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?
The new consoles will start at 0 installs and grow exponentially on the back of huge investments by Sony and Microsoft.