PC is not dead, but is it dissapearing?

[skavenhorde]

Here is an odd thought. I actually hope they do tone down the AAA aspects of PC games. Produce more middle of the line games so that costs are down. They might have to go for full download over the internet to even cut costs further. My reasoning behind this is that we can get back to the good ol days in the market where one or two guys could make a great game and actually make money off of it. It's being done to a small extent right now and the market seems to be getting better and better. Exampes: Eschalon, AOD, Frayed Knights, Depths of Peril, Armageddon Empires. Even though those aren't the middle ground, they might become the middle ground if the AAA market leaves for consoles. They will be able to fill in the holes in the market that the big boys left.

Who knows they might even be able to quit their day job and go full time and still be able to turn a profit.

I might be dreaming here, but when there is a need by consumers someone will fill that need and if it isn't the flashy Hollywood style publishers we have today, then it will be the little guys who took over when they left.

 

[gaboru93]

One thing that is starting to REALLY bother me is that games tend to be first available for consoles. The period between the console realease and PC one is getting bigger everytime. I may be wrong but that's what I feel.

 

[zakhal]

They might have to go for full download over the internet to even cut costs further.

In europe digital is more expensive than retail. Stardocs impulse and steam are good example. I have almost totally given up digital because of that.

This is an old example farcry2 pc:

1.US retail 50$
2.EU retail 24€ - 40€ (min - max)
3.US Steam 50$
4.US Steam 50€

Steam and stardock can keep their digital games. I wont be extorted by these ridiculous prices.

 

[skavenhorde]

In europe digital is more expensive than retail. Stardocs impulse and steam are good example. I have almost totally given up digital because of that.

This is an old example farcry2 pc:

1.US retail 50$
2.EU retail 24€ - 40€ (min - max)
3.US Steam 50$
4.US Steam 50€

Steam and stardock can keep their digital games. I wont be extorted by these ridiculous prices.

Forget steam, I hate that "you can only play if online with us" BS

But there are other distruberters out there that don't charge an arm and a leg to sell the game and it's quick and easy. Armageddon empires was a direct download, all I had to do was wait an hour or so to get an email and waaahhllaa I had my game. Without using STEAM I might add. Also Eschalon/spiderweb and pretty much all the other indies out there have a reasonable way of getting the product to you and they still treat it like a product. None of this BS where you have to be logged in to save your game or whathave you.

Anyways that is my little utopia. The big boys leave the scene for good and the little guys take up the slack. They go after the market that the big boys don't care about anymore.

 

[woges]

No Diablo 3 Console Release, I'd expect Blizzard would expand into console markets by making new types o[f] games set in their IP: like Starcraft Ghost. This is even more likely now that Activision is on board, but Blizzard have certainly been looking at consoles for some time.

 

[Ionstormsucks]

PC gaming isn't disappearing... I'll boldly claim that within the next few years we'll see a shift towards PC gaming again.

 

[wolfing]

One thing that will likely help the PC gaming cause is the continued increased ability of on-board GPU's. For a lot of people it's hard to justify spending $200-300 every year or so to get a new graphics card so you can play the latest games when you can spend that amount once and have a console that is good for 4-5 years.

I don't get where people get this idea. I change my graphic card about every 3 or 4 years, and the replacement normally isn't even $250, and I usually max out all graphic settings (except shadows). Then again, I mostly play RPGs and MMOs so I'm not a slave of the FPS (both as "First Person Shooter" and "Frames Per Second")

 

[woges]

I read somewhere (can't remember precisely) that the PC is in 3rd position, after Wii and Xbox 360, in terms of sales. It (the PC) was about 13-14% of the market excluding download sales.

 

[Benedict]

Forget steam, I hate that "you can only play if online with us" BS

I'm sure I've played off line . . . most of the time actually when playing one of their games, have to have their thing loaded up but I didn't have any other issues.

 

[pibbur]

I read somewhere (can't remember precisely) that the PC is in 3rd position, after Wii and Xbox 360, in terms of sales. It (the PC) was about 13-14% of the market excluding download sales.

Thank you for that one. I've always disagreed with the "pc vs console" thing, since "console" is not a single entity. It's more of a "pc vs Xbox 360 vs Playstation 3 vs Wii vs ...(insert remaining permutations)" situation. IMNSHO.

And not counting download sales will very likely result in increasing underestimation of pc game market penetration.

 

[zakhal]

Here is what known pc developers are saying about pc:

Cevat Yerli of Crytek, the makers of Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis Warhead has publicly stated:

We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future.

John Carmack, often called the 'father of PC gaming', and co-founder of id software, makers of the Doom and Quake series, recently stated:

It's hard to second guess exactly what the reasons are. You can say piracy. You can say user migration, but the ground truth is just that the sales numbers on the PC are not what they used to be and are not what they are on the consoles.

Cliffy B, lead creator at Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Tournament and Gears of Wars series, has been quite outspoken on this topic:

Here's the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC. Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.

Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games, makers of Supreme Commander, also chimes in with his assessment:

...people are going to stop making [games] on the PC because of my earlier point, what's happened on the PC with piracy. The economics are ugly right now on the PC. You're not going to see these gigantic, epic investments of dollars on the PC when it just doesn't work. The economics have to work. You're going to see those investments made on the console side and it's going to become a more console-centric investment. And then you're going to see them ported back over to the PC and that creates a different experience on the PC.

Robert Bowling, Community Manager at Infinity Ward, the makers of games such as Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4, provided a fairly blunt opinion on the issue. He made a blog post entitled 'They Wonder Why People Don’t Make PC Games Any More', the title of his post along with the contents clearly linking the move away from PC game development with piracy:

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn’t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).... the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding.

The people quoted above are some of the most successful and prominent PC developers of our time. Virtually every PC gamer has played one of their games, and all of them have demonstrated a high degree of dedication to PC development over the years.

I doubt any of them would suddenly start abandoning PC development based only on flimsy information and false perceptions. The logic of their argument is quite sound: if the same game has the potential to sell many times more copies on a particular platform because sales are not being undermined by piracy, then quite clearly the priority of the developers and publishers should be to focus on that platform in their design, development and marketing decisions.

As with any other business, games developers and publishers want to best accommodate the needs of the majority of their paying customers. Unfortunately all of these developers have received public abuse for making the above claims, the problem being that on the surface the disparity between PC and console game sales appears to have nothing to do with piracy. It seems to be a simple case of there being many times more console gamers than there are PC gamers. It's only when we take a closer look at the available data that it becomes apparent that things are not quite that simple.

I've saved an excellent example for last. As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%.

This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%. Regardless of the precise level of piracy, the key point to consider is that World of Goo addresses every single item on the checklist of excuses which people usually present for pirating games - yet it is still being pirated quite heavily.

 

[txa1265]

I'm sure I've played off line . . . most of the time actually when playing one of their games, have to have their thing loaded up but I didn't have any other issues.

Absolutely - saying Steam is 'must be online' is just a lie, misinformation.

 

[woges]

All kinds of data at http://www.theesa.com

 

[Lucky Day]

With all consoles having and predicting a decline in units sold except the Wii and no talk of replacement machines from Sony or MS I can't help but think this might be the start of the shift back to PC.

MS is now cashing in on the sales of the games but without a clear plan that will swing the cycle back to PC in a year or two. PC as a platform is always around, especially as it is more flexible and versatile. Its why consoles were abandoned 20 years ago when the videogame collapse hit. It happened again after the inital wave of 8 and 16 bit consoles too.

I have to agree with skav that the trend towards more casual games is a good thing - this push for hardcore AAA has been terrible for PC Gaming IMO. blah

And the "father of PC gaming" who got rich on the shareware model should, of all people know, that this amount of piracy is an indicator of popularity and increases distribution. Its like circulation to a newspaper - and he cashed in on it, and more recently, so did Galactic Civ. In spite of themselves I believe that's what is going on with the PC port of Prince of Persia - though I've been hearing that it fails as a console port.

 

[titus]

MMM false keys and all. I understand it and I acknowledge that it is happening a lot.

But games like D2 and WOW don't suffer from that.
So maybe one of those systems is the future for all pc gaming? (I am not talking about the games itself) I mean the concept of very large communitys, updates and patches all the way.

Maybe the future is just MMO for pc. But then we jus have to wait for a good mmo that can deliver what some jewels of single players rpg can deliver, but then in an online world?

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

I dont think just MMO, but definitely online and net-based. What I personally believe will die is DVD's and retail sale. PC gaming will shift to digital distribution platforms like steam, sever-side games, online games, possibly next gen browser games, etc. Also for single player titles. All these models that are more or less "safe" against rampant piracy and thus remain attractive to developers.

 

[GothicGothicness]

If you read in another thread I already wrote what PC gaming will be like in the future, that thread was sometime ago, but I am convinced we will get there.

Everything being server sides or online, for a server sided game developed by for example OLGA, you can play it on any platform, since all it presents is a picture on your screen, you do not need a graphics card in your computer, all you need is a screen and a keyboard, it can also be played in your cell phone, or on console.

 

[Lucky Day]

I can't see software in general ever getting away from some sort of hardware distribution model completely. Its like the theory of getting rid of brick and mortar retail - it defies human nature.

We have gone from tapes and cartridges, to two types of floppy disks and from CD's to DVD's - certainly we've added downloadable distribution but my storage space is limited, I tend to back it up on solid media if I can.

We could switch from driveless media in the future such as flash drives but that's taken a toll because a) its really easy to copy and b) we've had a number of virusi distributed already this way.

 

[Squeek]

Everything being server sides or online, for a server sided game developed by for example OLGA, you can play it on any platform, since all it presents is a picture on your screen, you do not need a graphics card in your computer, all you need is a screen and a keyboard, it can also be played in your cell phone, or on console.

That's incorrect. You're imagining something like the old IBM master/slave model where users only had access to dumb terminals. Client-server is kinda similar but different.

Your platform will need to have the right hardware if it's going to generate graphics that require it. Servers can run software your platform can't, but server-side software can't generate all the graphics needed on your end.

It's a question of "making it work" on the one hand versus "compensating completely" on the other. Those aren't the same thing.

 

[Chekote]

It's disappearing from retail for sure. But I think it's just evolving into purely digital distribution for two reasons:

1. PC is always ahead of the curve with tech
2. Digital distribution tools such as Steam are finally providing a solution for piracy.

It's very similar to the impact that iTunes had. I know a lot of people that used to pirate music. Now they get it via iTunes because it's so simple compared to pirating the music, where-as pirating used to be far simpler than going to the store and purchasing a CD.

I just hope Steam will start releasing sales figures so all this retail-only doom and gloom can be shut up for good.