PC gaming: Not just still alive, but still dominant, says PAX East panel
there are gaming news sites and blogs for a reason you know, this isn’t one
:rolleyes:
then they kissed
I thought the topic is appropriate.
Anyway, one problem with talking about PC gaming as a force compares to say console gaming is that often times statistics about PC gaming include League and WoW, which are massively heavy hitters, but for the most part operate in a separate market and appeal to separate customers than your standard say FPS. So just because there’s a lot of revenue in the PC market may not mean there’s much around for games like Asscreed and CoD, because a lot of the PC market is people who exclusively play League or WoW and don’t really show interest in branching out.
May I ask how you know that? The majority of friends I have enjoy League of Legends as well as tons of other games.
I picked up on it mostly from just seeing a lot of League exclusive “gamers” (quotes not as an insult, I just feel like only giving a shit about one game and not caring about games in general doesn’t fit the label) at my university. But it’s also statistically valid too seeing as the number of League players dwarfs the number of people playing nearly every other game combined. It’s popularity is so astronomical it’d have to be grabbing large percentages of people outside of the standard gaming community.
Not to mention, for whatever reason, League seems to have grabbed the female gender a lot better than most other games.
tbh, the xbox360/ps3 generation only really distracted the attention from pc gaming space because it was the largest leap in tech/quality since the snes to n64
it was also the first generation for gaming to reach the corporate-stage of industry (for the better and most certainly the worse)
other factors that drew attention away from pc space was the fact that both consoles had amazing performance due to it being made on criminally foreign architecture which didnt, in any stretch of the imagination, port well at all to pc
if you look back to pre-7th gen consoles, there was clear pc dominance back then, but consoles had their merits because it was still a primarily japanese-dominated industry, and hence creativity and inspiration was rich, which made consoles very relevant (though one could blame the economic crisis for the lack of creativity in ANY medium lately, hence why FPS industry is oversaturated with CoD clones or other brown/grey-filtered modern-military wannabees)
pretty much consoles were consoles until MS came along and tried to PC-ize the console industry, in the process corrupting many masterrace ideas like DLC (from expansions), Microtransations (from DRM services, which frankly, only steam got right), but also bringing consoles on a path to obsolete-ness
the 7th gen saw the success of pc concepts like DLC, microtransactions, though these ideas were most certainly an innovation for their brief time, they soon corrupted into the unholy plagues we see them as today
now that the 7th gen - The console’s greatest, and possibly worst generation - has passed, and the 8th gen not receiving any leverage from outside-events or big leaps in innovation (like the 7th gen did), and overall looking pretty meh, pc will have most certainly reclaim its former glory and will carry it on for the long generation to come (7th gen was THE longest console generation to date, and now 8th gen’s only going to get longer)
pc gaming has always been alive and dominant, 7th gen consoles only saw their glory because they were able to adapt concepts that have been on pc since long ago; of course this has its consequences, because the 7th gen consoles have basically popularized the most shady business practices of which should’ve been kept under the dark dungeons of the masterrace, and now its coming to bite them back in the ass in the 8th gen (look at that whole xbone DRM scandal)
With how shitty the hardware in the PS4 and Xbone is and how much higher resolutions are looming on the horizon, there’s not a chance the 8th gen is going to last longer than the 7th. The figures Sony and M$ have been throwing around for lifetimes (IIRC one of them said something stupid like 10 years) are blatant bullshit.
Not to mention if VR takes off the consoles are going to have it really bad because VR necessitates very high frame rates and resolution. Also the more open ecosystem on the PC gives it the flexibility to adapt to VR and really utilize it to its full potential.
I really think Gen 8 marks the end of consoles as a respectable gaming platform. Of course tons of people will still use them and enjoy them, but they’re becoming more and more obsolete as a platform and M$ and Sony are really strangling the ecosystem just when openness is becoming the most important.
the japanese (mostly nitnendo really) saved gaming during the great crash of 1983/1984, maybe they will do it again
the only thing that will save any console today are their exclusives (multiplats dont matter anymore since there is little difference between any console), and seeing how ps/xb garner most of their success from 3rd party support (of which whom almost always release multiplats), they could indeed die to Nintendo, who, despite their screw up with the wii u, are frankly far safer from the coming apocalypse, as they have a plethora of quality exclusives to keep themselves afloat, not to mention money in the bank (they rich). Also, nintendo hasnt really ever done DLC or any sort of expansion-like project ever, in fact i dont think they will ever do it for the wii u. You could even say that nintendo games are complete; unrushed, virtually bugfree, no artificial longevity from taking out and re-releasing portions of the base game, for once you can actually feel excited for a game again, instead of hopeful for the sequel not to be as shitty as the predecessor
btw edited my previous post
Guys, there’s a more important discussion than checking the perfectly fine pulse of PC gaming.
Are marbles dead? Are kids playing it enough at schools around the world these days? This worries me more than the status of PC games (which are alright, btw).
Full disclosure, I wasn’t gaming in Nintendo’s hey day, so I never built any brand loyalty or nostalgia towards them. But I honestly think they’re in one of the WORST positions to save console gaming right now.
Nintendo’s strategy has been to push hardware with popular proprietary software. Their software is growing stale, and they’re not coming out with ANY new impressive IPs. I think with the growth of Indie and third party AAA the exclusive titles strategy just isn’t effective anymore. I really don’t respect Nintendo because forcing you to buy proprietary hardware just to play certain games is really really anti consumer and just isn’t working anymore as a business strategy. Nintendo is going to have to completely reinvent their old tried and true method of shafting the costumer. Sure they can keep all their exclusives, but if they can’t pull strong third party support they’re not going to get anywhere anymore.
In addition, they took a HUGE hit to brand credibility with the WiiU that’ll really hurt them even if they pull their shit together.
And, to top the cake, their handheld market is doomed. Smartphones will eat larger and larger chunks out of the DS until the DS is dead. Nintendo is responding to the smartphone market all wrong. They see smartphones as a powerful growing force, so they feel threatened and are fighting tooth and nail against the smartphone market. Instead, they should just realize that smartphones are the future of handheld gaming and use their unique established position in the handheld market to pioneer the gaming smartphone.
Nintendo is really really out of touch with the gaming community. Maybe it’s because they’re in Japan and I’m speaking from an American perspective, but almost every big move they’ve made as of late was a complete blunder. In order to save console gaming they’d have to completely reinvent their image and strategy. I just don’t see it happening.
The thing that’s going to save console gaming is cloud gaming. It’s probably not going to become mainstream AT LEAST until Gen 9, maybe even later, but when it does it’ll be a massive blow to PC gaming. Why buy an ultra powerful gaming PC when a 100 dollar streaming box will graphically outperform it via connection to a super computer? Not to mention there’s some really nice technical and economic advantages to cloud gaming for businesses especially for multiplayer games.
console gaming is not going anywhere my friends, my friend was playing Need for Speed Undercover at 400x300 (ps3) then I showed him the same game on PC at 1920x1080 he said the quality is “about the same on both”.
Dude, there’s no way the game was running at that res on PS3. Not even most PS2 games ran that low.
edit:
400x300? Yeah, that’s ridiculous. No way it was that low.
800x600 was the resolution of my old crappy CRT monitor, and I could barely play things that looked somewhat decent on it… half that resolution in both dimensions is ludicrously low.
Even if he was playing on a CRT TV, the lowest res the PS3 will output to is 480p/576p, so that res is just not possible at all.
I suspect he was using hyperbole.
I was using hyperbole but in reality, I saw it on a 1080p full hd TV plugged via HDMI and properly configured. As with most PS3 games I’ve seen, the menu items and hud were at 1280x720 but the 3D graphics looked crappy enough to be 800x480 with no AA or AF, also there was major stuttering problems when more than 2 cop cars were on the screen.
At worst it was 600p or native with no/shitty AA. Most PS360 games do run at native 720p but a sizeable portion are rendered at sub-hd res. Consoles have been doing that for ages, it’s nothing that started on the previous gen.