I’ve been following the development of Dragon Age 2 on the Bioware forums, and it’s come up that Dragon Age: Origins, the original, sold way better on consoles than on the PC.
This despite the fact that the PC game play was vastly superior, due to the power of the PC, better controls and less bugs related to a bad port to the consoles.
Is PC gaming dying? I go into a game store and see shelf after shelf of console games, and one rack tucked a way in the corner forPC games, if they sell any at all.
And not only that, but the vast majority of the shelf space that is there is taken up by WoW and to a lesser extent other MMO’s.
I think I’ve been hearing “PC Gaming is dying” for about 15 years now, so I take any such predictions with a large grain of salt. Popularity of gaming platforms waxes and wanes, and while there might not be many different PC games out right now there are a lot (millions!) of people playing them. So I think PC games will be around awhile yet.
Most PC games today are sold online through content provides such as Steam, so shelf space is a bad indicator of the viability of the PC as a gaming platform. While console do constitute a much larger market, there still plenty of profit in PC games I believe.
That said, the big missing piece of the puzzle is that an ever-growing portion of PC game sales are happening via online services (Steam, Impulse, GamersGate, the sites of individual publishers, etc etc) - I think I read a little while back that 2010 is the first year that digital sales have been greater than retail sales. Also, there is comparatively less of a used game market for PC games, which is a big part of what marginalizes the platform in GameStop (since such a huge part of their business model is based on re-sale).
As far as I’m concerned personally, the last couple of years have been a PC game renaissance. In no small part due to Steam sales, where I (and many other people, from the sales figures) have picked up literally dozens of excellent PC games for 50, 75, 80, or 90 percent off original retail. It looks like they’ve got a pretty good business model at this point by selling at full price for the first few months, then heavily discounting and getting a ton more volume down the road. Go PC gaming, rah, rah, cheer!
I think the question needs to be rephrased. If they stopped making PC games tomorrow, I would still have enough in my library to last me the rest of my life. So “PC gaming” isn’t going to die in my lifetime.
Is the real question whether or not they’re going to stop making PC games? Because that seems unlikely too…
I think the economics of video game production require that blockbuster titles focus on console releases. If you need to sell a million copies, you want to do that on X-box. The PC will remain the home of the independent developers and MMOs, but won’t get more than ports of big games. The 19xx - 2004 period of being the premiere platform is done. It’s only chance for a comeback is if consoles turn into social game/HTPC things and PCs get shooters back.
Actually you’re wrong about Dragon Age:Origins sales. Some time ago the meter was at 1.3 million copies on PC, 1.3 million on xbox 360 and .6 million on the PS3.
That’s is NOT “selling way better on consoles”.
PC as a gaming platform is actually growing according to just about every measure out there, except retail here in the states and the UK. Aprox 70% of all PC games are now bought digitally, so retail numbers (the stuff that usually gets quoted) means jack shit when it comes to the PC market.
Some of the latest figures from top publishers has PC gaming coming in second or a close third in terms of software revenue, or first int he case of Activision/Blizzard (and a few other publishers - I’m not counting Pc only publishers, of course), and if you include that publisher in the total, then PC revenue is higher than the consoles combined. Another point to keep in mind is that, again, most games are purchased digitally on the PC, thats revenue that provides the publisher and developer a HIGHER profit margin than retail.
Now consider hardware. AMD just sold it’s 26th MILLION HD5xxx card. Those are DX11 cards that just came out what a year or so ago? That’s more than half of all xbox 360’s out there. In ONE year. Nvidia also makes BILLIONS selling gaming level GPU’s.
So no. the PC as a platform isn’t dying. It’s growing according to just about everyone.
When some of the most profitable franchises in the entire industry are PC exclusives, when PC exclusive games are selling about as much as extremely popular console exclusives (SCII vs Halo:Reach), it’s really hard to make a case for the death of PC gaming.
Blizzard would beg to differ, with three separate blockbuster PC exclusive franchises and nary a console release to be seen. Rumour has it that Firaxis has sold a couple copies of this Civilization game, too.
The days of the PC being the dominant platform might be over, but it’s still perfectly viable for any developer willing to put a bit of effort into leveraging its advantages.
I have to agree. Blizzard is an anomaly, and when you’re talking about the health of the gaming industry you can’t point to the success of a single developer. That’s not an indication of a vibrant industry by any means.
Still, although PC gaming is certainly on the wane, I think its popularity is underestimated right now primarily because digital sales are not being well-tracked. Steam is big, with plenty of developers going through it. Again, you could certainly say that the fact that everyone’s going through Valve is an indication that the industry is kinda weak right now, but it’s not dead by any means.
Consoles just have the edge right now in that the ease of playing on a console allows access to a much, much larger market, and it’s also much easier to curb piracy on consoles. Consumers really like the former and publishers really like the latter.
Graphics are no longer a competitive edge, as we’re hitting the point where the technology needed to get significantly better graphics on the PC requires purchasing video cards that cost more than a console and 4-6 games by themselves, to say nothing of the other high-end PC components. And even then, the game has to be developed to take advantage of that hardware, which requires a hell of a lot of upfront investment. It’s a risky proposition, and it’s just so much easier to aim for the 360’s graphics capabilities. It’s a known factor and it’s not marginal.
PCs right now have the advantage in games that A, work better with a keyboard and mouse than a gamepad, B, involve more in-depth communication than can be achieved with just voice chat, and C, are equipped with DRM that consumers won’t complain about or try to circumvent. Right now, MMOs fill all three niches exquisitely, but not many other genres do.
I don’t even own a current-generation console. Over the past year or so I’ve racked up new games via Steam faster than I can play them. And I play a lot of games.
PC Gaming is fine in the sense that lots of new games are being released for the PC and it’s not going to die off as a platform.
It’s bad when you consider that multiplatform development reduces games to their least common denominator. They’re designed around control schemes that are limiting. They’re designed around technology that’s several generations out of date so that they aren’t as pretty or rich or complex as they could be. You can’t write a smart AI that requires the CPU power of a modern PC because the xbox could never run it - and people aren’t going to spend the time to write two seperate AI functions for both platforms - so the end result is that the PC gets the dumber one.
So our games get worse because they’re being dumbed down and limited technologically. That’s not death, but it certainly reduces the quality of games available.
Games are amazing in part because they develop so fast - since the beginning of PC gaming, you’d have something that would amaze you come out every year. Something that was able to exceed your expectations in graphics or design or gameplay would always be around the corner. Now we’ve come to a screeching halt - nothing can be made that exceeds 2004 low end hardware unless the developer spends special effort making the PC version better.
Oh, and spare me the “oh I care about gameplay not graphics” bullshit. We’re playing the same fucking games, yours just look worse, and look worse than they could because you’re playing on the equivelant hardware of a low range 2004 PC. How in the world does a racing game for example suffer in the gameplay department if it’s the same game except the cars are more detailed, the reflections and lighting more realistic, the tire/surface simulation more accurate because of more powerful CPUs, etc?
I don’t think PC gaming will ever reach the heights it did around ten years ago when it was the leading gaming platform by far in terms of the quality and variety of titles. However it will remain a strong niche player in the gaming industry. One niche is the casual gaming segment which is stronger than ever with the success of Farmville. MMORPG is another niche in which WOW at least is doing very well.
And finally there is the hard-core gamer niche for whom PC gaming offers the best experience. The success of Steam ensures there will be a viable distribution platform for the hard-core gamers regardless of what retailers do. The success of Starcraft 2 and Civ 5 shows it is still possible to make successful PC-exclusive games especially in the strategy genre. And it looks like the next generation of consoles won't be around soon further increasing the hardware edge of PC's.
It doesn’t have to. The point of that statement is just to say that you don’t care so much about the games looking better. You’re okay with what you have, with the other perceived benefits of having the console.
A) It’s not just graphics. The size and detail of the world - not just how it looks, but how you interact with it - is limited by the paltry hardware. Physics and AI have to remain simple because there’s not that much processing power there. There are lots of things you can do to make games more interesting with more advanced hardware outside of graphics.
B) I usually find that people say it in an elitist way. Implying that the people who care about technical aspects of games are just idiots looking for shinier objects, and that they’re above such thing and only care about quirky technically simple games due to being a better person. The reality is that there’s a huge amount of overlap in the type of games between platforms - so why wouldn’t you want games with the same concepts and gameplay to have better AI, physics, graphical realism, world size, detail, view distance, etc?
If the next-gen consoles take another 2-3 years I wonder if some developers will consider making PC games which they later port to the next-gen consoles. The PC versions will let them
a) make cutting-edge games which are not possible on current-gen consoles
b) refine the games and iron out bugs to create rock-solid releases for the next-gen consoles soon after release
I think it would be a smart strategy for developers like Bioware and Valve with a strong PC history.
