for the tv, so the dsl router was already there.
Bigger drive - or you could save money by buying the machine with the bigger
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Extra controller - $50
Standard 120GB laptop SATA drive - call it $80, can be much less
Headphones - okay, $75.
External adapter so you can use that 80GB drive to back up the 120GB one - $15
Call it $620, though you might get as low as $600 or so. Or you could throw in a 320GB SATA drive. Plus, the PS3's a Blu-ray player. The up-front cost's more, sure, but the PS3 actually includes most of the 'accessories' you'd want.
Still, I agree that's a tough sell in this economy, either way. PCs can
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There will always be both. (Score:5, Insightful)
The PC is optimized for one person to use at a distance of maybe 0.5 m. It sits on a desk. It is a lousy multi-player device.
The console is optimized for multiple people to use at a distance of 2 m. It sits in the living room. It is an excellent multi-player device, and, even if equipped with a keyboard and mouse, a highly inconvenient personal computer.
This is in addition to the cost reasons already cited.
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The PC is optimized for one person to use at a distance of maybe 0.5 m. It sits on a desk. It is a lousy multi-player device.
The console is optimized for multiple people to use at a distance of 2 m. It sits in the living room. It is an excellent multi-player device, and, even if equipped with a keyboard and mouse, a highly inconvenient personal computer.
This is in addition to the cost reasons already cited.
Nah, I think with cheap 16-32 GB flash cards that even a PS2 would make a perfectly fine universal com
Forget the 'open platform' and 'use a TV' bollocks (Score:2)
On a PC, however, you have to code for as many hardware devices as possible. Instead of optimising, you're generalising. For a PC to also act as a cons
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More importantly:
Same Hardware and Same O/S. I seriously doubt the Xbox division of Microsoft wants to deal with the situation where someone's Xbox-PC won't work because they got 3 zero-day drive-by worms from Internet Explorer and a virus from opening an infected word file someone sent them from work.
Consoles are nice because they just work all the time. PCs are nice (for gaming) because you can tinker with them to get best performance out of them. Those two values sets are mutually exclusive in the sam
Been done before (Score:3, Informative)
Amstad MegaPC [wikipedia.org] and the Sega TeraDrive [wikipedia.org], both obviously failed.
Those machines were basically just a PC and a Megadrive (or Genesis as you USians knew them) in the same box. I seriously doubt you could get away with integrating a console into a PC as an expansion card because then you'd need to start testing games on umpteen different mobo combinations to be sure of compatibility, negating one of the major benefits of using a console in the first place.
Also, I don't see how it would stop MS or Sony loosing money on hardware at the start of a generation (I believe 360 hardware now turns a profit?). A company like Dell isn't going to shoulder a loss for Sony as they're not going to see any licensing revenue from games. Consumers would see an integrated box that is more expensive than two separate boxes and vote with their wallets.
Good idea, then we can stop using x86! (Score:2)
As long as all the mainstream consoles right now are using PowerPC cores, they're about as close to PCs as goat cheese is to cows milk.
I'm all for PCs starting to use PowerPC though, if it means running console games on them. I doubt anyone would be too disappointed if they got a PC with a Cell or two in it.
When will PCs merge back to Consoles? (Score:2)
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And the Magnavox odyssey came out in 1972, before the first generation of home computers (The PET, Apple II, and TRS-80) No, the Altair doesn't count.
Merge with HTPC not with general purpose PC (Score:2, Interesting)
those who do not learn from history... (Score:3, Insightful)
PCs are PCs and consoles are consoles. If hybridization didn't succeed for the Odyssey^2, Commodore 64GS, Coleco ADAM, Atari XEGS, Amiga CDTV, CDi, Sega TeraDrive, Amstrad Mega PC, FM TOWNS Marty, and 3DO -- why would it succeed now?
There was never any reason for consoles to exist.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see wasting my money on a console when for $100 more I can get a PC that will do all the same things plus a LOT more!
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That's one thing that always gets me with games. PC games can come out between £25 and £35 (possibly up to £40 if it's FIFA or something similar), where as console games tend to start at £40 in the shops! Yes, a console is cheaper first off, but then you're slapped with the extra later on so that they can make their money back.
It's not even as if the quality of consoles has been great - it's only the latest generation that actually begins to approach pC quality graphics/resolution! I
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It's not just market share. They make money on every game. You have to pay royalties to publish games for the 360 or the PS3.
Chicken-and-egg problem for new developers (Score:2)
Except the draw of consoles is A) graphics on big-ass televisions
Every TV over $300 can take VGA or DVI video output from a PC.
and B) no hardware upgrade costs.
Not providing a version for older PCs is almost entirely the fault of publishers. If there are both PS2 and PS3 versions of a particular title, why can't there be XP and Vista[1] versions of a particular title? And why do things like World of Warcraft still run reasonably well on an older PC?
Why go back to PCs?
Because all the console makers appear to require a prior published title on another platform and use cryptographic methods to enforce this requirement. The
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Agreed. Publishers are entirely at fault here.
Blizz is the perfect example of a company that does PC gaming right. (Setting aside dick legal moves)
They manage to maintain windows and mac ports for all of their games. Their games scale well with old hardware.
WoW ran on my 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 64MB Geforce4 Go Dell laptop. Sure, the graphics couldn't be turned up too high, but the resolution was nice with a decent framerate.
WoW runs on my crappy, black-friday-special $300 compaq laptop, with Intel integrated g
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But probably not as well as a PS3 (which is capable of running OpenOffice via Linux) or Xbox 360 could.
By the way, per your sig, on some systems (like the YDL I have installed on my PS3) netcat is "nc"
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I read that as "We don't like your kind in these pants."
Yeah, just starting to have my coffee.
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Previously you had all sorts of different arcade systems, first they were game specific hardware, then you had "systems" per manufacturer (Sega System 16 etc.), and today everyone just builts their arcade games around standard PC hardware, some are even running Windows.
And arcades are dying a prolonged, painful death. (Netcraft confirms it.)
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The big problem with consoles is portability.
What's more portable than a DS Lite? You can't stuff a PC in your pocket either, and netbooks can't keep up with PC game graphics unless the game is designed to run on desktop PCs made four years ago, like WoW or something.