Was the death of PC games really nigh? Revisiting an old thread.

Back in April 2005, I started a thread where I and many other posters made some bold predictions. I thought it’d be interesting to revisit the topic and find out how right or wrong we were.

I’ll start by dissecting some of my assertions

The Wii made a liar out of me. I was almost right…almost

Wrong again. 1080p games are fairly uncommon and 2560x1600 has replaced 1920x1200 on the PC. It only took 3 years instead of the 10+ years i envisioned.

4 years later, only the xbox 360 has anything resembling a decent online service, and it costs $50 / year. The PS3 has mediocre online at best and the Wii offerings are laughable. Plenty of cheaters on xbox live too. Time to eat my hat…

We did get Halo 3 and Gears of War I & II on Xbox360, but otherwise, little has changed in 4 years. Thus, I was wrong again.

Was the number of PC blockbusters severely reduced? Not quite. Half wrong on that one.

Wrong. expensive top of the line GPUs and SLI gave the edge to PCs.

The bottom line is that I was quite wrong. If any other participants in that thread are still alive, it would be interesting to find out if someone fared better.

I’ve been told that very little out there actually utilizes SLI properly. I’ve heard people say that in some games frame rates actually get lower if you force the game to use SLI.

Of course all that could be old wives tales. I logically don’t see why just having the other GPU do the next frame could be so difficult.

Anyway, even without SLI modern GPUs urinate on consoles while laughing heartily.

I don’t call Fallout 3, Elder scrolls IV, Sims 3 to name but a few… dead games. Fallout 3 is perhaps the most beautifully rendered game I’ve ever seen in my life (and on top of that the fantastic visuals don’t even effect performance! granted: I was playing it using the Geforce 8800 Ultra: But that just proves my point)

Consoles will never, never, ever outperform a PC in terms of performance. No current architecture will remain in the ‘lead’ for 2-3 years upon release. I would love to find a console control able to even remotely come to close to the capability of a keyboard + mouse.

Well, it would seem that Worlf of Warcraft (warcrack) is proof positive that the PC gaming isn’t dying a painful death.

Edit: even with their BBB failing rating for failing to live up to most of their advertising, having horrible support and what not, we gamers still eat it up.

You didn’t mention the biggest problem with PC gaming: the cycle of piracy which leads to DRM which turns off gamers. I haven’t seen the sales figures but my impression is that this has had a major impact on PC games in the last few years and with fewer A+ PC exclusives compared to 10 years ago. I would imagine that PC gaming will still survive but perhaps become a niche segment for hardcore strategy/FPS gamers.

  I also think that the console has a lot of potential with innovative control mechanics like Project Natal and greater integration with home entertainment. 10 years from now I think most households in rich countries will have consoles performing a variety of roles.

I am willing to bet that despite the storm of people saying how much they hate DRM, that DRM hasn’t impacted PC game sales all that much.

You make it sound like only high end hardware beats out consoles - you could get a $60 video card today that has more graphics processing power than any console. The same with a $150 card of 2 years ago.

The Xbox 360’s GPU most closely resembles, IIRC, is a Radeon 2600, or somewhere near the performance between a geforce 7600 and 7800. Think about how old that is, how many generations ago that was. Any even the newest Xbox 360 off the lot will still be stuck in what was, even in 2005, mid-range technology.
I do think Consoles are killing PCs, at least in some genres. Almost everything is developed for at least the Xbox 360 along with the PC, and most developers take the easiest route with the lowest common denominator. They’re stuck with 2005 technology so they can’t push the cutting edge. Games will still work better on the PC - better resolution, post processing effects, frame rates, cpu power, etc. - but not to the full capability to the hardware. There are some exceptions like Mass Effect, where the developers take the extra time to properly develop the PC port to be better than the console port - but for the most part the consoles are dragging down PC gaming to their level.

Historically, hardware advances have driven games and games have driven hardware advances. Everything got better quickly. It was a great and exciting part of gaming. But now we’re looking at software development technology being locked into 2004/2005 technology for what, 8 years? It’s stifling the game industry.

The biggest problem, bar none, with PC gaming is the piracy issue. Unfortunately there isn’t any real way to overcome this barring some sort of continual online-verification system (Steam probably comes closest and I love it to death.)

Instead what’s happening is the programming of blockbuster titles for consoles primarily with a secondary release to PC after the low-lying consumers have been plucked.

I also agree completely with SenorBeef: since a multi-platform release is virtually requisite in today’s market, games get programmed for the least demanding platform. Upsampling it to PC standards rarely goes well; see GTA IV.

GTA 4 is the exception rather than the rule - they managed to screw that one up so hard somehow. Most console ports to the PC are equal or better than the console counterparts, but don’t live up to what PCs are capable of. GTA 4 is the only one I can think of offhand that was actually worse for the PC.

True, and it pisses me off - but not really in terms of tech. I’m quite content to be able to play the latest games on a two year old rig.

What does piss me off, however, is that 90% of games these days have an interface and control scheme that is tied to the console version - because they’re designed for both. Very glaring in RPGs, such as Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. And don’t get me started on PC games with save points. You wouldn’t like me when I’m talking about PC games with save points.

DRM helps to sell products which have it (unless, perhaps it is over-the-top DRM and hits the news for it). http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html

“Finally, on the contentious topic of DRM, aside from Spore whose audience may well have fallen victim to DRM-induced hysteria, the presence of intrusive DRM appears not to increase piracy of a game. For example Call of Duty 4, Assassin’s Creed and Crysis all have no intrusive DRM whatsoever: they all use basic SafeDisc copy protection with no install limits, no online activation, and no major reports of protection-related issues. Yet all were pirated heavily enough to have the dubious distinction of being in the Top 10 downloaded games list. But strangely absent from the list are several popular games which do use more intrusive DRM: BioShock, Crysis Warhead, and Mass Effect. This indicates quite clearly that intrusive DRM is not the main reason why some games are pirated more heavily than others.”

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html
“For offline games, the problem of protection is much more complex. As expected all offline protection systems have eventually been cracked, and once cracked, a pirated version of an offline game is identical to the legitimate version in terms of gameplay experience. However the SecuROM, StarForce and Tages protection methods in particular have presented a strong barrier against being cracked, and the end result has been that proper working pirated versions of some games have not been available prior to the game’s official release, and sometimes not even a week or two afterwards. This delay and the resulting uncertainty in the availability of a pirated copy, however brief, can drive some impatient gamers to actually purchase the game rather than wait for a working crack to appear. There are several examples of copy protection/DRM being quite effective at preventing piracy for a period of time:”

I will note however that PC game sales have been steadily declining since 2000. PhilSteinmeyer.com » Blog Archive » Retail PC Game Sales – Still On Life Support

It looks possibly we’re bottoming out. That the drop doesn’t happen until ~5 years after the internet started growing among the public, I could only offer some hypotheses like the introduction of napster around 2000, or that a certain internet mass needed to be achieved first. Or it could have nothing to do with piracy–though I doubt it (for instance, CD sales also took a massive hit starting in 2000 and digital sales have not made up that difference even near.)

No, it never was. Console hype completely warped some people’s perceptions of the future of gaming.

As has been stated before, console hardware can never really compete with PC hardware beyond the initial few months at launch. Bottom line is that consoles rely on gaming PC technology as their basis, secondly, consoles are largely frozen in time with their hardware specs, and finally, PCs are bigger and therefore can fit more in, and dump more heat more easily.

As for the games, the console is a great platform for certain genres of games however it is inferior to the PC in terms of complex control schemes and game formats. By and large the console versions of games are dumbed-down compared to their PC counterparts, they have poorer graphics, more basic control schemes and are generally fairly shallow (e.g. the majority of console FPS appear to be a) run to half-height wall or barrels b) crouch c) shoot d) crouch compared to their fast-paced, highly mobile PC counterparts).

Consoles are a fantastic replacement of the old arcade machines and for the lower-end of PC games (i.e. as far as simple control schemes, graphics). Each platform will have a niche and will continue to thrive.

I’m never sure how much to infer from these charts. The idea that the last few years have had lower sales than 1994 is scary. On the other hand, it only counts retail sales. I’ve spent more money on buying digital distributions of games than retail for a few years. Does the industry publish figures on how much PC game revenue is through digital distribution?

I’d venture to guess that if you look at the total digital sales of music in the other chart I linked to, that it will be strikingly similar to online sales/PC game subscriptions as they’ve grown over the last few years. Just a guess.

I don’t.

I was a frequent PC game buyer in the 90s, in the sense that I purchased one or two games every single year from 1993 (Space Hulk and Doom) to 2004. Since then I haven’t purchased any “new” games at all, and though I’ve purchased quite a few “classic” and “gold” editions. The reason for that is twofold.

Mostly it’s because I have difficulty finding anywhere to buy games. In the 90s every electronics store and games shop had a wide selection of games well displayed. I could wander in on a weekend morning, buy new software and wander out. The same shops also often sold hardware and non-gaming software that I also frequently purchased. Today in a town of 100, 00 people there are two dedicated gaming stores, and 95% of their shelf space is devoted to console games and hardware. A small selection of PC games and zero PC hardware. The electronic stores have an even worse selection of software, and hardware is also severely limited.

Why the change? I have friends who work or worked in this sector, and they all tell me the same thing. In the 90s they could afford to stock games because, although they weren’t big money spinners, they had a high enough turnover to be profitable and they served a valuable function of getting people like me in to browse and buy the more profitable hardware. The introduction of internet shopping reduced the sales dramatically. People would still browse in the stores, but when they found something they likes they went away and purchased it online where it was 20% cheaper. And it was 20% cheaper because there was no store to maintain.

So the stores stopped stocking “speculative” items like software and cheap hardware. Today they only stock items that people will come in specifically to buy and where they can be competitive with online sources because of bulk freight. So they are full of printers and photo paper and MP3 players and so forth.

This has also made it less appealing for me to buy games online. Without the sales staff selecting for good games it’s hard to know what to buy. The industry was always 99% crap, but the stuff sold in stores seemed to be 99% good. I purchased games like Deus Ex and Starcraft brand new based on the box alone because I basically knew that I could trust the quality if it was still on the shelf after a week. Shithouse games would get bad reviews from customers and the staff would cull them. The few times I purchased games online in the early 2000s I have been sorely disappointed.
So for myself and many people I know it’s a spiral to oblivion. We abandoned the stores for the cheaper prices online, so the stores stopped stocking games, so we can’t find them to buy online any more.

The second problem is related. The last game I bought online was Medal of Honor in, IIRC, 2002. It was a second rate FPS ported directly from some platform system. It was a badly plotted system that used technology from 10 years earlier. A friend also gave me a copy of some Turok game that he had purchased and was throwing out. It was the same. And this sort of thing has swamped the PC games market, where games from platforms to PC swamp the market and generate sale simply because they have been ported. And this make sit hard to find genuinely good PC games because it make sales figures misleading. Prior to 2000 it was a rarity to find a console game ported to PC. Sometime after 2000 it became the norm, and it seemed that most PC games were console games.

So I certainly wouldn’t blame this on cracked copies . At least I know for myself and the people I know it isn’t true. We will still happily pay money for an official copy of a game if we have a better than average chance of not getting a Turok or a Medal of Honor.

Huh? Your graph seems to show that CD sales maxed out at ~820 units. Digital singles alone are currently at ~1000 units and digital + CD is ~1380 units. The total sales only appear to have dropped below the all time CD record for the years 2001 and 2002; by 2003 combined CD and digital single sales once again topped 820 units.

I’d also add that the internet has fundamentally changed the music industry with or without illegal sales. Music companies no longer have any ability to dictate what music people are exposed to or what music they can buy. As a result it’s harder to develop true pop music that appeals to a wide base. It’s all become either “niche marketing” or “appeal to the lowest common denominator” (ie 14 year olds).

As a result adult pop music has all but died. Spending by young teens (our LCD) has remained unaffected by the internet. In contrast young adults have stopped buying music. Now you can blame this on illegal downloads if you wish, but the fundamental changes in music industry seem a much more likely culprit. Adults simply cannot find music they they like because the popular music they are exposed to is LCD garbage and they have trouble finding the niche stuff they would like.

And again I speak from experience here. I have a hard time finding music I would purchase on commercial radio and TV, I have to subscribe to specific niche websites to do that. That’s an suboptimal solution for the industry because most people have fairly broad tastes and we’ll buy “different” music we like if we are exposed to it, but by definition these niche sites don’t expose us to it. At best I get exposed to novel stuff through “Other people who bought this also purchased these songs from our sister sites”. That’s much less effective than top 40 programming where we could hear what the majority of the population thought was appealing, not just the population under 18. (And yes, some of this can be attributed to age, but you’ll hear similar comments from 25 year olds who remember the good old days of 2000.

Additionally we have the competitive effects DVDs and computer games, where the increase in their sales almost precisely mirrors the the loss of music sales.

Let’s just say that it’s highly debatable that unauthorised copying of music has had any measurable effect on the music industry. So using that highly contentious fact to support the equally contentious claim that illegal copies have had any effect on the games industry is, well, highly contentious.

Stores stock according to sales. They’re not all going to stop stocking something that’s making money.

If you saw a reduction in shelf space, the safe bet is that the market shrunk.

The hit began in 2000. Digital sales began in 2003. Digital singles might be doing well, but a single sells for a significantly reduced price from a full album. The total digital sales are at ~180 and CD sales are at ~380, for a total of ~560. The market has shrunk by 32% since 2000.

Obviously this depends on who’s reading the graphic right.

Absolutely. That was my point, though I may not have made it well. The market indisputably did shrink for the stores, and it shrank because people stopped buying from them and started buying from online sources. IOW the overall games market would have been stable or slightly increased, but the store’s market decreased, so they reduced shelf space. The reduction in shelf space then led to a decline in the whole market because people could no longer shop effectively.

My point was that the decline in store sales wasn’t due to unauthorised copying. It was due to competition. The decline in overall sales also wasn’t due to illegal copies, it was due to a reduction in shelf space, due to the original store sales decline that also wasn’t due to unauthorised downloads.

Essentially online games businesses were parasites on physical games stores. When the parasite load become too high the host died, killing the parasite as well. I’m sure there’s a name for this phenomenon in economics. My point is that though it’s internet related it’s not due to unauthorised copying. Unauthorised copies would have been a far greater market share in the early 90s when bypassing copy protection meant that you had to photocopy two code pages in the manual and most games I saw were unauthorised.

Ahh. Well that’s true enough, but it seems to be a heck of a stretch to attribute that to unauthorised downloads. People are actually buying far more music now that there are unauthorised downloads, that alone would seem to put the kibosh on the idea that unauthorised downloads reduce music sales.

Rather what are seeing is that now people no longer need to buy an album with 8 shithouse songs to hear 4 good songs and they are opting not to. This is just a fundamental change in the business plan. It seems that if the RIAA weren’t to collude in an anticompetive manner this would be the business model the free market would produce anyway. IOW it’s got nothing to do with unauthorised downloads removing market share, it’s entirely attributable to a a reduction in buggy whip sales.

Well given that the graphic has no axis labels and no legend explanation its almost impossible to know how to interpret it. But I think you may have interpreted it correctly, though it still doesn’t support the idea that unauthorised downloads are having any impact at all absent anticompetitive practices by the RIAA.

Interesting, Blake. My budget keeps me from buying new games very often–pretty much I buy new games only when they’re released by Blizzard, or when I get a gift card. A few times a year I’ll buy an old classic game for twenty or thirty bucks, figuring that’s a good and relatively affordable treat for myself. And I always–always–buy from retail stores. Usually it was Circuit City (may they rest in peace), simply because their prices were about ten bucks less than elsewhere. But I also bought from Best Buy and Walmart. I always found their selections to be acceptable: when I went in looking for a specific game, I think I always found the one I was looking for.

Of course, before I buy a new game, I read online reviews of it; when I’m looking for a cheap game, I find one in a genre I like (e.g., RTS) that has good reviews on the box from websites I trust (e.g., Gamespot). Maybe it’s just that the shelf space has reduced, but it’s limited to games with good reviews?

I’ve very rarely been tempted to get a console. The Wii is tempting for me, since it’d fill a niche that computer gaming wouldn’t, and might get me up and moving. Unless I found an excellent working Xbox for $10 at a yard sale, though, there’s no chance I’d go for one.

Do the console vs PC comparisons ever include the tons of money being spent on MMOs? not only all the pay for play games like World of Warcraft, but all the free ones with specialty shops that bleed you a little at a time and are designed for younger kids like Wizard 101, they are all raking in the cash. The industry has changed, box sales are not the end all be all of profits anymore. PC gaming is doing just fine.

This is a good point. I spend $15 a month on WoW. Plus having bought the game itself and the two expansions. Just on subscription amount, that’s $180 a year, plus the initial outlay of approximately $150 for the game and xpacs. Expand that $180 over the past four years that I’ve been playing this game and you have $720. And when the next xpac somes out (whenever that will be), I’m about 90% likely to buy that within two months of its release, too.

That’s more than I ever spent on games per year before I started MMORPGing.