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Forums - PC Discussion - PC gaming is dead-- long live PC gaming

vlad321 on 18 March 2011
ZenfoldorVGI said:

 PC gaming isn't dying. The best thing the PC has going for it in that department is the fact that there are no benchmarks of profitability PC gaming has to achieve to stay on the market. The games could sell like shit and be pirated everywhere and "they" wouldn't stop making PCs or PC parts. Hell, most(anecdotal) graphics card purchases at EVGA.com are for folding@home nowadays, or benchmarking to compete with other benchmarkers.

If PC games stop selling, the platform will still exist. People who are only interested in profits will just stop making games for it, or they will make them for consoles first and release them later on pc, and that's already happened to an extent.

The exceptions are independent developers who aren't well funded enough to create console games, and developers who have carved out a sustainable niche in PC exclusivity with MMOs, adventure, or RTS games.

For relevant exclusive "commercial" style games, yes the PC is a sad shadow of glory's past, and it will continue to be. If you doubt that, remember not too long ago, FPS wasn't considered a console style game. To say it's not dying, is one thing, to pretend its glory days are yet to come, or that it hasn't went downhill since Half-Life was released is imo denial.

Console gaming, despite all bias against it, is far better now than it's ever been, as PC exclusives have finally become available on those platforms, and due to the cost of development, most releases have  a high enough budget requirement not to be simple cashins. Games aren't "worse now than they used to be"imo, I believe they are more mainstream and more popular, and if you think they suck now, you might consider the option that it is your taste that is niche and unpopular and not the current state of new releases or the industry.


Absolutely false. Actual PC games can't be on a console. Can you iamgine trying to play one of the actual FPS games wehre reflexes and speed matter? Any worthwhile strategy games? Any deep RPGs? All those genres are something that a console just CAN'T do. Just like a PC can't do a fighting game corretly (unless you plug in extra stuff) so can't consoles play actual PC games. Just like fighting games on the PC, any of those genres are half assed (and tha'ts a half-ass more than I would give them) on the consoles. Why? Well simply becuse of controls, and no, motion pointing is NOT the same as a mouse. When you let me rest my hand and my pointer doesn't scroll off the screen adn id ont look at the ground, call me.



Tag(thx fkusumot) - "Yet again I completely fail to see your point..."

HD vs Wii, PC vs HD: http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=93374

Why Regenerating Health is a crap game mechanic: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=3986420

gamrReview's broken review scores: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=4170835

 

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okr on 18 March 2011

"Point&Click adventures? Yeah, there's actually a revival of those - on the Wii".

I laughed when I heard this. He couldn't have been more wrong.

The point&click "revival" - which isn't a revival, when will NA gaming media ever learn that the genre never died but USA stopped caring about it more than a decade ago - happens
- mainly on PC (lots of new p&c adventure games each year - 90% of them remain unnoticed outside the genre fans, the 10% which are noticed are all made by Telltale games)
- to a lesser extent on DS and iOS (several original developments on both systems, some PC ports of older games)
- not on PSN/XBLA as they only get some PC ports of older and newer games (for example Monkey Island 1&2, all Telltale games, Jane Jensen's Gray Matter on 360) but not a single original development - or only one if you count HR
- not on Wii which gets the least PC ports of all systems (far less Telltale games for example, Broken Sword) and afaik only one original development (Another Code - which wasn't even released in NA)

I often wonder if these people who try to explain gamers the world of gaming actually know the world of gaming.



Zlejedi on 18 March 2011
RolStoppable said:
vlad321 said:

But he is right in the first 1/3rd. FPSes are ruining gaming. Though he missed the point it only started being retarded when they started being made for the lowest common denominator. Remember when FPSes didn't have the whole soldier bullshit and you were literally moving at speeds of cars and actually required reflexes? When you could carry more than 3 guns and the option of 50 others, which were in fact the same thing as the original 3? What happened to a lightning gun that can shoot ninja stars, guns which shoot 6 rockets at a time, perosnal flak cannons, personal cannons that shoot cnanonballs bigger than you?

Though, his arugment about 3rd person over 1st person just sounds like the argument of a scrub who can't play well enough.

Gaming matured, that's what happened. Over the top action had to go and make space for realism. That's why you are moving slow now. That's why you can only carry a couple of weapons at any given time. That's why your health regenerates automatically.

...wait. That doesn't make sense.

Microsoft is to blame. Ever since they've entered the home console arena, they have worked hard to change the perception of the market by manipulating game journalists. Today the Xbox brand is the golden standard in gaming (at least in the USA) and most websites will tell you in their editorials and articles that all consoles should strive to be like the 360. First person shooters didn't mature, but Halo was put on a pedestal to become the standard for the genre. That's the point where things started to go downhill.

In the last few years we've repeatedly had news claiming that the money is on consoles and that the PC isn't worth it anymore. This lines up perfectly with what Microsoft wants, full control over gaming. They realized that they don't have a chance to get the major Japanese talent on their console, so they focused on the other big thing: The American talent. However, that was predominantly working on the PC, so they did everything they could to build the perception that consoles are the way to go, along with the obvious moneyhats of course.

Feel free to write this off as a silly conspiracy theory.

It isn't silly conspiracy theory. There are huge corporations supporting consoles with tons of marketing money to spend and everything to gain while pc side has nothing apart from random voices of small developers and enthusiasts of the platform.

Also yeah I too blame current state of affairs on Microsoft before they entered the console race both the consoles and pc offered diffrent types of gaming entertainment with diffrent genres dominating them.

Then came Microsoft with their idea of making closed enviroment pseudo pc game system on which they would have 100% control. With a Xbox at the forefront in the genre changes they adapted classic pc genres to the gamepad control going for lowest common denominator that when pc gamers started to feel "dumbing down" as major changes had to be made to fit gameplay designed to play on super accurate mouse to dual analogs.



PROUD MEMBER OF THE PSP RPG FAN CLUB

Foamer on 18 March 2011

I think this graph says it all. After realising that they couldn't get gamers to pay for GfWL in the same way as they could on the 360, Microsoft all but abandoned PC gaming and closed down a number of PC focussed studios. I believe Sony have released more PC games than Microsoft over the last few years. If I was an investor in Microsoft stock, I'd be looking at the growth and profits that Steam is producing and wondering what the hell Microsoft were playing at. At the moment I'd prefer Microsoft to abandon GfWL altogether, as their half-assed efforts aren't good for anyone and I'm tired of reading how they're going to refocus on PC gaming and nothing really ever happening.



Foamer on 18 March 2011
ZenfoldorVGI said:

For relevant exclusive "commercial" style games, yes the PC is a sad shadow of glory's past, and it will continue to be.

Define 'relevant'- if you're on about 'AAA' games, then that's a pretty narrow segment of the market, and one which really doesn't seem to be proving very profitable for publishers and developers. The PC still gets a ton of exclusive games, more than all the consoles combined I believe, and across a far wider variety of genres. What it doesn't get is $50 million exclusives but a) it never did anyway and b) games with that size of budget released for single consoles are almost entirely first party, money-hatted games with Microsoft or Sony picking up the tab to drive hardware sales. The big publishers are multi-platform due to the rising cost of making games, not because of any decline in PC gaming.



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fps_d0minat0r on 18 March 2011

the bit about internet explorer and office on xbox was shocking....i never thought of that even though its so simple.

PC's would die overnight if microsoft allowed those to be installed on xbox and it would sell like 200m units a year.

think about it.....a £200 xbox that lets you play games, surf the internet and use word/excel/powerpoint and you would be able to buy a USB extension to plug in printers, keyboards, mice.

that would meet most peoples needs, especially in developing countries and the only people buying PC's would be people like programmers and video editors who are in the minority.

id become an instant xbox fanboy if that happened.

but then again microsoft would lose billions so it will never happen....



twesterm on 18 March 2011
vlad321 said:

I find it interesting that costs of games ROSE this generatoin, where you claim it's easier and cheaper to create games because of uniformity, than before when they were mostly focused on the PC. I mean shit, half of Activision's profits come from WoW, and they really have to struggle to make it into the black. So theoretically yes, you are correct, realistically though the industry is in a worse position now than it has ever been before this standardized hardware. Keep in mind that libraries for PCs are also far more standardized now than they were in the mid 90s, with card makers also putting a lot of effort in optimizing their cards for games that come out.

...

As to your final question, you know my opinion very well on that as well. To me the quality of games, mostly because they serve the least common denominator now ( and I'm not talking Wii Sports and those, I'm talking FPSs, RPGs, and other games people think are "hardcore" which are laughably casual this gen) than before 2005. Meanwhile that same least common denominator also seems to be latched onto good graphics and how much they mean. As before, you are theoretically correct, however realistically ever since the standardization of hardware this gen came about, quality has exponentially falle, and graphics have become more meaningful to the masses.

tl;dr: Yes everything you say should be the way you say. However, realistically, ever since 2005 and this new gen that has standardized and brought so much control to everything came about, quality of games are down, giving a shit about graphics is up, and developers are having a harder and harder time covering costs.

 

Edit: SOmething that is very laughable about that video. He said something along the lines of "We no longer need the traditional PC because..." and proceeded to list out 5-6 different devices. I hate to break it to this guy, but hardware converges, it doesn't converge. I don't have fuckign space for a tablet, a phone, an mp3 player, and whatever else he mentioned in there. I used ot have a powerful laptop, then i exchganed it for a PC which I'm pretty sure is The Beast from Revelations, and a small notebook for $250. I will not lie to you, that was the absolutely best swithc I ever did. I have written entire database backbones on that little pocket calculator, something no device besides a computer can do. At the same time when I need brute horsepower, I have my desktop tower.

Edit2: Also yes, shows movies etc. can be watched on the small thing as well. On top of email, etc. etc. etc.


Sorry for the late reply, been dreading reading and taking the time to respond to a long post (and I sometimes lost interest when I don't post in a thread for a while...)

Anyways!

Game development costs haven't risen because it's focused on consoles, it has risen because more is expected of developers.  You could actually argue that consoles are keeping costs down since if we were developing only for PC we would constantly have more and more powerful hardware to deal with and have to create better and better.

Yes, the industry is in a shaky place at the moment, but that really has nothing to do with PC or console gaming. 

I don't know if quality overall has fallen, it's just that right now games are a big risk and taking a leap of faith in game is big risk.  You can either make something original and out there or you can build what you know will sell.  You call things like Call of Duty the lowest common denominator because it's easy and that's fine, but it also allows more people to get into games.  I don't really like it either way, but it's what people like and it sells.    I'm really not sure what the complaint is.  I'm sure if it was shit-in-a-box and it sold bazillions I could see getting upset over it, but like it or not, it's a quality game that people want.

Costs are really high right now because some games just have infinite budgets and have set the bar unrealistacally high.  Killzone 3, FFXIII, and Gran Turismo 5 are great examples.  I won't say a word about their gameplay but just look at the games.  These all had infinite budgets where the developer got to take all the time they needed to make their game as good as possible (or at least as good looking as possible).  They release and they blow people away because they look amazing.

Now, every game must live up to those which most developers just can't do, or more specifically, they can't do with their budget, or even more specifically, they can't do with their budget and make something completely original.  That isn't the fault of consoles or PC gaming, that's just humans being visual beings.  If you look at two similar games side-by-side, you're going to take the one that looks better.

But I digress, that really has nothing to do with the topic.

What does tl;dr mean?



 

twesterm on 18 March 2011
fps_d0minat0r said:

the bit about internet explorer and office on xbox was shocking....i never thought of that even though its so simple.

PC's would die overnight if microsoft allowed those to be installed on xbox and it would sell like 200m units a year.

think about it.....a £200 xbox that lets you play games, surf the internet and use word/excel/powerpoint and you would be able to buy a USB extension to plug in printers, keyboards, mice.

that would meet most peoples needs, especially in developing countries and the only people buying PC's would be people like programmers and video editors who are in the minority.

id become an instant xbox fanboy if that happened.

but then again microsoft would lose billions so it will never happen....


I don't know, I don't see myself ever using those type of applications on a console because, well, then I would have to use my TV for that.  Just like if you have a computer strictly for business, you wouldn't want games on it, my TV is strictly for entertainment and I don't want business software on it.



 

ssj12 on 18 March 2011

Hey Twest, maybe you should take this mindset when making games.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/18/volition-we-want-to-make-games-worth-steali/1



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