Is PC Gaming Dying? BitTech

[Revv23]

I always love Bit-Tech's op-ed's.

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/20...gaming-dying/1

Well, are they? It’s a topic which has been discussed a lot during the first half of 2009 and depending on who you ask and when you’ll get a series of different answers – and I’ve definitely been guilty of trying to persuade others one way or the other, which is due to more than just my argumentative nature. It’s a complex issue.

It’s probably an over-inflated issue too because, interpreted in the widest possible way, the answer to ‘Are PC Games Dying Out?’ is simple.

No, they aren’t. PC games have never been bigger – there are regular releases, several big exclusives every year, a glut of exciting new developers rising out of the indie scene like zombies from graves and there is, of course, the mammoth MMO genre. Specifically, there is World of WarCraft (and a few more notable cousins too, such as EVE). WoW is the trump card that gets pulled out by anyone who chooses to support the PC as a platform - but this single game isn't enough to keep the platform afloat, and indeed, its success may be one of PC gaming's problems.

A look at the weekly top 10 sales charts for PC games, stocked with the Sims, WoW and CoD4 is enough to tell you that there are issues - for big publishers at least - with the direction PC gaming is going in. We've decided to take a look at the state of PC gaming and see if the complaints are justified, if we'll ever see another game like Crysis, and if the current model of big publishers and multi-million dollar development budgets is sustainable when it comes to PC gaming.

Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI – on the hardware side there are just too many people making too much money from gamers to give up on PC gaming just yet and, just because the PC Gaming Alliance has proved mostly useless, that doesn’t mean that the group isn’t good for something. If nothing else it reflects how many companies are seriously invested in the PC platform.

It’s worth pointing out that this also possibly makes the PC the cheapest platform to develop for too. There are few licensing fees or dev-kits to take into account and there are plenty of companies who’ll be happy to help you out with the more costly parts of the business, like Nvidia does through the The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program. There’s no demands on features you have to include in your title either, unlike with the Xbox 360, where Microsoft insist that even games like Tales of Monkey Island have a leaderboard.

[moiraesfate]

PC games aren't dying out, but the insane prices they are charging are making it hard for people to buy games during a very harsh economic recession.

[zalbard]

How many times do we have to discuss the same thing?...
PC games aren't going anywhere.

[vengance_01]

They are not dying, but evolving. More times then not, I love to just pop in a game in my 360, have it work, sit back relax on my couch and play the game on my 42inch 1080P LCD TV. I hate to say it but I slowly converting over.

[Revv23]

How many times do we have to discuss the same thing?...
PC games aren't going anywhere.

If you looked at the article, you would have seen it's a really good op-ed about changes in the gaming industry, not about the death of pc gaming.

[Sh1tyMcGee]

Articles like this are seriously getting old and retarted, they do this kind of crap just to get some traffic. BS, PC gaming is not, nor will it ever die.

[ajaidev]

Look at it this way, PC's are ultimate gaming machines out there. When the PS3 was released people had more powerful computers "Based on GPU not CPU". PC's/Servers are what make consoles possible, PS3 is a server chip on a mobo and a 7 series Nvidia card so is Xbox 360 well with a ATi card but the IBM cpu is totally server cpu inspired.

Now to software support, i tried writing a software for the cell "PS3 with a Linux environment" it was bloody hard the cell is not programmer friendly at all. If PC gaming dies so will console gaming "well eventually". Think ATi and Nvidia will not have a base to work on and will have to make a new GPU out of a graphics workstation GPU, hard work to say the least.

[Xoulz]

I wish the industry would wake the Fook up... PC gamers are not dying.. !!

PC gamers just buy less games per year, because we are not influenced by Assassin's Creed, Spiderman/Batman or any of the garbage they push off on 15 year old counsel gamers.

We buy quality games and play them for years. All of my friends (and I am 39 year years old) game heavily on their PC. I have an Xbox 360 that I touch about once a month and will buy games I only play a few times and GIVE them away. But on my PC, I easily rack up 20 hours a week...

I bought Battlefield 2142 for $60 some 3 years ago... been playing it 20 hours a week since then. It's not my fault EA/DICE doesn't offer an expansion pack for it. Many of the people who play these types of games are just ignored by the developer as they dismiss the potential sales. If EA would get off their but and patch BF2142 and offer an expansion for $70 I would buy it & so would almost anyone who plays it.

These companies do not support their PC end-users.. they dump & run, instead of building their franchise.

[Easybeat]

As always the article's on the death of PC gaming are mis-titled (apart from being incorrect) they should read:-

"The death of high end PC gaming"

There is an overwhelming abundance of online games, flash games and small games which are even crashing the gaming sales charts. I read that Popcap sold 25 million copies of the Bejeweled games, that is a mind boggling number.

[Vinas]

They are not dying, but evolving. More times then not, I love to just pop in a game in my 360, have it work, sit back relax on my couch and play the game on my 42inch 1080P LCD TV. I hate to say it but I slowly converting over.

I say the same about my 57" connected my water cooled gaming rig. Sitting back on the laZboy with 7.1 bluetooth headphones and a logitech wireless keyboard & moouse. Nothing beats it!

This site will make you understand that PC gaming is alive and well:
http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/

[Calmatory]

Why would/should developers prefer PC over consoles?

Consoles are cheap and dead simple.
Consoles have fixed hardware, meaning that the developers can focus on one system, instead of having to fiddle with possible problems brought by different hardware/software mixes.

PC's are "one platform", whereas consoles differiate from others quite alot.

[ajaidev]

Why would/should developers prefer PC over consoles?

Consoles are cheap and dead simple.
Consoles have fixed hardware, meaning that the developers can focus on one system, instead of having to fiddle with possible problems brought by different hardware/software mixes.

PC's are "one platform", whereas consoles differiate from others quite alot.

Pc's don't differ from each other than much "If you don't optimize" for programming, the x86 cpu is exactly that with more and less cores and same with the cache. But if you optimize the game for a i7 that will take longer time, depending on the software model you use.

The consoles on the other hand have to be optimized individually there is no standard, a Xbox 360 != PS3 != Wii you cant simply do "get texture xxx.xxx" on all the consoles but you can do that on any and every x86 PC. But if you want to use say SSE4.1 and SSE4a together then you are in a fix, optimizing takes time. All console games are made in graphical workstations and programming stations, both are PC's one with a high powered gpu and one with a high powered cpu.

[Power5]

You could easily make a PC game the same as a console game. Just pop it in and it works. Just fix the resolution and graphic quality to something along the lines of what a PS3 or XBOX can play and just about anyones computer will have no problem playing it at 720p. PC input devices are just better suited to gaming more I think. Stupid console controllers suck at just about every game for precision.

[Coldon]

did anyone bother reading the article, its honestly quite well written and makes some very valid point, unlike most of the other PC gaming is dying trash out there...

[systemviper]

With all the horsepower and flexibility still at the Desktop, it a very exciting time for gaming.

[Baron_Davis]

yeah, with Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, etc, PC almost dead

[azraeel101]

misread the title as Is PC Gaming Dying? BieTch lol

You could easily make a PC game the same as a console game. Just pop it in and it works. Just fix the resolution and graphic quality to something along the lines of what a PS3 or XBOX can play and just about anyones computer will have no problem playing it at 720p. PC input devices are just better suited to gaming more I think. Stupid console controllers suck at just about every game for precision.

everything in your post is wrong, you literally have no clue what you're talking about

when making a pc game you have to make it work with a myriad of hardware configurations, drivers and even codecs, a LOT more testing is needed as opposed to consoles which have fixed hardware

I only play on pc but I have an xbox360 controller hooked up which is much better for driving games, platformers, sports games, etc; I shiver at the thought of having to play games I own like GRID, Overlord, NBA2K9, Dreamfall, HAWX or Assassins Creed (which, to answer the clueless post above, is awesome for the $10 I paid for it) with mouse+kb

[Mechromancer]

The only thing dying out is 'good games'. So much time and money is pumped into the game engine (graphics, physics, etc) that the quality of the experience is diminishing. That has been said time and time again over the past 6 or 7 years and it largely holds true today. Also, most games aren't mass marketed nearly as well as they should be. The last time I went to Frys Electronics, I saw that 80% of the games were titles I had never heard of. The only games I'm planning to buy in the future are Mass Effect 2 and All Points Bulletin because I've heard of them. Steam does a good job at putting new games in front of our faces too, but only a select few games get distributed there.

[Hell Hound]

Doom 4.

[Calmatory]

yeah, with Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, etc, PC almost dead

This. PC gaming living off on top of a few selected titles by one company. If PC gaming isn't dead yet, it will soon be.

I'd like to see more multiplayer games released, games which are being maintained by their creator, bringin up patches, new features etc. And yeah, target the games for the low-end systems and build some eye candy for the minorities like Source engine does.

But meh, everything is easier on the consoles. ..and thats what Microsoft is doing aswell. E.g. Alan Wake to be XO exclusive.

[Eastcoasthandle]

I wish the industry would wake the Fook up... PC gamers are not dying.. !!

PC gamers just buy less games per year, because we are not influenced by Assassin's Creed, Spiderman/Batman or any of the garbage they push off on 15 year old counsel gamers.

We buy quality games and play them for years. All of my friends (and I am 39 year years old) game heavily on their PC. I have an Xbox 360 that I touch about once a month and will buy games I only play a few times and GIVE them away. But on my PC, I easily rack up 20 hours a week...

I bought Battlefield 2142 for $60 some 3 years ago... been playing it 20 hours a week since then. It's not my fault EA/DICE doesn't offer an expansion pack for it. Many of the people who play these types of games are just ignored by the developer as they dismiss the potential sales. If EA would get off their but and patch BF2142 and offer an expansion for $70 I would buy it & so would almost anyone who plays it.

These companies do not support their PC end-users.. they dump & run, instead of building their franchise.

They are doing this with BF2 with patch 1.50 which is officially released today. However, they are just combining current maps with the addition of Operation Blue Peral.

[fiskov]

First Person Shooters died a long, long time ago.. At least 5 years ago.
I remember FPS's back in the day which required reactions, aim and knowlegde (counting spawn/weapon times, knowing spawn locations, number of steps/time it took to reach certian points on the map etc).

Now all we get is games which get slower and slower, while making them more *accessible* to new players by adding in retarded delays and No-No's such as bunnyhopping and shooting while jumping.
Companys take original great games, which only needed a simple update to the graphics and butcher them into something which quite frankly leaves me weeping into my pillow at night.
(Cough cough, CS to CSS | TFC to TF2 | Q3 to Q4 | UT and UT2K4 to UT3 | RTCW and W:ET to NEW Wolfenstein.. To name a few).

Thank's to complete morons which sit on the developer forums all day spounting suggestions to a game they couldn't *get* or wasn't to *their taste*
All we get is realistic, after more realistic games which does nothing but slow down gameplay even more.
Maybe im insane, maybe im out of touch.. But i want to escape all of realitys flaws (weapon bob, breathing, and viewing distances) not bloody play these games with them.

For some strange reason i still have faith FPS games will one day return to their former glory.. But my faith is like a candle and it's running out of wick.

Rant over.

I feel PC gaming is dieing though, everything i keep looking forward to is either scrapped or not being released on the PC. Such as i recent game i've been waiting for, for several years IL2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey.

[Origin_Unknown]

bit-tech are a bunch of clowns with nothing else to write about

[Mr. K6]

PC gaming is now a shell of what it used to be, but it isn't anywhere near dead. And I still much prefer it over console gaming.

[natty]

mouse aiming and ability to chat with others is why I've always preferred PC gaming