Is PC Gaming Set For a Comeback? 495
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."
PC gaming never went away. (Score:5, Insightful)
Steam proves that the right games sell well on PC.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Comeback"? Did it go somewhere while I was playing all these awesome PC games?
Epic fail (Score:3, Insightful)
Dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I think PC gaming is dead or will be anytime soon.
It's a River (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Market Penetration (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Um... FarmVille? Mafia Wars? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Only if future games will run well on Laptops (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Steam is pretty genius, but not just due to having "the right games". I started to use it recently (due to the Mac client). Every time you want to play a game, you have to start up the client first, and it presents you with a list of discounted games (only today for -50%!).
I'm really not susceptible to ads, but I already bought 3 games I wouldn't have otherwise. When they're at $5-$8, that's below my impulse-buy threshold.
I also own consoles, and the games are much more expensive there -- games that are a year old still sell for $40-$60! I'm seriously considering moving back to PC gaming right now, since the very same game usually costs half of that on PCs.
The Steam platform fixes the biggest issues with PC gaming --- automatic updates and online distribution.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Won't happen for the majority of developers (Score:5, Insightful)
mmorpg (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. Eventhough I know PC game sales are fairly low compared to consoles that first line of the article really bothered me. "the PC a third-class citizen for many gaming genres, especially the kind of high-adrenaline action games", I'd say a lot of high-adrenaline games are for the PC and work better on it because of the usual higher pace (mostly slowed down on consoles due to no mouse in FPS's for example).
Re:The circle of (virtual) life (Score:2, Insightful)
Not a circle, so much as a downward spiral for PC Games... Each revolution lower than the previous. Look at the shelf-space devoted to PC games now in Gamestop or EBGames and compare it to the entire floorspace that was once devoted to them in the age of Babbages and Software Etc. That is a ration that has been in steady decline regardless of the age of the Console generation.
Maybe Digital Delivery is making a dent too. I hope so. I would like to see the EBX line of shops go away. With the availability of drive space and broadband, there should soon be no need for physical media sale for any media (Why I don't own a Blue Ray player)
Steam is the light.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yea except when you buy a console for $400 and then have to buy 3 more controllers so you can play with your friends, plus god knows how many accessories just to be able to use the system the way you intended to, plus an extended warranty to make sure the vendor you bought the system from doesn't completely screw you (Red ring of death anyone?) the costs easily add up to be as much or more than a top end gaming rig.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly applaud Valve for their efforts with Steam. No it might not be perfect, but it's honestly a DRM that I can tolerate and even like, since it adds value. I wish more execs understood that: don't fight piracy by considering consumers as criminals, fight it by providing additional value and ease of use that you just cannot get with pirated games!
Re:The circle of (virtual) life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Market Penetration (Score:1, Insightful)
reference?
World of Warcraft wasn't that demanding when it was released. One of their targets was to have it running on as many PCs (and Macs) as possible. Each expansion has raised a bit the bar on the performance required (by having slightly more detailed graphics). Probably the relatively low spec of the PC needed to run the game in a reasonable way helped a lot in its market penetration.
Some examples that support that it was low spec when launched:
- GPUs with vertex and pixel programs weren't required. They have/had a checkbox to enable skinning on vertex shaders (maybe to better supports crappy intel integrated graphics). All pixel effects were optional (with a global setting to enable pixel shader effects).
- They didn't have shadows until quite late (last expansion I think). The only shadow the characters had was just a fake circle shadow that "did the job".
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
Dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price.
I've noticed that consoles are becoming more-and-more like computers. The hardware is no longer a fixed standard (different models with different capabilities), and you constantly have to worry about having the right OS software else the game might not play. This is why I never did any computer gaming beyond the Atari, Commodore, and Amiga computers - they were fixed hardware and therefore easy to use. IBM PCs and Macs were a pain in the ass to get working.
Fortunately the console makers have followed the KISS principle and kept the upgrades fairly simple but 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." That's the point where I'll probably say "fuck it" and become a 100% classic gamer.
I want to have fun, not work.
No kidding (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Hardware Limits - Make it stop! (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet, the failure of the PSP Go suggest the exact opposite; some people like their physical media.
I suspect the difference here is in how PC and Console players view their purchases. With PC games, a game is understood to be a software purchase, something that has to be installed and configured, typically on only one machine and thereafter tied to that device. There has never been a resale market on PC games and they're not exactly the kind of thing you loan to a friend. The view of a PC game is therefore closer to the view of a MS Office disc.
However with console games the situation is different. Console games have always been understood to be concrete "physical" purchases, not software. You didn't buy a program running Super Mario Bros, and you didn't really buy the "game"; what you bought was the cartridge, the physical product which contained that software. And that cartridge could be used on any NES system in virtually the same way as a tape or CD could be used on any respective player. (Tapes and CDs have since been replaced with mp3s, but I would argue that while they are digital, mp3s still retain a measure of tangibility for most users)
Nowadays, the cartridge has been replaced with a disc but the concept remains. When you buy a console game, you buy a physical product like a DVD which can be used on _any_ compatible system. You didn't (explicitly) buy software. There's a whole culture surrounding this subtle distinction: people take games to their friends houses, or loan them to others; they resell the games they have; people have game librarys with shelves and shelves of titles which can all still be played as long as a compatible device is available. Console game ownership is in this sense far closer to book ownership. And like books, console gamers will prefer to own a tangible hardcopy of a game rather than an e-version.
PC games do not appear to have this same culture. You might keep the discs etc, but your PC game collection is not going to be on a shelf in your living room, ready to be popped into a player. The requirements of re-installation, product codes, compatibility and DRM all mean that a PC title does not have the same level of direct association of product->game that is seen with consoles. Therefore, PC game players will not associate their game DVDs with the game itself as strongly as a console player would.
So for this reason, digital downloads can succeed for PC games while still falling short in the console world. However, if PC games should ever reach the same level of convenience/modularity as console games, this situation may change. So, if Microsoft ever get their act together about Windows gaming, Steam might see significant fall off.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate this line of reasoning. People seem to ignore that you have to buy a console, where most people have a PC sitting around already. So the real argument should be the cost of buying versus upgrading, not buying versus buying.
What is the price of upgrading your standard middle-of-the-road Dell, versus buying a whole new gaming console?
I think this equalizes the price a bit, especially since game requirements have gone somewhat stagnant. If you have a modern processor already all you really need is a video card. And you NEVER need the cutting edge $600 model. I've haven't found a game I couldn't play with my old, tragically outdated, Radeon 4700, that I picked up at Fry's for $70. (The rest of my system is a bit excessive, but that is more due to my hobby than strict necessity)
Another thing is that a computer is a multi-purpose tool, a console isn't. So even if you spend around 10% more on a gaming capable computer, you're going to be using it for more, and using it more often.
This last point isn't addressed at you, but at a poster previous to you who's point was that computers aren't as good at gaming, because someone else in the household may want to use it. An argument easily reversed against consoles, most households only have one decent television (HD, large, etc...), so your gaming must stop when someone wants to watch American Idol. Also, I know of more households with multiple computers, than I know with multiple HD-capable, large screen, televisions.
Not saying one is superior to the other, just pointing out that this argument is fraught with fallacies.
Don't be glum (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Won't happen for the majority of developers (Score:2, Insightful)
Can you go on the internet? Check.
Are you heavily restricted on what software you are allowed to install on it? Check.
Does it come in a nice, neat, attractive case? Check.
Is it next to impossible to upgrade the hardware? Check.
Parent is right; it's not a PC. It's a Mac.
Re:Number of PCs and number of people (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:The publishers only have themselves to blame. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Number of PCs and number of people (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
My guess is their licensees yelled at them (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
What limitation do you believe will bite me from Steam's DRM? I've used it from the earliest days, have bought over 100 games, and have never had an issue. I have had issues with physical CDs getting lost or damaged over the years, or gone looking for a classic game only to realize I tossed it in my last move.
Sure, it's possible Steam may one day just stop working as a whole. That's a pretty small financial risk, however: less likely and cheaper than a major car repair, or needing to replace an appliance. Not high enough on the list of risks to be worth worrying about IMO.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
DRM done right??? There is no such thing.
Sure there is. If the DRM never gets in my way, is copy-protection not user-thwarting, it's done right. Of course, that's my opinion as someone who pays for games.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet, the failure of the PSP Go suggest the exact opposite; some people like their physical media.
No, the PSP Go flopped because it was an utter ripoff. Imagine if Valve had bundled Steam with their own line of gaming PCs, so if you wanted to use the service you needed to buy a new gaming rig, which was locked from playing any non-Steam games, and just to insult you a bit more they charged a ~50% premium over equivalent hardware.
That describes the PSP Go's failings: It cost more than the regular PSP, and you had to re-buy every game you wanted to play on it. Even if you were a new buyer and didn't care about backwards compatibility, you still paid a premium for the PSP Go and you couldn't borrow games from friends. Why would you buy a console that costs more and does less?
The iPhone/iPod Touch, on the other hand, has a enormous game market. The difference is that Apple doesn't punish you for downloading apps.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
There were no commercial computer games before I was born. :) But you avoided my point - what's wrong with DRM if it doesn't prevent anything but copying?
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:4, Insightful)
No it's not. The DRM does not work (i.e. it is possible to pirate the games), yet you can lose all your games if you ever get banned from Steam for whatever reason.
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:3, Insightful)
But everything is wrapped in DRM these days, and wishing that it wasn't so is not going to change the world. Sure, we could start boycotting and lobbying and whatever else... But the fact of the matter is that DRM is a part of the game industry these days.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. If being wrong was a felony offense, you'd be sentenced to thirty consecutive life sentences for how wrong you are. Not everything uses DRM - I don't buy any games with DRM and yet I still find plenty of great (and popular) games to play. DRM is only used by the asshole companies that normally (but not always) make crappy games. The fact that you think that people should just stop caring about their rights to the property they purchase and just take it up the ass is exactly what's wrong with people these days.
People get on Slashdot, and I wouldn't be surprised if you yourself do this, and cry about the "evil companies" and how they screw people over, yet you gladly line up to take it in the ass from companies using DRM to give you an inferior gaming experience at a higher cost just because you might have to actually have some principles and say "No, I'm not buying Bioshock because it has DRM" and "give up" (like you're actually losing anything) playing that game. Playing the latest "Cool New Game 3" is not a need and you are in no way harmed by not playing it because you refuse to support unjust practices by companies.
If for some reason you feel that you have to play Cool New Game 3, despite it's DRM, then buy it used for a console. That way you still get the game, but the asshole company that put the DRM in there won't get a cent.
Re:Number of PCs and number of people (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score:2, Insightful)