I’m not all all worried about the PC dying out as a platform.
The gaming trend that I find much more worrisome is the rapid expansion of DLC for premium games. I’m getting a little of seeing games that retail at 59.99 and then have thirty or forty bucks worth of “content packs” within a few months. Some games even have DLC that you can buy on day 1.
Day 1 DLC is obnoxious.
I have seen the quality for DLC increasing though, or at least the price matches the quality. Oblivion had mostly crappy DLC. The reaction when they made you pay for horse armor was priceless. Now with Skyrim, they release a bunch of features as free patches, and only make you pay for the large DLC. Or like when the Witcher came out and some features were lacking, so they put out a big patch for free.
It’s not just obnoxious, it’s downright insulting.
I can sort of accept the concept of DLC in and of itself - outside of nickel 'n diming considerations it’s actually a pretty neat thing to be able to sell micro-expansions of the main game without them being, well, full-on expansions (with all the expectations implicit in those). It gives a given game a longer shelf life, and even if it’s usually the B reel stuff that gets released as DLC, a level’s a level. When you like the game, you’ll take that to prolong the experience just a little more.
Day One DLC on the other hand is “oh yeah, we could totally have included this on the DVD/Steam download. But we didn’t. Because fuck you, that’s why.”
It’s even more infuriating when said DLC is actually a full part of the game’s main plot, like the Catwoman bits of Arkham Asylum, or the L.A. Noire cases that even get referenced in passing during the main game’s missions, ffs.
I was referring more to the Steam/Xbox/PSN network that would be serving up these downloads. They’re not built to handle the kind of bandwidth required for their customers to download 15-20 million games a month.
Obviously, they’d have to scale up their servers to handle the load, but do they really want to?
I actually think the best model for online-based gaming, at least for a while, will be having the rendering still performed locally, with just the content online. That’s what Diablo 3 does, I believe.
Why? Because I try rendering stuff on another computer even in my LAN, and I still get a ton of lag. 100Mbps is not enough to let me play Plants vs. Zombies via remote desktop without the audio sounding like crap, and cutting out, while the video is still jerky.
Yes, they want to. They see all the money that Apple and Steam rake in on their app stores and they want app stores of their own. Plus, by making the games downloadable, they can sell more DLC, since game’s already part of the downloaded environment. It also allows for free-to-play and micro-transaction games to be built into the experience from start. MS & Sony both want some of those fees. And it (maybe) kills the second hand game market, since, at least in the US, digital games can rarely be resold.
All the major next-gen consoles are planning expanded online sales and services. In ten years, Gamestop will go the way of the record store.
Why on earth not?
Cutting out sunk in costs of retail + the cut retail itself demands?
Why do you think EA opened up Origin? MS, EA, Activision, and dozens of puiblishers/devs are on record pointing out how much more profitable digital sales are to them.
That’s not really an accurate test of what modern server side tech can do.
Gaikai and Nvidia developed dedicated hardware that can encode vdieo and audio in milliseconds. This is not something you can do on a general computing CPU on your PC.
PC games won’t die, because for just a few more hours of coding, you can sell your game to another market! We’ll just end up with PC versions that are half-baked console ports like BF3. (it requires IE8. Need I say more? Ok to start the game, you have to start IE. Then their Origin software. Then you can start the game. Finding and sorting servers doesn’t work. It doesn’t display your ping in the game. I could go on…)
Right, I’ve read those same reports. But I think the “within 10 years” talk is a bit on the ridiculous side. Sony’s CEO was making some of the same claims in 2006 and he backed off real fast.
The industry’s just not ready for a complete changeover yet, no matter how much they want it.
What are the differences between the PC, Mac, Xbox360 and PS3 versions of Portal 2?
I think what you’re going to see is: for may games, the underlying hardware will be irrelevant. The game will be multi-platform, and each platform may have additional graphics depth if it’ll take it.
And certain games won’t come out for certain platforms, because the input method isn’t appropriate.
I’m not saying tomorrow.
Frankly I’m pretty sure in 2002 there people who thought we would never be watching movies online. Heck getting music online was still a hassle for most.
But here we are ten years later.
I’ll bet you a 20 spot that digital media will be the lion’s share of revennue for games within 10 years time.
We’ll meet back here int his very thread and the winner will gloat and the loser will pay via our subdermal implant chips courtesy of paypal.
Paypal, when you really got to pay off someone really fast!
I do agree that next gen the multi-plat will rule. Exclusives will be relegated to a couple of first party games, and games best played with mouse and keyboard.
Which is good!
You’ve got yourself a bet.
PC games and console games are just completely different animals with some overlap. If i want to play a fighting game or a sport game i’ll fire up the console, shooting or strategy i’ll be on the PC. MMO? PC, Action RPG? console. You can’t just replace one with the other, PC gamers and console gamers are into completely different things.
Some people pay the premium of buying it full price on day one. Others wait eight months and get the GoTY version with all the DLC for ten bucks on Steam.
That might have been the case a long time ago, but now a days?
Skyrim, an action RPG is absolutely best played on PC, for example.
The only difference, besides PC’s more powerful hardware, that you seem to emphasize is control options. But PC’s have been using gamepads for years, and most modern games fully support gamepads.
The only difference between the last streetfighter game on PC vs console is that on PC it runs at 80+ FPS at 1080p, and on console it’s 720p, 30 FPS.
PC gaming isn’t going anywhere, it’s just getting worse. The people who play PC games aren’t going anywhere, and the publishers aren’t going anywhere - PC sales are bigger than anyone thinks (because news reports always use the hilariously wrong NPD numbers that don’t count about 70%+ of PC sales) and digital distribution lets the publisher make more money per sale because they take a much smaller cut than retail.
No, as we’ve seen over the last few years, the biggest threat to PC gaming is that everything is becoming multiplatform and dumbed down for the lowest common denominator - so PC gaming gets held back. On the plus side we’ll have a new generation of consoles soon, which means games that can take advantage of modern graphics libraries and modern hardware will start getting made (as they could now, if anyone wanted to bother) - but that’s only a temporary effect. In a few more years we’ll be in the same position we are now - playing 2012-technology games in 2019 or whatever.
The real threat to the future of gaming is this cloud gaming garbage. I keep hearing “wouldn’t it be awesome if…” about OnLive style services. No. It would not be awesome. You know what’s awesome? Having a magic box 3 feet and about 1/100th of a light-nanosecond away from me responding to my inputs instantaneously and giving me instant, full resolution beautiful sound and graphics. Cloud gaming is utter garbage with no upside at all. I don’t really give a shit if cloud gaming ends up replacing consoles (it has a viable path as a low hardware cost portal to gaming), but if I’m ever forced to play a cloud game on my pc I’m going to burn the motherfucker down.
I searched for this thread looking for OnLive reviews. What’s got me considering them is that I really want to play Amnesia, but I don’t have a gaming PC- only a low end laptop and consoles. For $20, it sounds like a low risk investment. I guess I’ll give the free 30 min demo a rip.
Has anyone tried Amnesia specifically?
If Amnesia supports a gamepad (not sure if it does), that would be your best bet. Latency is intolerable with mouse and keyboard, but game pads, depending on the game, are a bit more forgiving.
You cna use any wired xbox 360 gamepad on your PC. Wireless will also work, but you’ll need an adapter.