PS4 vs Xbone vs WiiU vs Oculus Rift. Your predictions?

Three scores and eight years ago, I made some bold predictions. Let’s see how things have changed :

Sound quality parity between pc and console games: still true.

PC games have higher resolution graphics: still true, but markedly less so. While we have 1440p monitors, most gamers play at 1920x1200 if they want rock solid 60fps. GPUs are still too weak for 2560x1440p@60fps, much less 3840x2160p@60fps (aka 4K). This will change in a couple of years, however.

Next-Gen Console games look better than PC games for a while: Not this time. Nowadays, the most expensive PC gaming dual-GPUs are $1000-$2000 for a pair. a $500 console cannot compete with that amount of power.

PC Gaming is not user friendly with its hdd installs, patches, time consuming graphic settings to tune, etc: mostly false. Steam (and Nvidia’s Geforce Experience) are reducing user frustration, and on the flip side, console owners were forcefully introduced to patches and hdd installs.

There are no Japanese games on PC: still somewhat true but nobody cares since japanese games took a nosedive in the last decade and have become less relevant. Things have improved slightly, but not enough.
8 years ago, I saw and welcomed the doom of PC gaming and its irksome, neverending expenses. A few years later , I moved to laptops exclusively and was never truly tempted to splurge for a beastly gaming desktop. 90% of the best AAA games were made for ps3/360 (and Wii) and their PC ports were late, unoptimized and overall, less enjoyable on a 27"monitor than a 52" TV screen, even though I they are rendered at 720p or less. There was virtually no compelling material to consume.

Despite this, Steam, Blizzard, Independent developers (Minecraft?) and MMORPGs have kept PC gaming alive, the next-gen consoles are coming (not you, WiiU, back to your drawer!) and in the middle of this, the Oculus Rift VR headset drops, and with its warts and all, has hundreds of game journalists declaring it the next big thing. 3D VR with great head tracking and serious visual immersion, filled with cleverness and very cheap. All that remains is to work out the kinks.

It turns out that, in the future, the Oculus Rift will require a lot of graphical power to get a less pixelated image. This will require a better screen and much more powerful GPUs than people have, and VR demands that everything run at 60fps, preferably with V-Sync! Oh, and to have VR have the same sharpness that we are used to with our HDTVs, we’re looking at needing games rendering in 4k. If we want our VR to look as sharp as a 4K tv, we’ll need it to be 8K.

The bottom line is that in 2014, with a VR headset available, beefy PCs become very relevant again. People will spend more money for VR than they would a regular console. Non-gamers become interested. In a few years, Once control schemes remove keyboards and mice from the equation, you can imagine something like the first arcades, multiplied by touch gaming, multiplied by Wii craze. Only hardware costs will keep things in check.

The Oculus rift and eventual competitors may become the number one reason to own a gaming PC in the next 5 years.

I’ll make my predictions on the consoles in a later post since this one has already grown beyond reason. What are your predictions?

Reported for forum change.

Things will exist just as they always have.

PC gaming has a dedicated chunk of the market and I don’t see that growing or changing too much during the next console cycle.

Nintendo will continue to do their thing with the Wii U and it will sell tremendously well this year on the backs of new Mario Kart and Mario Bros. games. It will also sell well next year when Smash Bros. 4 is released. Any relevant third-party software is just gravy.

The PS4/Xbox One will slug it out for a few years and end up completely even, which is pretty much where they are now.

Which of the three will end up on top is anybody’s guess.

I’ve tried the Oculus Rift. It’s not a general-purpose mass-market gaming interface. It’s okay for some sorts of first-person games, but it suffers from the same problems that VR has always suffered from: eye strain and motion sickness. Ten minutes in the OR demo app was about all I could stand, and I never get motion sickness with normal gaming rigs.

PC gaming has continued to grow and grow the past 4 years. From Steam growing it’s sales 100% year over year every single year for the past 8 years, to the growth of the Asian and mainland European markets - which are dominated by PC.

The largest, most popular games on the planet right now are either PC exclusives, or multi-plats.

My predictions:

PC will continue to grow at it’s turtle pace :slight_smile: The new consoles will start at 0 installs and grow exponentially on the back of huge investments by Sony and Microsoft.

Most worthwhile games will be multi-plat, and so the system you choose will have little impact on the types of games you play, specially the first few years of the new consoles. After that, the landscape will look pretty much as it does now.

The consoles will dominate the “core” mainstream market in the US, UK and Japan. Europe and the rest of Asia will still be playing PC games.

Odds are, if you’ve been a PC gamer for a while, you played FPS games before console gamers did. You played the games that fueled the Western RPG rebirth, before console gamers did. You played online and multi-player games before console gamers did. You played free to play and MMO’s before console gamers did. You played Action RTS’s, MM survival experiences, huge indie hits, before console gamers did.

New technology and the open nature of the PC platform will mean you’ll continue to do the same. The latest market trends, and the most “out of the blue” new and successful things will be coming out on PC first. Expect the gap in terms of graphics to widen even quicker, by the way. This time consoles don’t have the advanatage of a significant architectural shift, like they had this generation.

In the meantime, consoles will have evolved to be more like, well, PC’s. From restrictions on used games (and even if they don’t start out with any, expect them to come later), to required installs.

Someone else on here said it but it remains true:

As long as people have computers, they will want games to play on them.

There will always be quality PC games because the market isn’t going away until such time as the distinction between “my computer” and “the console” is blurred, which is a few years away.

Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night is fine by me.

Of course, throwing in that “multi-plats” qualifier changes your statement a bit. While I think you wanted to say something about the importance of the PC platform, by throwing “multi-plats” in there you basically just said “The most popular video games are video games.”

And they certainly are.

I don’t think it’s wrong. I mean, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and whatever the hell MMOs they are playing in Asia right now are all PC exclusives, and those are WAY bigger than most of the stuff the standard AAA space fights over.

Unless you want to make the case for like, Angry Birds or something.

Obviously consoles DESTROY the PC at “retail” but while that’s still a large chunk of the market, it is also a declining one. I don’t think any of the console “big names” are the juggernauts you think they are in terms of sales. The one true runaway success in the console space is Call of Duty, and that’s multiplatform. Yeah, fine, Halo does well, and so does like, FIFA, but honestly? Compared to the multiplayer game space? I dunno.

League of Legends is a free-to-play game, so it’s really hard to compare its “sales” to console games. But World of Warcraft currently has about 8 million subscriptions, which is down from a peak of 12 million. For comparison’s sake, here’s a list of Nintendo’s bestselling Wii games (they’re some of the easiest numbers to find*):

Mario Kart Wii - 34 million
Wii Sports Resort - 32 million
Wii Play - 28 million
New Super Mario Bros. Wii - 28 million
Wii Fit - 23 million
Wii Fit Plus - 21 million
Super Mario Galaxy - 12 million
Super Smash Bros. Brawl - 11.5 million

Sure, but how many of those games get each of their customers to give them $12 EVERY MONTH?

Edit: Though it’s true he say “most popular” games, not “biggest” games or something. So yeah, I think in terms of units, PC gaming isn’t winning any huge battles.

Weren’t many of those titles attached to hardware?

And I said most popular titles. No one is playing Wii Fiit anymore. But Half the planet is playing League of Legends (well, half the gaming planet), and the rest are playing some MMO or another.

As for dollars being brought in, the PC space is larger than any single console out there. It’s just that only about 5% is being brought in by the traditional and dying, retail market. PC is about innovation. In the market place and in games. And that’s why it’ll always be here, and it will continue to grow, and why consoles will always be left to play catch up. Except perhaps when it comes to stuff like this:

http://gifs8.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/img4492.gif

No, only Wii Sports Resort was. The rest sold as well as they did the old fashioned way, because they’re awesome.

Half the planet is also playing Farmville, I notice you didn’t mention that. “Popularity” is a funny thing when you’re comparing PC to consoles. It’s easy to point to WoW or LoL and say they’re bigger, but WoW has had almost a decade to build up its fanbase (is any paid MMO even close?) and LoL is, again, a free game.

Meanwhile, console companies like Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft produce dozens of games that sell millions of copies every year. Comparing them is stupid. Both are huge. But like I said, I see all sides staying roughly where they are now.

This is a sped-up GIF of comedic writer A.J. Jacobs and his family goofing around with the Kinect. Of course it looks ridiculous. Two of the participants are under 6 and one is being as silly as possible because that’s his job.

Way to go, you really got me.

Game bundles are a pretty common thing.

Nowhere near as common as the standard Wii Sports bundle (which I excluded because of its bundle-ness) and some of those are just stores giving you extra games when you buy a system. They’re only “bundles” in the loosest definition of the word.

That said, does it matter if you buy it separate or as part of a system bundle? It’s still a copy of the game sold.

I’d say it warrants for an asterisk. Is it the game or the console itself driving the sale? I’d say its the console.

I wasn’t trying to “Get” you.

I’m illustrating the ONLY remotely interesting thing to come out of consoles. That is their innovation this generation: gimmicky motion controls. Granted they might improve a lot next gen, but I honestly can’t think of anything else that came out of the consoles this gen that is worthwhile (aside from a few AAA titles).

Maybe third person shooters? They didn’t start on console, but I might be tempted to say they were iterated on and improved there mostly due to their popularity.

On the other hand, what’s come out of PC?

True survival/survival horror genre revival with games like Amnesia dark descent and machine for pigs and Day Z, and different takes on that from the likes of the Stalker series which in turn birthed games like Metro.

MMO’s which continue to expand in diversity from Wow to Eve. Free to play as an emergent market, now responsible for some of the biggest games on the planet. The Action RTS genre, nuff said. The increase in “eSports” interest. The various delivery vectors for indie development including Steam and other digital platforms where you can self publish, as well as the humble bundle and others - all things which made games like Minecraft possible.. The rise of the self published and crowd sourced developed/financed game. Game streaming, though not always successful, has been used to demo games for a while now on PC.

And who knows what’ll come next. VR tech seems likely to be just around the corner, and t looks like the PC is where it will appear first, and where it has the highest potential to be what the developers want it to be, since PC hardware isn’t static, and it looks like it’s going to take hefty hardware to drive these devices.

High resolution devices are becoming cheaper, 4K TV’s high resolution monitors, etc will definitely start to enter the gamer’s home, and consoles won’t be able to take full advantage of them.

For me, being excited about the new consoles, would be like being excited about an new Nvidia GPU announcement… from 3 years ago.

I keep trying to say this, but I think it’s pointless to split the industry this way. It’s not PC vs consoles/handhelds anymore, it’s PC AND consoles AND handhelds AND mobile platforms. Everybody is making games for each platform and there’s no longer that split anymore.

“Xbone.” LOL.

If things stay the way they are the PS4 will win vs. the XB1. However Microsoft still has a chance to react to all this negative feedback about their always-on Internet", always-on Kinect, and used game policies.

Doesn’t matter much to me, I remain a PC gamer. I might pick up a PS4 when it’s ~$200 or so for social gaming. In the meantime my PS3 still satisfies my rare urges for console gaming.

They’re actually already 2 for 3. The system doesn’t always have to be online (though Xbox One owners do have to register each game they buy online) and the “always-on” Kinect can be shut off completely.

This is an inherently asymmetric comparison. You’re comparing the number of people playing WoW right now to the number of people who have ever played those console games. How many copies has World of Warcraft ever sold? I don’t know, but it’s surely more than the 12 million peak membership: Some people stopped playing it before that peak time, and some started after that.