PC sales are declining at an unprecedented rate. It’s all over the tech news every other week. Something tells me the days of PC gaming truly are numbered as there won’t be PCs around to play them much longer. Particularly personally upgradable ones.
To clarify what I said I think the days of the gaming specific mega PC are coming to an end as tablets and all-in-one machines that are packed into tiny form factors drive GPU makers and discrete component manufacturers (GPUs, Sound cards, memory sticks etc…) away from wanting to invest the money in R&D and manufacturing to cater to, what will ultimately be, a niche market even more than it was in the 00’s.
I will concede that PC gaming itself seems to be seeing a resurgence with STEAM but PC sales, and in effect “PC Game Consoles” are DECLINING. And I think that resurgence has more to do with the dirt cheap prices developers have to sell their games at to move units on PC. Games have been devalued greatly by the PC market. If the prices were equal across the board between PC and consoles I think few people would choose to play the games on PC. Price is the motivating factor for recent PC game success. Superior graphics etc… is just an added benefit.
I think PC will likely be an indie haven for a good while no matter what happens, because developing for PC is effectively free (aside from labor costs). Sure, the Wii U has really good indie policies, but all consoles regardless of how indie friendly they are need a dev kit or a console to develop on. I recall Gaijin Games saying that the Wii U development console was cheap at “only” a couple thousand bucks. Maybe the Ouya can fill that niche, but I’m dubious.
Indie games also, generally, have the advantage that they don’t require amazing specs to function. So they’re effectively immune to the issue that less specialized hardware is being sold.
We don’t know what res the new gen console games will run at. The last gen claimed to be able to run at 1080p, and for simple little games that could be true, but most of the graphically demanding games ran at less than 720p at 30 fps. Is the new gen console going to run at 60fps/1080p? I doubt it, on average. So that puts them behind where PC has been for years.
360/PS3 games didn’t ever look better than PC games, even when they came out, unless you’re declaring an “average” pc a 3 year old midrange one or something.
And I have no idea why you have to invoke $1000 GPUs. Yes, those exist, but a $250 7950 is twice as powerful as what will be in the PS4, and even more compared to the xbone (good frat boy name there btw). And that’s year-old tech now.
This is true. It was always massively exaggerated before, but now it’s so simple that PC games will actually be easier than console games to install. No media to work with, both have to be “activated” online anyway/
I have no idea why people think bigger monitors are inherently better. It’s a pretty ridiculous notion. Bigger devices allow more people to share the same viewspace, that’s it. If you could put a 4000x4000 display on a postage stamp and implant it directly onto your eyeball, it would be an immeasurably better viewing experience than a 100 yard tall screen viewed across a stadium.
A 27" monitor at a normal viewing distance of 2 feet gives you much more visual information than a 52" monitor at 8 feet, and those are typical viewing distances. This ignores the fact that the monitor will be higher res and most likely better quality in general. I wouldn’t give up my 30" IPS monitor for any TV on the planet, nothing would be as good.
Now me running a game at 1440p on this thing at 2 feet away compared to a 52" TV running a sub-720p upscaled game at half the frame rate? Not even in the same ballpark.
The size obsession is weird. It’s like preferring your muscle cars to have an engine from the 60s that weighed 700 pounds and put out 150 hp compared to a modern one that weighed 250 pounds and put out 600hp, because hey, it’s bigger.
Anyway, I think the consoles of this generation are going to face more competition from mobile devices than anything. They’re setting the bar low - they’re technologically way behind the times on launch day and it’s only going to get worse. Meanwhile, smartphones and tablets are like PCs. The technology just gets massively better every year, and people are actually competing to have the best. New mobile games come out all the time that do things that last year’s mobile games couldn’t do. Mobile gaming now looks like PC gaming from the golden age of the late 90s in terms of how far it’s come so fast.
Since the current console generation is setting the bar so low, the gap between PCs will be wide open at the start and open wider quickly. And the gap between them and tablets won’t be that large. In a few years, gaming on the PC will be orders of magnitude more powerful, and tablets will be more powerful than current gen consoles. It will sap away both the high end market (pc) and casual market (tablets), both of which actually allow lower cost of ownership. The anti-used games system and generally having more control of games in the next generation of consoles means games will be even more expensive, meanwhile games on the PC and tablets are insanely cheap. I suspect that currently the average console gamer probably pays about 8x more for his games than PC gamers, and that gap will probably only widen.
So what will perpetuate console use this generation? They’re suitable for casual multiplayer, and ignorance. Most people simply won’t understand that PC gaming is both massively higher quality than console gaming and also cheaper, although the ubiquity of mobile devices may make them realize the same about those. But they’ll be attacked from both ends, and I think this generation of consoles will be generally regarded as a failure.
Crash and burn.
I’m curious what your response is to my position that PCs in general are on the way out, taking pc gaming with them.
I’d need more data. Yeah, people are replacing laptops with tablets, so what? How is that affecting desktop sales? Is there a slowdown of video card sales and such? If there is, how much is it because we’re hamstrung by developing for 10 year old tech so getting a new video card just means you can run the latest games at 200 fps instead of 120? How much will that interest re-ignite when there’s a developmental leap upon the release of the new generation?
I own an ipad instead of a laptop. By your logic, I’m one of those people who’s abandoning the PC.
How things have always existed changed a lot in the last console generation, which was the first to have three successful consoles splitting the market. About the closest there’s ever been to that situation was the 4th generation, with the SNES and Genesis. The generation before last was absolutely dominated by the PS2, which enjoyed more units sold than the Wii, XBOX 360, or the PS3.
My guess is that we won’t see the death of PC gaming or consoles, but that both will decline, not only in terms of market share (lost to tablets, phones, etc.), but in that total units sold will be flat or down compared to years 2005-2011. I’m also guessing that we may see a dominant console again-- not the Wii U, maybe the PS4-- or at least a less evenly-split console market. I think that Microsoft is making a mistake if it’s putting a lot of resources into TV with its new console, because they’ll be competing with smart TVs, and Sony makes those. I don’t even have an opinion on the Occulus Rift yet.
[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
I’d need more data. Yeah, people are replacing laptops with tablets, so what? How is that affecting desktop sales? Is there a slowdown of video card sales and such? If there is, how much is it because we’re hamstrung by developing for 10 year old tech so getting a new video card just means you can run the latest games at 200 fps instead of 120? How much will that interest re-ignite when there’s a developmental leap upon the release of the new generation?
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Good questions. Try Google, surely much of the data you crave is available.
Many Wii U games run at 1080p. I don’t think the Xbox One and PS4 will have any problem doing it.
I’m using the numbers I have available. And I’m saying that I believe 12 million subscribers at a peak compares pretty similarly to 34 million copies sold of a console game. That’s all. I’m not saying one number is better than the other (because I have no way of knowing which is better), just that WoW isn’t alone as a ubiquitous game.
You even see professionals, who should know better, make this mistake and it’s irritating.
Oh come on, that’s ridiculous. One number is ridiculously better than another. I mean, let’s say WoW has averaged 8m full paying subscribers over its lifetime of 9 years (The number is actually significantly higher, but I’m not sure how many of those accounts are Asian which pay less). That’s over a billion dollars. That doesn’t count the purchase of the original game or expansion packs or optional paid add-ons like paid server transfers, premium cosmetics, etc. And that’s money that almost all makes it back to blizzard. They have to pay a few cents to some sort of processor, but that’s it. It’s a direct payment. There’s no manufacturing cost, no shipping, no storage, it’s pretty much pure profit.
Whereas how much do you think Nintendo or the original publisher receive from the purchase of a retail game? I’m not sure on this, but I’m guessing the retailer buys new games for somewhere around retail -$15 or so. So you’ve got $35-45 to split amongst the developer, publisher, console licensing fees (not a factor for first party games, but generally), you have to account for actual manufacturing costs, distribution. First party games are unusually profitable because you can waive the licensing fees and you can generally publish and develop yourself. But factor in that some significant fraction of those sales are bundles, and not all copies of the game are sold at full retail price, and I think Nintendo making $25 per sold unit would be a generous estimate. That’s 850m.
Except I was only comparing sub fees to sales. WoW has sold tens of millions of retail copies of the game, and digital copies for that matter, and also 4 expansions. It’s ridiculous to think that the same 8-12m people have been subscribing to the game for a decade. People quit playing, and others buy new copies - but those new players have to pay for copies of the game and expansions to get current. This site lists retail copies of wow sold at 12m, and 21m expansions. That seems really low to me - it suggests a really low turnover and I find it implausible. The same 12m people playing for 10 years? Yeah, right. But let’s go with the numbers they say which seem really low - the combined numbers they give for sales and subscriptions come to over 2 billion.
So I’m being really conservative on WoW estimates, and overly generous on Wii game estimates, and yet we’ve got well over 2 billion compared to under a billion. It’s not even close.
I don’t actually care about this argument - WoW is a runaway success and isn’t a typical example of anything - but I want to show how ridiculous your attempts to always try to equate these things are.
Incidentally, I have no idea why you blow off League of Legends as irrelevant because it’s a free to play game. They choose the business model that will make them the most money, and they take in hundreds of millions, so I don’t understand how that makes them a non-player. Being F2P increases the player count, but it’s still huge and makes a ton of profit.
LoL is probably the most played game in existence (what would be higher? I can’t think of anything) and yet it has no pop culture value at all, which is kind of strange. When WoW was all the rage, it was a big part of popular culture. TV episodes were made around it, it generated lots of discussion. LoL is absolutely huge and yet I would guess that randomly polling people would say 90% have never heard of it.
Woops, I made a huge error. I did 8m subs * $15 * 9 years to come up with a billion. Obviously you can spot the error - I left out the fact that it’s a monthly subscription, not yearly. So it’s actually 8 * 15 * 12 * 9 = 13 billion dollars over the life of the game, just in subs. Now - if you sub for 6-12 months in advance, you get the monthly cost down to $12 I think, but I’m also deliberately using a lower number of subs in order to try to underestimate the effect of the Asian market. But whatever, let’s say 6m subscribers at $12/mo, which is a dramatic underestimate that’s still about 8 billion just in subs.
Hmm, yeah, WoW or Wii Sports or Mario Kart or whatever the hell you want to compare. So close, hard to tell which has been more successful.
WoW is one game. It requires a constant commitment from Blizzard and has been one of the few things the company has done in a decade. Interestingly, one of the other things they’re doing is a console version of Diablo III.
Mario Kart Wii is the just a single title in a long line of dozens that Nintendo produces that each sell million upon millions of copies, generating billions of dollars in sales.
YOU CAN’T COMPARE THEM DIRECTLY, BUT ABSTRACTLY, THEY’RE CLOSE. I don’t know how many times I have to say that.
So wait, is WoW abstractly close to the entire output of Nintendo, is that what you’re saying?
Because it clearly wasn’t what you were saying before.
So what you said was dumb enough, but go ahead and change your argument to that if you want, it’s even worse.
You are talking about the world wide PC market. A market that moves more units per quarter than ALL consoles COMBINED do in several years.
It does not correlate well with gaming hardware either, as it is a saturated market. Everyone you know probably has a PC/laptop. Not everyone has a console, or a gaming rig.
Eventually the desktop PC will disappear as data centers and the internet become more and more powerful. But this is 20-30 years in the future. And then we’ll all be playing games on our smart TV’s, or portable computing devices. Not desktops, and the traditional consoles would be long extinct.
So yeah, eventually the traditional PC desktop will be gone. But if you actually think that that is likely to happen BEFORE consoles go the way of the dodo, you have a screw loose. An ongoing market 1000 times the size of the entire console market, even during bad times, vs a market that has to be literally resuscitated every few years by companies willing to spend BILLIONS to bring it back to life and that only serves a single primary purpose competing with a dozen devices that serve that same purpose?
OK, sure. :rolleyes:
Battlefield 4 will be 720p on the PS4 - this has been confirmed.
AMD was in trouble last quarter. Nvidia has been reporting record profits though.
Like we both agree, more and more games will be multi-plat. This doesn’t really mean much. And this game sold over 15 million copies on PC (50% of which were digital sales - essentially pure profit for Blizzard). It ain’t gonna sell anywhere near that on consoles.
This data is apples and oranges to some extent (though it’s generally acknowledged in the article itself, and generally only comes in the form of “this company does stuff other than make games”), and it’s also a year old, but I think it throws some of crap data in this debate into stark relief:
You’ll note that as of summer, last year, Nintendo had almost twice the revenue of Actiblizzard. TWICE. And that’s not just the WoW numbers. That’s WoW + Call of Duty + everything else Activision makes. And unlike some of the other outfits in that list (Sega Sammy, Namco Bandai) Nintendo is a pure games (and games hardware) vendor. Oh, and apparently Nintendo had a “rough year” last year. Go figure.
So yeah. The PC game market is apparently not quite the unstoppable juggernaut some folks make out.
I doubt it will take so long. Laptops are already more common than desktops in Australian households. Owning a desktop is still quite common-- 63% of American households in 2013-- but that’s down sharply from a peak of 75% in 2010. And by no means are the majority of those going to run, say, Crisis. The average selling price of Windows machines in 2009 was $589. Those aren’t gaming rigs.
Why are we even talking about PC gaming in a thread about console predictions? Do you even have a console prediction beyond “they’ll continue to suck”? If you and SenorBeef are going to continue with your tirades, I’d like to see some cites for your claims.
Cite, please.
Cite, please.
Cite, please.
I’ve seen you go off on this rant before, like you find it unbelievable that consoles and console games are profitable. Diablo III is the third highest-selling PC game of all time-- 12 million units, according to Wikipedia, not 15 million as you claimed-- there are many console games that have sold more. Interestingly, DIII is the only one of top 5 PC games that was released after 2010. Number 5 is Starcraft, and that’s from 1998.
Console titles like Halo 4-- which wasn’t even that big a seller-- can still bring in $220 million on opening day, which is more than Marvel’s The Avengers brought in on its opening weekend. And if you think that Nintendo is not profitable, you’re simply wrong.
Cites:
http://www.ce.org/Blog/Articles/2013/May/Is-the-Rise-of-Mobile-Devices-Hastening-the-Declin.aspx
http://www.news.com.au/technology/a-government-study-shows-that-laptops-are-on-the-rise-and-desktop-computers-are-in-decline/story-e6frfro0-1226175405615
This is what I’m trying to get at.