Digital Distribution Numbers Speak To Health of PC Game Industry 192
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the i-demand-a-recount dept.
from the i-demand-a-recount dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority:
"Over the years many voices have declared PC gaming dead. We have seen developers abandon the platform for consoles, citing piracy as the cause. Game stores have slowly relegated PC games from prime shelf position to one tucked away in the back corner — even Microsoft dumped AAA PC game developers from the company. It seems, though, that the demise of the PC as a games platform has been exaggerated, because until very recently sales data ignored digital distribution, with the latest data released by US company NPD revealing that 48% of PC unit sales in the US in 2009 were digital. That translates to 21.3 million games downloaded in the US. Interestingly, although 48% of games were sold online, it only worked out as 36% of the revenue. This highlights the fact that it isn't just convenience that has PC gamers shopping online; it is also that games are generally cheaper than in stores."
pc games from the 1990s (Score:2, Interesting)
Old games can still be played on today's pc's (starcraft comes to mind). If you bought an older game for the previous generations of gaming consoles, it will not probably play on the latest generation of consoles.
I still buy pc games that I don't have time to play today in the expectation that I will be able to play them in the future when I have more time. That said, I am buying almost exclusively stand-alone games that don't need to connect to a server with thousands of other players.
BenJCarter (Score:0, Interesting)
the PC will never really die as a games platform (Score:3, Interesting)
There was another story on Slashdot recently about centralizing graphics processing into a single graphics server per household, with the output from that server being displayed on client devices. Once you reach that point, consoles and PCs, monitors and TVs, all become the same devices.
Making Older Titles Available Again (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't necessarily agree with the comment about digital distribution always being cheaper than stores - for example, because I don't usually hurry to buy new games, I picked up Fallout 3 about 6 months after release for £12.50 new (=$18.00) & then the Game Of The Year Edition (with all 5 DLCs) for £19.99 new (=$30.00). That was from my local Game game store here in the UK, a national chain, and they constantly have similar pricing offers on.
However, especially as I've noticed how the PC games shelf space has shrunk in Game stores over the past couple of years (in favour of console games), this is where digital distribution comes into its own - namely for the range of stuff that's available on-line but not in stores.
I don't buy that many new games but I've bought from Steam & GOG.com - in both cases it's good to have the ability to get hold of a few older classics again.
I don't think PC gaming is dying as such but I do think the whole PC market with respect to games is changing dramatically for the following reasons:
1. PC and graphics hardware development is slowing down for desktop gaming PCs & focus moving to lower-powered netbooks & portable devices. Presumably people still want to play games on those devices which means smaller & less complicated games - one reason for the success of selling older titles online.
2. Most Windows users still seem happy enough with Windows XP even though I have no reason to doubt Windows 7 may be a better OS. This brings into question as to just how many people have the capability to run (or even care about running) DirectX 11 and therefore how much development games companies are prepared to do on it - when all said and done, this list [wikipedia.org] of DirectX 11 games is very small.
3. I don't personally care about "mass migrations to Linux", I use it because it's there and because it does what I need an OS to do. But whilst Windows 7 may have fared better than Vista, it's still not the raging success for Microsoft that XP was & Linux has matured greatly since XP was released to the point where there's a far greater chance of running older Windows games in WINE on Linux than on Windows 7 or XP. Again, this fact alone must influence older game sales & the forums on GOG.com have lots of threads discussing whether or not certain GOG-released titles will run under WINE. (I don't go on the Steam forums much but the fact that there's soon to be a Steam client for Linux says a lot to me).
4. Modern games are huge development projects with huge up-front costs. Developing games for a fixed console platform *MUST* be much easier than developing for PCs with their plethora of different hardware. Plus games companies make their money from making sequels of established titles, it's the younger, less cynical gamers that rush to buy (or get their parents to buy) those titles & the youngsters like their consoles. All of this leads to the conclusion that there will be a continued slowdown in new PC game releases.
5. MMORPGs & online gaming - if people are spending more money on monthly subscription games then they're spending less on boxed games, especially during an economic slowdown.
As a PC gamer, what I'm really looking forward to is a lot more resolution of petty licensing squabbles of older games so that more of them get released, maybe even with some commitment to allow those games to be updated to run on more modern Windows OSes or even natively on Linux. It make sense that if the games companies are no longer getting as much revenue from new PC games than they used to, then they should look at opening up the revenue streams from re-selling older games.
Re:Low(er) Prices + Convenience = no-brainer (Score:4, Interesting)
Piracy
1) Hunt for suitable p2p client that isn't taken down or adware infested yet
2) Hunt for suitable download that is not a translated version or fake and has a proper crack
3) Wait hours to leech from people with unreliable connections
4) Start over again when an important patch appears
5) Get trojans off the PC that came with the crack
Digital sale
1) Shell out $$$
2) Download at line speed
3) Play (if Steam is not overloaded)
I admit, this is hearsay experience. I've obviously never pirated a game, that would be illegal.
Re:and (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a fan of Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II and the expansions, all of which I own on CD.
Not long after the original game was released about 5 years ago, Stardock changed the license key format (I think due to piracy issues) so that the key printed on the instruction manual no longer worked. However, they informed everyone about this & getting a new key issued was straightforward & quick.
I hadn't played the game for about two years & had rebuilt my PC since I'd last played it but decided to dig it out again recently. When I installed the game & connected to Stardock via their Impulse application (think of it as a simpler version of Steam), I remembered the old key didn't work, had the lost the new key & realised that the registered email address Stardock had for me was an ISP-based one from an ISP I no longer use or have access to.
I emailed Stardock, asking them to either send the key to my new email address or to update my records to that I could send myself the key from Impulse. This was on a Friday evening and I had been looking forward to playing GC II over the weekend.
To give Stardock credit, they were very helpful and by the following Tuesday they had sorted it all out - but I did need to send out about three emails to them and they appeared to have nobody on duty over the weekend, which is when I had really fancied having the gaming session.
So, yes, this is one specific reason why too much reliance on the game creator servers can be a problem for legitimate purchasers.
Re:Second Hand Market (Score:4, Interesting)
sony and co (all the large game corps) have all got together and are simply trying to destroy the second hand market which is why they are trying to force us to only accept digital distribution laden with DRM like steam where all your purchases are not allowed to be resold.
I accept that Steam is a form of DRM control but it's the best of a bad bunch. The stuff you've bought already is always available to you to download onto any PC you own plus it's very easy to backup your Steam folder to an external hard disk - this means that if you rebuild your OS or upgrade your PC, you just have to copy the Steam folder back rather than having to reinstall and re-update each game one-by-one.
As for re-selling old games, have you checked prices on eBay recently? Unless the used games being sold are highly collectible or only a few months old, the prices of used PC games are peanuts. I have a stack of old PC games from about 3-5 years ago that I no longer play but are just not worth listing on eBay & will go to the local charity shop instead. I'm afraid that this idea that you can re-sell oldish games for anything near their original value is a myth.
but now they are not happy with the consoles and are trying to block second hand games being traded on them.
I'm not defending this behaviour by any means but if, as a gamer, it's important to you to be able to re-sell a game once you've finished with it, then maybe the only option is to factor it into your original purchasing decisions. The fact is that a lot of people appear to be mindless enough to queue at midnight with their kids to be the first to have a computer game suggests that most of them don't care about reselling them. Besides which, have you seen what happens to the condition of optical disks after a few weeks of kids putting them in consoles? :-)
i hate scum bag anti consumer corporations.
I agree - but the best way to hurt them is in their wallets. If you don't agree with the expected terms & conditions around something you plan on buying then just don't buy it. Corporations have got so powerful because too many mindless consumers have been sucked in by too many marketing lies - if you stop handing money over to them, they wither and die overnight.
Re:Low(er) Prices + Convenience = no-brainer (Score:1, Interesting)
Piracy is more like...
1) Find torrent tracker, preferably reputable with an invite only system.
2) Find game
3) Download
4)???
5) Profit
If you aren't stupid you shouldn't have to worry about any sort of Trojan or virus of another kind. And if you look for a game, say, one week after it is released. Then you'll have no trouble getting it at the same speed that steam would download at. Sometimes even faster.
Piracy can easily be a problem but, in my experience, A good number of people only pirate things to see if its worth a damn, if so then they shell out the money to buy the game from steam or another store.
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Interesting)
Steam makes it possible to buy 3-5 year old games for cheap. Best Buy doesn't designate any shelf space to games more than a couple years old. Some of us older gamers (cough, 40, cough) have lives, so we can't always get to the latest/greatest game until it has been out a couple of years. I just finished HL2, for example, and I'm halfway through Dragon Age. No rush to finish it before Dragon Age II, because I won't have time to play that one for a couple of years. By then, it'll be $19 on Steam.
Re:Of course. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't access steamcommunity.com here, but I know I have more than 100 games on my Steam account [steamcommunity.com]. A lot were bought through various sales, some in packs with other games. Quite a few I wouldn't have bought otherwise.
Heck I can think of one game I've bought twice: Overlord... once standalone, once as part of the Overlord Complete Pack [steampowered.com] after the Raising Hell expansion was released on Steam. After I priced it out, it was cheaper to buy the complete pack than to buy Overlord: Raising Hell and Overlord II separately.
The kicker here is: I've never finished Overlord. I've never even started Overlord II.
I've probably played half the games on my Steam list once or never.
Re:History repeats itself (Score:3, Interesting)
How about this one: on its opening month, Modern Warfare 2 moved an impressive 6 million combined on 360 and PS3 in North America, but only 170,000 [kotaku.com] on PC. If we presume that there is an additional %50 for digital sales, the PC is still seeing less than 10% of the sales of the 360 and PS3 averaged together.
As someone who deals with publishers regularly, you expect a PC title to sell about %10 of what an identical console title will move. Breaking 150k on a PC is a strong achievement. 150k on a console would be beyond a failure.
There are some complicating factors in PC, though. For one, per-unit sales do not map nearly as cleanly with money spent or profitability. There are a lot of titles in the $5 clearance aisle that move on impulse, and buffer up the raw number sold without actually helping developers to eat. There are titles that move better on PC than on console due to interface and other questions. Flight Simulators, RTS, and MMO's, while the floor fell out of all of them a while back, they still do better on PC's than consoles. Sadly, though, the upper end a PC-only game can realistically expect to move these days is about 500k units, which is a break-even point for a moderately conservatively budgeted title.
World of Warcraft also sucks up a genuinely stupid amount of user dollars every year. It is in and of itself 1 Billion dollars per year. But it's really not fair to assess the income potential of future games on that particularly freakishly large nugget (many companies have gone broke trying). And when you're talking about the overall "health" of the PC gaming industry, it is hindering development rather than helping.
Also, PC as a gaming platform is permeated by flash and other downloadable mini titles, many ad-or-microtransaction supported. These do not bridge over to consoles well, which is where developers actually pay the rent. It takes a very different title, development methodology, and mindset to even survive on the PC side of things.
Overall though, it's difficult to make a giant blockbuster-sized game on the PC and expect to make your money back. Blizzard is one of the last developers trying it, with Starcraft and Diablo rehashes coming out soon. But, again, Blizzard is raking in 1 BILLION dollars a year from WoW. They can afford to take risks like that. Other than them, there is an updated Civilization soon, and then nothing but console ports as far as the eye can see. And even those are becoming thinner, as chasing the last 100k in sales might not offset the additional development and supply chain costs.
Poke around http://www.vgchartz.com/ [vgchartz.com] for a while and see how a PC release generally does against a console release. Their numbers aren't thorough, and sometimes they're off by a lot, but they're usually in the right ballpark. I don't see anything released in the past few years that broke 2 million units on the PC.