Uh, Yeah, About That PC Gaming Thing…
Why’s PC gaming dying, or so you’ve heard? Go watch Microsoft’s E3 presentation, and you can find out. Yesterday, I watched the biggest computer software company in the world, makers of the dominant home computer operating system, dedicate an hour-and-a-half to the X-Box 360. During this time, a concerted effort was made to pretend the home computer did not exist. Remember how World Cyber Games: Ultimate Gamer, the show designed to advertise a PC gaming competition, pit players in the ultimate test of competitive console gaming? Minus Amy and Chelsea explaining how they defied the odds without access to a keyboard and mouse, Microsoft pulled the E3 equivalent.
Yo, what happened to this?
Pre-presentation, I saw G4 laud the 360 as “the proven king of online multiplayer gaming, with over 17 million users online”. (Not that World of Warcraft doesn’t cover more than half of that on its own, and that online console gaming is seen as a bit of a joke in the rest of the world.) I got to see “world premieres” of Modern Warfare 2, Alan Wake, Splinter Cell: Conviction, and Left 4 Dead 2. When commenting on these PC/360 releases, a Microsoft rep noted that “[y]ou’ve just seen an incredible lineup of exclusive games for the X-Box 360.” Afterwards, I was told that I had seen “[t]he experience evolved with X-Box 360, the first console to deliver high-definition graphics, online gaming, and a social entertainment network. All in one box.”
This happened over a decade ago. It was called “I hooked my computer into the fucking internet”.
It’s bad enough that game developers have perpetrated the biggest lie of this generation, that gaming consoles are the last frontier for high-end graphics. It’s bad enough that PC franchises are being rebooted (i.e. dumbed down) for console gamers. Now, Microsoft just provided the most compelling argument for conspiracy theorists who believe the game business is deliberately sabotaging PC gaming. Thanks for shitting in my mouth, Microsoft. In the event the console gaming business fizzles out for you, don’t be surprised if this comes back to bite you in the ass.
June 2nd, 2009 at 6:58 pm
they surely aren’t doing it because they have some emotional need for the 360 to beat the PC. there have to be a lot of reasons they prefer to promote gaming on the 360, and they all have a dead president on them.
personally i will never own a 360 (or ps3) because i find two-handed controllers annoying and clumsy.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Excellent article once again.
If I could find a legitimate source that confirms the statistics of PC gaming online being superior to consoles in sheer numbers, I would be very happy.
The fact of the matter is, Microsoft dropped the ball. They are more concerned with their short term project (the 360) than they are their fall-back from long ago.
However I don’t blame them. As the 360s life cycle draws to an end (which won’t be for a while – this era will be rather long comparatively), they are making pure profit off of game sales, and the consoles they are producing are breaking even as the cost of the technology decreases. Microsoft sees gaming for windows as a lost cause because of one thing – propriety and standardization.
The PC platform has been opened up and non-regulated for years, but (almost) all console related activities are governed by the company which produces them. Thus, Microsoft and Sony can cut a profit off of game sales (which is where they make a majority of their profit, and why their games cost $60). Since there is no governing “PC Corp”, there is no conceivable way Microsoft can milk money out of consumers. They aren’t involved in the production of hardware, and the buying of windows itself is almost a one-time-deal (not to mention many tech savvy gamers merely pirate windows).
Ultimately – investing in the PC platform is at a loss. However, it would not be a loss if hardware producers started a program similar to games for windows (I think there is one already, I can’t quite remember what its called, but I know its as equal a failure) to promote PC as a gaming platform. Simplification is key for a targeting simpler market, is it really THAT necessary to have so many versions of the 4870? (obviously they have different specifications, and as a techy I’m willing to investigate the finer points between two pieces of hardware – but hopefully you get my point)
I think the best possible thing that the PC market could use to jolt its system is what happened with the Crysis computer. Admittedly it was mostly a marketing tie in, and the game is just a glorified tech demo, it still proved that consumers may be willing to pick up a gaming PC if the price is right. Different gamer geared custom builder sites are a step in the right direction, but ultimately fall short. Don’t get me started on the pit-falls of OnLive.
What PC gaming really needs, is in fact the only thing it lacks, and cannot foresee-ably obtain: the elusive “PC Corp”, the messiah of PC gaming, someone who can bring the platform into a more acceptable level of popularity in the market. To achieve this task is most difficult, the merging of gaming and selling of hardware is a difficult one to master. The only possible even I can see happening is a gaming company (Activision/Blizzard, perhaps?) working together with various hardware manufacturers (which benefit both, mutually) and microsoft to create a regular, yearly standardized iteration of the “Gaming PC”.
Now, obviously, this standardization takes away from the identity of the PC as a customizable machine, however, if the market wants to grow to as bloated a size as the console market, those are the steps that it must take.
Personally I prefer the mouse and keyboard no matter what.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Obviously I do not account for the statistical majority, but I’m a PC gamer through and through–my most recent console is the Gamecube, and I’m proud of it (and I only use it to play Animal Crossing). I build all my own rigs and overclock them to the moon…1GHz above stock is something fun to do. Enthusiasts of my caliber are a rare breed. Do not get me wrong, there are plenty of people who will tell you that there’s no reason to buy a PC when you can build it yourself for much cheaper, but even among those ranks, the number who actually know what they’re doing is laughable.
My point about the ridiculously geeky enthusiast niche market? It’s actually where the PC gaming market is. Those of us who do the aforementioned won’t go near a console, we’ve put too much time into our box to even contemplate it. Buying an OEM is too mainstream for us, and therein lies the problem. We swap out GPUs and RAM kits like its our business, but the average Joe has no fucking clue what they’re doing with the guts of their rig. A decently computer-savvy person told me that he wasn’t ALLOWED to build a rig because his parents thought he’d break something.
To point the finger with a little more emphasis: PC game publishers have an entire team working on making sure there’s a balance between what they want the game to achieve, and what hardware available can make the result happen. For maximum profit, they need to make the shit look as great as possible without closing the door on too many GPUs. What the fuck happened with EA? Their estimation of Crysis was laughable. It took an entirely new generation of GPUs to be released to the market to get higher than 30fps when maxed, and that barely renders the game playable.
There’s the problem: companies don’t feel like doing the work required to make the game playable with different hardware configurations. Hell, don’t blame the CF results on ATI’s drivers, did you ever think that the game is a poorly coded POS? They also don’t want to take the chance with piracy. I’ve said before, the piracy rates are completely linear with how piss-poor the public views the game. Lately, there’s been a lot of piracy. In addition, many companies are taking greedy shits on their fan base. L4D 2 is the finest example to date. L4D’s hardly been out for a year and is in desperate need of DLC and an update (which will never come). Players basically payed $40 to beta-test L4D 2. Valve isn’t looking too hot right now, and they used to be very popular.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:56 am
I think the big focus by M$ on console gaming this year was due to the fact that the Wii is stomping the crap out of competition. With the new Xbox that was announced you can see that they are obviously targeting the same casual gamer audience that the Wii appeals to. Quite frankly I don’t know very many casual gamers at all who play PC games rather than console of some kind which is really where the problem your mentioning is. The Wii opened consoles up to a whole new market of consumers and now Microsoft is trying to cash in on that as well. In addition to piracy issues casual video gaming has really detracted from the attention PC gaming normally gets.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:21 am
One thing:
PC market != PC gaming.
PC gaming doesn’t need a big PC market to survive. In fact, I’m liking more this age when most of the market is at the consoles. I play less games (I pirate most of the releases and delete them a hour after) but I play more time, to those gems that the old PC market left for us.
Of course this kind of gaming doesn’t even benefit the hardware sellers, but screw them -.-
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:37 am
At least we got Facebook on the 360!
Well at least denying the existence the PC for their games to seem exclusives makes a little sense. But then they showed Metal Gear Solid after they said all of the next announcements will be exclusive. That game is on the PC and PS3.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:39 am
But it does, if there’s no real consumer base for PCs, there’s also not a healthy body of gamers, either…having a PC is a requirement for PC gaming, the latter cannot be strong if the former is not.
Why screw the hardware market? They are doing amazing things right now…ATI’s 40nm wafer, Intel’s Nehalem and Lynnfield, they’ll soon be dropping to the 32nm process, AMD’s 6-core Shanghai, nVidia’s Ion, and all the other board makers who made a push to mATX with the X58 chipset (DFI being the first). There is simply so much computational power they are capable of doing that was unthinkable two years ago, how is that possibly a bad thing?
Again, without the hardware, publishers would be even more in the dark about trying to create a standard for games.
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Screw them because it doesn’t really improve the games, just their graphics.
But hey, I’m about to buy a nvidia 2XX just because of the beasts they’re, but that’s no really important for the real gaming, imho. In fact, I want that card mostly for parallel processing.
Yeah, the things they’re doing are amazing from a technological point of view. They just rape anything the consoles have. But they need to “ally” without making crappy standards like consoles. They could pay ID, Valve, Epic Games or even Blizzard to release the source code of their engines and allow them to be used in commercial projects. That way creating a PC game with good graphics would be much cheaper.
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I suggest nVidia and AMD to pay id to release idTech5’s source code.
I can’t include Intel because they’re angry and afraid of GPUs taking all the importance at PC power (A GTX280 is like ten times faster than a I7 at computing physics or any other operations with floats).
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:08 pm
CPUs don’t do much for graphics at all, they just prevent your system from bottlenecking. Hell, an i7 costs just as much as a 4890, take your pick.
I have 2 55nm c216’s strictly for 24/7 folding. If ATI cards could fold better, I’d be all over them. I loved my 3870, nothing I own can hold a candle to it…no headaches whatsoever, OC’ed to 840MHz core no issues.
You DO realize that Intel’s integrated and dedicated Larrabee is supposed to be equal to the 285, right? And it’s still a CPU, so you could OC the pants off of it. In any case, there’s more to computing than physics…an i7 beats out all but potentially 3 GPUs on the market at raw number crunching (prime numbers, etc.): only the 9800GX2, the 285, and the 295 can come near it in terms of the sheer volume of calculations.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
But who needs those kinds of calculations? Who’s going to expend more than the minimum at a CPU?
Not gamers. (Well, I can think of a few exceptions, like very complex AI). And that’s not good for Intel
CPUs were important before, but they’re losing importance at a very high rate.
Who knows about that Larrabee thing… Let’s wait until it’s out.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Enthusiasts, that’s who. Folders, that’s who. Servers, that’s who. The people who love to overclock. Or, those who simply feel they need to have the best (gamers are total suckers for that kind of thing…they’ll buy ANYTHING; Fatality shit ring a bell?). I recently just binged on a Q9550 (E0, thank GAWD), one of the best upgrades of my life.
While it is true that CPUs are becoming less and less useful in games (hell, I’ve YET to count ten games that are optimized for quads), that’s only because of Moore’s Law. It’s been realized that chips are only going to be able to double in transistor count just one more time before we hit a brick wall–after all, you can only make them SO tiny. After both Intel and AMD figure out how to create wafer CPUs (like what Sun was doing before they got bought), nothing will be able to touch them, and it’ll be like buying a 4GHz Pentium a few years ago.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:24 pm
I think everybody’s replies to what I wrote sums up Microsoft’s rationale. We have a video game industry that has evolved into a race to secure the largest possible install base, and the average person couldn’t hope to understand most of the tech discussion in this thread. Even somebody like myself, who has been using computers for a little over two decades now, still has to consult family when it comes to building his own machine. It’s my opinion that putting together your own PC gives you the best value for any gaming device imaginable, but it’s not an easy task.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:39 am
I have a Pentium 4. Suck it bitches.
June 4th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Can you OC it to 8GHz, because unless you can, I don’t give a shit.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Hey, I’m posting from a P4 right now. I remember clocking it at 4 GHZ some years ago (it’s at stock’s 3.2 now)
@grmnasasin0227:
Right, but that’s not a lot of people. CPU’s market was much healthier when you needed a powerful CPU to run some games. And that’s why intel is angry with nVidia and vice versa (the suing thing, etc).