PC gaming executives: Everything's fine
The state of the PC gaming industry is fine. Just ask any executive whose business depends on PC gaming.
Representatives from Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Crytek held a combination political rally/pep talk for the PC gaming industry Friday at Nvidia's GeForce LAN 4 event in Alameda, Calif. The audience--several hundred rabid PC gamers with plans to spend the entire weekend playing Crysis--cheered the panelists as they reassured attendees that all was well in the PC gaming world.
The runaway success of gaming consoles like Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's PlayStation 3 has the PC gaming industry on the defensive these days. Once the only destination for serious gamers, the PC has lost a little momentum as less expensive and increasingly powerful consoles proliferate. According to NPD, sales of PC gaming software in 2006 were down substantially from 2001, when $1.5 billion worth of games were sold. Last year, total sales were just $970 million.
Some of the panelists took issue with those numbers, claiming they don't reflect the increasing number of games distributed digitally. And Michael Wolf, global product manager for Microsoft Games for Windows, pointed out that there are more people playing games on PCs than on all consoles combined. Still, the executives couldn't help but sound defensive as they discussed some of the broader issues.
Part of the problem is that modern PC games require a very expensive system to deliver a suitable experience. Nvidia's Roy Taylor, vice president of content relations, noted that Crysis can't be played at its maximum settings even on top-line PCs today. Half the audience upgraded their systems just to play Crysis, which is great for hardware companies like Nvidia and Intel but tough on the average person's wallet.
Consoles deliver a pretty good gaming experience for far less, and even an audience of hard-core PC gamers had to agree. About two-thirds of the audience owned either a Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3--or both. As a result, the PC gaming market is increasingly devoted to more immersive games, such as complex first-person shooters like Crysis, while the consoles are thought of as more of a social experience, Taylor said.
And that's what the PC industry would like to try to do: find a way to get casual gamers interested in the PC again as a gaming platform. Randy Stude, director of Intel's gaming platform office, fielded several questions about the integrated graphics performance of Intel's PC chipsets. No one at the event was using an integrated graphics chipset, which is designed to deliver basic graphics performance for cheaper desktops or notebooks. And that's part of the problem. "Something needs to be done so a person buying a PC at Wal-Mart could be a PC gamer too," Stude said.
There are always going to be inherent advantages of the PC as a gaming device, said David DeMartini, vice president and global general manager for EA Partners, a division of Electronic Arts. For one, it's easier for game developers to write software for Windows PCs using Intel's or AMD's chips, as the three major consoles all use different technology. It's also possible for gamers to evolve their systems with the games, dropping in new processors or graphics hardware to accomodate the demands of new games. Once a console is developed, it doesn't evolve, and the game experience doesn't evolve along with it.
But it seems that PC gaming is becoming more of a specialized experience for only certain types of games. At an event last week, Intel's Dadi Perlmutter, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobility division, bemoaned the fact that just about every game developed for the PC these days seems to involve killing on a mass scale.
There's more to it than that, of course, but PC games do seem to either be first-person shooters or complex role-playing and strategy games. And that's the interesting question for the PC industry: people are buying PCs anyway, why don't game developers focus on casual yet compelling games for those of us without an itchy trigger finger?
Perhaps because they are making so much money on the current audience. The several hundred gamers at the Nvidia event are willing to spend vast amounts of time and money on the games that are already out there, and no good business executive wants to alienate their best customers. It seems likely that the PC will continue to be the platform of choice for the rabid gamer, but if the gaming industry wants to convince people who are buying PCs anyway to think of those systems as more than just a word-processing and Internet surfing device, they've got some work to do.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Pretty graphics has taken the place of a good story line in movies(ie Matrix, LoTR, Beowulf,etc,etc,etc) and has replaced good gameplay for a long time(i.e. 99% of the games made since 1998.
I can invite two or three friends over for a gaming party on the Xbox 360 or the Wii. If I want to play mutliplayer on the PC, I have to send them all home to log in. Advantage: consoles.
Developers should keep making the complex RPG and RTS games for the PC - those are my favorite games. But the sit-by-yourself gaming won't attract casual gamers looking to socialize.
Second, consoles come with more than one paddle for a reason, many games allow 2 people in the same room to play co-op, PC games don't really offer the same luxury.
Most PC games can't be played in co-op even if you buy 2 copies of the game. This is an area where the PC is way behind the console.
Since I upgraded to a gaming pc last year, my sons and I have been playing a lot more pc games. And yes, we have a Xbox 360 too. I've recently signed on to Gametap for a year and I'm loving it. And most of the games work with my older intergrated video card pc. IMO service's like Gametap will go a long way to keep pc gaming alive.
Remember when Duke Nukem 3D came out? It had co-op mode where 2 or more players can connect through 56k dial-up modem and beat levels together, and kill bad guys.
Make a computer game with humans versus computer, storyline, AI, anything. Just let the humans be social and chat through the keyboard or voice headset. I'm not talking about team-based deathmatch, I'm talking about involving a good storyline with the gameplay, so it's fun and social for the humans.
Games for Microsoft's Windows operating system I have also
acquired a few games for Mac OS X and Linux.
There is a common misconception about what PC and Mac
means. Today PCs have always been standard machines or
personal computers mainly running Intel or AMD hardware with
Windows or Linux. A Mac is an Apple machine running the Mac
OS with a different subset of hardware (has used Motorola chips
and IBM and Free Scale Semiconductor PowerPC chips until
switching to Intel.
Macs are PCs now too that are fully capable of running Windows
either via virtualization or through Boot Camp in OS X Leopard
or higher which lets you natively run Windows on a Mac side by
side with OS X as a dual boot system.
OS X and Linux also have games and are in the PC market -- the
Mac it can be argued is a market in itself with no other vendors
for the operating system or hardware besides Apple -- even in
PC space no other vendor supplies Windows OS besides
Microsoft but other vendors compete on hardware -- no one
company owns the entire PC market although Apple controls or
owns most of the Mac market just by not letting anyone else sell
Mac hardware of their own. Apple has chosen to keep OS X
unlicensed and so have no outside machines running Macintosh
OS.
Mac OS X has great games too and the games in OS X and Linux
are both OpenGL -- and there are no problems with OpenGL on
these platforms like in Windows with system crashes etc when
pressing the start key for example in Windows while an OpenGL
game is running -- it crashes. That doesn't happen to OpenGL
games on a Mac certainly. Microsoft sabotaged OpenGL to not
work as well in Windows and as a proprietary replacement they
choose the DirectX standard of their own making.
DirectX graphics because of what Microsoft did look better and
work better in Windows -- if MS did not do what it did to
OpenGL then OpenGL would be the major graphics engine in
Windows and there would be no DirectX or it would be behind
OpenGL.
I use a Nintendo Wii for console gaming but sometimes prefer
PC games.
There are some cross-plaform APIs for most of these things too, but they are not as widely ported - or employed by game makers - as OpenGL.
Another annoying thing I've noticed the last few years: You play a game like Dungeon Siege for a week and they make the ending ridiculously difficult.
This means that with a top end games PC or a top end console, gammers are not yet getting the full benefits in their games.
This also means that the market is far better at the lower horsepower end of gamming with plently of games developers and good well developed games and equippment.
Also both the PC and the PS3 have had their own teething problems during transistions.
Might i add that you can make the same kind of games with a PPU,GPU,CPU top end PC system as you can make with the Cell,GPU system of the PS3 and that the PC is fast surpassing the PS3 so the picture hasen't changed that much since 2002-2003 with the PS2 and the PC but yes during 1999-2001 the PC did indeed dominate and the consoles have caught back up since.
What happens next though, what does the 8th generation console games market look like thats the question that will answer your question about PC's vs consoles.
To answer this question you need to look inside Japan.
One thing i've noticed is that NEC already has some very powerful new chips up that are like GPU's from what i can gather, and Intel were looking at powerful transputer like arrays.
However the top end gamming systems of today(ps3,xbox360) hasent't made as big an adaption into the market as hoped and this looks set to possibly lower investment confidence for the next cycle.
So at the moment at a guess theres a 50/50 chance that Japan will come out with a console system as kick ass as is currently the trend. Indeed though its a question and i will be curios to see what horse power and use of horse power might arise.
Also with the success of the WII, more groups may feel confident to try and market their own consoles in a way that pushes for a games market that uses Java or Java like compatability allowing some games to run on all machines.
A conflict of royalty interests could easily make high end consoles more expensive as to reclaim profit margins.
The games makers though who make good powerful diverse games can't lose.
But the most damaging thing to the PC is, unfortunately, Windows itself. With each new version it has bogged the gamer down. Windows 98SE was pretty good for games really, XP seemd to me to run games at slightly lower framerates (but admitedly this did improve in time) but Vista is incredibly bad as the basis for a gaming platform. DirectX10 is an unmitigated disaster. Admitedly I do have a relatively powerful system, but I have done all sorts of tests with both XP and Vista, and it has become clear that this new generation of OS from Microsoft is cripplingly slow in real terms.
What we really need is some sort of Windows Gaming Environment, a very low cost games-orientated OS without all the system hogging rubbish that we simply don't need. I do wonder how fast my system would be if I didn't have to run Windows in the background.
I guess another reason why game developers would choose consoles over PCs is because of piracy. A lot of PC gamers pirate games, where as it's a lot more difficult if you've got a console.
Don't get me wrong I like pc gaming but its nice to know I can run into game stop and not be stopped by hardware, well anymore you might have to buy a guitar shaped controller but yeah...I understand why people head to consoles
Actually, if there was MMO like WoW that you could play on he console....pfff.....I think those dev's would jump ship in a heart beat.
http://****************.blogspot.com
Steve's take on them.
and had zero problems playing my favorite games.
Sucks to be uninformed, I guess...
/P
You can't find old games like that anymore... or so I thought until I found home of the underdogs.
http://www.the-underdogs.info/
Executives, want to make their hall of fame? You'd better be the best of the best and not just a flashy graphics overload like what's being written now.
Just because new games in boxes weren't being purchased for PCs doesn't mean that people weren't spending money to play games on PCs. How much money was sunk into a monthly subscription fee?
That's a new game paid for every 3 months and yet it's not counted in PC gaming sales because no one "sold" a game. So Blizzard has 8 million WoW subscribers @ $15 a month and we're to believe that the PC gaming industry is dying?
Not hardly.
The Wii, yes.
The PS2, yes.
The 360 and PS3, not quite.
on never-ending zero-achieving shooter games.
It cost me 3 weeks of my life (total time wasted) to beat a video
game with nothing to show for it but more spots on my bum.
- ah to be young again and know everything
- by Dragon Forge November 20, 2007 5:05 AM PST
- But it is perfectly easy to see the various age grps and the type of responses.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(38 Comments)More money is spent on pc gaming, and I haven't picked up a hardcopy in years. Consoles are for quick and dirty, less intelligent gaming runs.
The hype out there now is meant to try and segregate the markets because the industries are trying to figure out the consumer and move them to the most profitable platform and game line.
My younguns have all the consoles but the lion's share of entertainment time is always on the pc.