The last few years haven’t been that great for PC gaming with fewer and fewer high-profile exclusive titles. I am wondering whether this trend will reverse somewhat in the near future. Some reasons:
Starcraft 2 has provided some much needed buzz for the platform and has been one of the few triple-A titles exclusive to PC’s recently. In general strategy gaming, the last PC stronghold , seems to be holding up and Civilization 5 should provide some additional momentum later this year.
Online delivery platforms like Steam seem to have gained a measure of acceptance reducing concerns about privacy and providing a vehicle for smaller, unconventional titles.
It appears that this console generation may last longer than usual with Sony and Microsoft milking their machines for a couple more years. In the meantime PC hardware is moving forward as usual meaning there will a large performance gap in the near future. Perhaps this will tempt some developers with PC exclusive titles which they port later to the next generation of consoles.
Diablo 3 is looming (next year, maybe?) and will sell millions. There are also a ton of MMORPGs scheduled to drop over the next year or so, including the next WoW expansion.
I guess as long as Blizzard keeps putting out games, PC gaming will survive.
At worst, PC gaming will be a niche product. RTS and MMORPG games seem to work best there, at least. There’s no way you could get a Rome: Total War game onto a console.
…Well, there might be, but that’s why I’m not a video game designer. i just can’t see a way to do it.
It’s retail presence in the States is small, but combine it with it’s online presence and you have a platform that stands up to any SINGLE of the current gen consoles, specifically the xbox and PS3, just fine. It’s still the top gaming platform in most of Europe and Asia as well. There are more active Steam accounts than xbox live accounts, and consistently, there are more PC gamers playing online than console gamers. We also have the most exclusives. A lot are AA, not AAA games, but in total we have more than any console.
In terms of gaming/graphics performance there is already a huge gap. 1080p gaming is almost unheard of on the consoles, as most games on them aren’t even true HD (sub 720p) and lack the detail levels and image filtering (AA, AF, etc) that PC gaming offers.
That doesn’t mean consoles as a WHOLE don’t have the larger share of the marker though. I do think that will balance out a bit, however, as consoles conitnue to age, poorly, and more hardcore gamers will at least dabble as the companies behind the consoles continue to focus more and more on the casual crowd.
I expect the same cycle that has existed since the 80’s will continue. PC’s will become more and more popular as gaming platforms until the new gen of consoles arrives, and then it will decline for a few years, then become more and more popular, util the next gen of consoles after that… etc.
It’s hard to call a platform irrelevant (as some do) when the biggest game in the industry is on it exclusively, and at least four other of the most popular and profitable franchises call PC their primary home.
I wonder why they don’t just come up with a keyboard and mouse peripheral for consoles. Being a keyboard designed specifically for gaming, it could be even easier to use than a normal keyboard. Anybody know why?
It doesn’t need a comeback, it simply needs to continue evolving. Forget the old video game stores and go the Steam route. I’ve bought more PC games in the last year from steam sales than i have in decade prior to that.
Post that possibility on any console gaming forum board and you’ll see why pretty quick.
Setting aside the 100’s of “GEEK BOARD” shouts, you’ll also get some more logical arguments. Primarily, that the whole point of consoles is homogeneous hardware (and locked down software). It’s the same reason why when the xbox went through it’s recent redesign, none of the hardware performance was improved, and latency was actually introduced into the engineering in order to have the new one perform exactly as the old one. You can’t have two gamers on consoles with different experiences. And developers won’t create two different GUI’s for the same platform to support a peripheral that will almost certainly screw up balance in multi-player and affect single-player as well.
Can you name these titles? I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of WoW for the big one, but that’s hardly PC gaming as people know it. I think I know what the five biggest franchises are, but I certainly wouldn’t say that any of them were primarily PC titles.
Franchises are different, though. Most PC developers, even the huge days when PC gaming was it, did not make dozens and dozens of games in the same characters and setup like Mario. With the exception of, say, Ultima, it’s just not done.
In the medium run, consoles will still dominate. In the long, though, I don’t see this maintaining. PC’s will get even easier to use, graphics will eventually be a minor standard component on everything, people will just plug them into the fancy big new tv’s for mega-screens. Your X-BOX 2050 will likely be a convenient hardware plug-in, not a totally different system.
Nintendo made a mouse for the SNES but very few games supported it.
Today you don’t even need to make any specialized peripherals since modern consoles have USB ports, so if a game designer wanted too, there should be no technical reason that prevents them from including support for mouse and keyboard.
How is WOW “hardly PC gaming as people know it”? It’s part of a genre that thrives on PC. And it’s a hardcore RPG to boot.
I was thinking of Diablo, star craft, Sims, Half-Life mainly.
As for exclusives just this year and next we are looking at:
Diablo III
starcraft II and the next expansion
Napoleon Total War
Shogun II Total War
Civ 5
The Witcher 2
Neverwinter
Guild Wars 2
Football Manager 2011
Stalker call of prypiat + The next Stalker
Arma II
Drakensang river of Time
The Old Republic
War Hammer II
The next WOW expansion
Heroes of MM VI
That’s just off the top of my head, and only this year and next. Couple that with all of the AAA multiplats coming to PC too.
Because for the longest time, and in particular during the “golden years” of PC gaming, no one played MMOs. It’s been my experience that a ton of people who play WoW just play WoW. They aren’t “PC Gamers” they’re “WoW players.” It’s kind of like counting Farmville players as PC gamers. The platform is incidental.
Yeah, The Sims is one. I think you’d be surprised how small Blizzard’s games and Half-life are compared to Halo, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War, Rockband (or maybe Guitar Hero) etc. Console franchises dominate PC ones in terms of popularity and profitability.
I am comparing the PC today to what it was ten years ago when it was undoubtedly the top gaming platform with a terrific array of exclusive titles across many genres including FPS and RPG. Certainly the platform has been on a downward trajectory since then.
Right now the PC seems to be strong only in strategy and MMORPG and the latter category is dominated by WOW. How many top exclusives does the PC get outside these two genres? I guess you could argue that exclusives don’t matter that much and the PC does get a decent number of ports but often these don’t take advantage of the platform to the fullest and take a long time to come which suggests that they aren’t a priority for developers. The PC may put in impressive numbers when it comes to online players and the like but many of them are not paying for the games and therefore don’t contribute to the business viability of the platform.
In any case it would be nice if we could get numbers for revenue from all sources including online platforms like Steam. I agree that boxed retail numbers are biased against the PC and like I said in the OP, online distribution should help revive the platform going forward.
Why does PC gaming need to make a comeback? As long as it keeps giving us gems like Team Fortress 2, Civ IV-V, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, The Witcher, Portal I-II, etc., I’ll be happy. If console gamers get to share in the fun, then more power to them.
The idea is that, as the disparity between the console market and PC market grows, more developers will follow cliffyb and the PC will only get bad console ports, MMOs, and microtransaction-based nonsense.
Well it’s not for lack of trying on the console side of things. An xbox 360 high up mentioned how they try to stagger the PC release of a game in Europe because if the console and PC version gets released at the same time, everyone will opt to play the PC version (Of course, who wouldn’t want to play a game on a superior platform?). So they don’t. They purposely delay the PC version.
As I mentioned, we still get plenty of exclusives. Actually more than any of the (so called HD) consoles. And thanks to the advancement of technology a gaming PC is coming down in price more and more. Finally, services like Steam, stardock, GOG.com, Direct2Drive, Gamer’s Gate, etc and publishers like Valve, Blizzard/Activision, EA, and now Microsoft (who made an announcement about coming back to PC exclusives) who have made a commitment to supporting and develop for the PC, will only make the platform more attractive.
Also a new generation of people who are not afraid of PC’s, but rather, are comfortable with them, might give what is obviously the better platform a fair shake.