By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Gaming - Do you believe PC Gaming is dying?

 

Do you believe PC Gaming is dying?

Yes 136 41.21%
 
No 169 51.21%
 
Unsure / Can't decide 25 7.58%
 
Total:330
Scoobes on 17 February 2010
r505Matt said:
Scoobes said:
r505Matt said:
Scoobes said:

Lol, it happens. That's the biggest problem when debating PC sales, it's very difficult (currently) to track PC sales. We can estimate sales of one area (e.g. Steam) but it's only an estimation and only part of the overall equation. We really have no clue as to how well or badly a PC game might sell. It would be nice to have more sales data for PC and I do think it'll come in the future, but until then we have to keep making educated guesses.

One educated guess (a view common among PC gamers), and an explaination as to why console games seem to sell better, is that PC games are far less front-loaded than there console counter parts. Take a game like Starcraft for instance which has wracked up 10 million sales and continues to sell. However, it took nearly 10 yrs of sustained sales to get to that figure. That's the thing with PC games, they're pretty much always backwards compatible and now all available for digital download, so will always have a very long shelf-life.

They aren't backwards compatible!!! Dammit, I have this old game "Are we there yet" best little puzzle game I've ever played, I can't play it even with emulators =(

I think the processor doesn't know what to do with it. =(

There is always a way! It just might take some work to figure out how, lol.

This may seem like a stupid question but have you tried DosBox? The majority of MSDos era games tend to work if you use DosBox. I managed to get the old elder scrolls games working that way.

Yeah I did. I gave up on it a while ago, maybe I'll try again.

How did you get Daggerfall working? It glitches out on me constantly. I really wanted to steal more carts and horses from shops and sell them back to them in the morning =P

I have such "fond" memories of that game. Not understanding leveling system for a while, so I didn't know why I wouldn't level after killing 100s of enemies. Or how I didn't notice the dungeon maps in the menu, so I would memorize those bland dungeons in my head to get around. If I got lost, such a hassle to find my way back out. It wouldn't have been so bad if they all DIDN'T LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME haha.

I said I got it working, I didn't say I got it working well, lol! Honestly haven't played it for ages now but I'm sure Bethesda released some tips on getting it to work since it's now available as freeware. It seemed to run OK on my PC after following their advice. I've had more problems with Planescape and Return to Krondor tbh.

As for Daggerfall, what I remember was that it was dauntingly huge... yet all so familiar :P




Get your Portable ID!

Around the Network
brazylianwisnia on 17 February 2010

PC gaming will never die but now it's far away behind consoles.
Really how many there were AAA exclusives on PC last year? (by AAA I mean game made with a budget with at least 20mln $ with very good reviews and strong sales)
and on consoles? 10 times much more.
PC is expensive.I can buy a PS3 for 299$ and play Uncharted 2.PC needed for that shiny graphics costs around 800-1000$
PC now rules only in MMOs,RTS and RPG(with best games in this genres also on consoles).



r505Matt on 17 February 2010

Man I want to play all my old PC games now.



MikeB on 17 February 2010

It depends how you would define dying. If you mean that PC gaming has lost a lot of its importance over the year then yes of course, these aren't the PC gaming heydays of Doom and Quake. Last gen the PC gaming market significantly declined, this gen PC gamers don't even get to enjoy Microsoft sequals to PC games like Fable, Gears of War or even Halo. Or recently Alan Wake another such a game which was originally planned for the PC and published by Microsoft. Then you have plenty of other Microsoft games series like Forza, Kameo, PGR, etc which aren't released for the platform.

Many 3rd parties are also delaying their high profile games like for instance the Grand Theft Auto series. Even Crytek is focussing on consoles nowadays, etc.

However PC gaming will not completely die in the foreseable future, even Amiga gaming never died out completely, for instance there are still Amiga 'Game of the Year' awards each and every year.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

shio on 17 February 2010
MikeB said:

It depends how you would define dying. If you mean that PC gaming has lost a lot of its importance over the year then yes of course, these aren't the PC gaming heydays of Doom and Quake. Last gen the PC gaming market significantly declined, this gen PC gamers don't even get to enjoy Microsoft sequals to PC games like Fable, Gears of War or even Halo. Or recently Alan Wake another such a game which was originally planned for the PC and published by Microsoft. Then you have plenty of other Microsoft games series like Forza, Kameo, PGR, etc which aren't released for the platform.

Many 3rd parties are also delaying their high profile games like for instance the Grand Theft Auto series. Even Crytek is focussing on consoles nowadays, etc.

However PC gaming will not completely die in the foreseable future, even Amiga gaming never died out completely, for instance there are still Amiga 'Game of the Year' awards each and every year.

The PC Gaming market never declined. The only thing that declined was the retail market.

10 years ago the Retail market was probably 95% of all of PC Gaming Revenue. Now, retail is less than 20% of the total revenue of PC Gaming.

PC still has more AAA exclusives than any other platform, and it has more exclusives than all consoles combined.



http://i48.tinypic.com/120qaon.jpg
Around the Network
MikeB on 17 February 2010
shio said:
MikeB said:

It depends how you would define dying. If you mean that PC gaming has lost a lot of its importance over the year then yes of course, these aren't the PC gaming heydays of Doom and Quake. Last gen the PC gaming market significantly declined, this gen PC gamers don't even get to enjoy Microsoft sequals to PC games like Fable, Gears of War or even Halo. Or recently Alan Wake another such a game which was originally planned for the PC and published by Microsoft. Then you have plenty of other Microsoft games series like Forza, Kameo, PGR, etc which aren't released for the platform.

Many 3rd parties are also delaying their high profile games like for instance the Grand Theft Auto series. Even Crytek is focussing on consoles nowadays, etc.

However PC gaming will not completely die in the foreseable future, even Amiga gaming never died out completely, for instance there are still Amiga 'Game of the Year' awards each and every year.

The PC Gaming market never declined. The only thing that declined was the retail market.

10 years ago the Retail market was probably 95% of all of PC Gaming Revenue. Now, retail is less than 20% of the total revenue of PC Gaming.

PC still has more AAA exclusives than any other platform, and it has more exclusives than all consoles combined.

According to the NPD about 79% of PC games are bought at retail. For consoles it's about 90% on average. According to them: "physical retail product remains the driving force behind industry sales".

And of course this seems likely considering Microsoft and 3rd party behaviour over the recent years.



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

shio on 17 February 2010
MikeB said:
shio said:
MikeB said:

It depends how you would define dying. If you mean that PC gaming has lost a lot of its importance over the year then yes of course, these aren't the PC gaming heydays of Doom and Quake. Last gen the PC gaming market significantly declined, this gen PC gamers don't even get to enjoy Microsoft sequals to PC games like Fable, Gears of War or even Halo. Or recently Alan Wake another such a game which was originally planned for the PC and published by Microsoft. Then you have plenty of other Microsoft games series like Forza, Kameo, PGR, etc which aren't released for the platform.

Many 3rd parties are also delaying their high profile games like for instance the Grand Theft Auto series. Even Crytek is focussing on consoles nowadays, etc.

However PC gaming will not completely die in the foreseable future, even Amiga gaming never died out completely, for instance there are still Amiga 'Game of the Year' awards each and every year.

The PC Gaming market never declined. The only thing that declined was the retail market.

10 years ago the Retail market was probably 95% of all of PC Gaming Revenue. Now, retail is less than 20% of the total revenue of PC Gaming.

PC still has more AAA exclusives than any other platform, and it has more exclusives than all consoles combined.

According to the NPD about 79% of PC games are bought at retail. For consoles it's about 90% on average. According to them: "physical retail product remains the driving force behind industry sales".

And of course this seems likely considering Microsoft and 3rd party behaviour over the recent years.

You're not making sense. First of all, NPD said "79% of games for portables, PC/Mac, mobile and smartphones were bought on retail", so the figure for PC games was diluted due to the sales of handheld games. Second, It also doesn't take into account subscriptions/micro-transactions revenue, which is pretty much half of the entire PC gaming business.

In the Horizons Report, it was estimated that Retail was only 24% of the total PC Gaming Revenue in 2008. It should be less than 20% in 2009.

As for 3rd party support, Japanese are supporting PC more than ever, with Square even sending exclusive games to PC. EA is supporting PC more than ever, and there are more developers on PC than in all consoles combined. Microsoft was forced to stop releasing games to PC because they knew it would take away sales from Xbox 360.



http://i48.tinypic.com/120qaon.jpg
Scoobes on 17 February 2010
brazylianwisnia said:
PC gaming will never die but now it's far away behind consoles.
Really how many there were AAA exclusives on PC last year? (by AAA I mean game made with a budget with at least 20mln $ with very good reviews and strong sales)
and on consoles? 10 times much more.
PC is expensive.I can buy a PS3 for 299$ and play Uncharted 2.PC needed for that shiny graphics costs around 800-1000$
PC now rules only in MMOs,RTS and RPG(with best games in this genres also on consoles).

Actually, for that money ($800-1000) you could get a PC that would blow PS3 and Uncharted 2 out of the water and make a significant percentage of multiplatform games look better than Uncharted 2 and do a hell of a lot more on a technical level (better anti-aliasing, longer view distances, higher res textures, higher anistropic filtering etc.). If you wanted PS3 comparable graphics you could get away with spending only $400. Even relatively cheap modern graphics cards can produce PS3-like visuals.




Get your Portable ID!

brazylianwisnia on 17 February 2010
Scoobes said:
brazylianwisnia said:
PC gaming will never die but now it's far away behind consoles.
Really how many there were AAA exclusives on PC last year? (by AAA I mean game made with a budget with at least 20mln $ with very good reviews and strong sales)
and on consoles? 10 times much more.
PC is expensive.I can buy a PS3 for 299$ and play Uncharted 2.PC needed for that shiny graphics costs around 800-1000$
PC now rules only in MMOs,RTS and RPG(with best games in this genres also on consoles).

Actually, for that money ($800-1000) you could get a PC that would blow PS3 and Uncharted 2 out of the water and make a significant percentage of multiplatform games look better than Uncharted 2 and do a hell of a lot more on a technical level (better anti-aliasing, longer view distances, higher res textures, higher anistropic filtering etc.). If you wanted PS3 comparable graphics you could get away with spending only $400. Even relatively cheap modern graphics cards can produce PS3-like visuals.

Show me the game on 400$ that will look like the U2...Crysis can't even compare to U2 on 400$ PC.Uncharted 2 is the best looking game ever.Level of detail,animation,effects no game can stand to this beside Crysis and multiplatform games aren't even close

 

@shio

If PC have that much AAA exclusives than name at least 10 of them from 2009....i'm thinking only about The Sims 3...but wait it's coming to consoles too.what a shame...please name it because i can't find none http://www.gamerankings.com/browse.html?site=pc&cat=0&year=2009&numrev=0&sort=0&letter=&search=



MikeB on 17 February 2010

@ shio

I'm not sure how much that clouds that percentage. I think nearly all smartphone games are not bought at retail (at least I don't know where to get them or than download them).

In any case of the games which are not distributed online and can only be bought at retail console sales seem to dwarf PC game sales worldwide.

I think gaming is moving more and more towards consoles, they provide a far cleaner and more compelling end user experience in most cases. With cheap HDTVs and surround audio setups well supported by consoles IMO there is far less a reason to own a gaming PC than last gen (I was a PC gamer).



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales