Certainly they aren’t new. I had an Atari 400 (with tape drive for loading programs!) in my day. What is new though is the price tags. At least I was looking at the price of the Sony PS3 and its something like $500-$600. Thats quite an investment…especially if it doesn’t run the older games (I assume it does, but no idea).
You could very well be right. As I said, I’m not exactly an unbiased judge and am basing my opinion that Console games won’t be around long term (at least not in their present form, as I said earlier) solely on my own prejudices. There certainly seems to be a market for both…and where their is a market, there will be companies eager to fill it.
Not true at all, I am running Battlefield 2142 on a 2.5 year old machine that cost $1100 just shy of three years ago. The 256M PCI-E video card is a EVGA 6600, costs about $70 Athlon 3200+ 512M of Ram. One of the keys to getting bang for your buck in PC’s is NOT to buy the bleeding edge $500 cards, a year later thats a $125 card, THATS when you upgrade.
I have seen $4000 gamer specials, they are a thing of beauty, but the games have to be designed to run on fairly common machines or they will die on the vine and people will complain the game sucks, not their own machine.
Also like it or not, the motherboard integrated sound cards are plenty for most people, spend your money on good speakers.
The PS3 is a mess all on its own. The Wii costs $250 in the US, ranges from $420-$495 in South America (with the exception of Brazil, which is $1120), otherwise $300-$400 in the rest of the world; except Japan, unsurprisingly, wich has it at $215. PS3 costs $5-600 in the US, $640-770 in the EU. Xbox 360 costs $350 in the EU, $300-400 in US.
Sources: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, Wikipedia
Sony claims that the PS3 runs PS1 and 2 games. I don’t know if this is true, and have no intention of trying to find out.
Most of that stuff is available because of web access, but the web isn’t just the domain of PCs anymore. You will be able to get a lot of free micro-game content via the virtual console on the Wii, and the same probably goes for the other two.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but the difference between WoW and the rest of it’s genre, or WoW and previous Warcraft games, is far greater than the difference between Civ IV and Civ III. WoW really blew things out of the water in terms of simplifying the genre and expanding the market. It’s definitely the exception though.
It’s the exception that proves the rule. Battlefield 2142 is running on the year and half old Battlefield 2 engine, which wasn’t that impressive then, and certainly isn’t that impressive now (graphically speaking).
The PC Games will always be around - given a 10 year expected life cycle on the current gen systems, the PCs will retain “cutting edge” capabilities.
Perhaps the neatest thing about the 8800 is not its raw speed, but its Direct X 10 rendering abilities, something the current generation of consoles will never have.
However, I believe their will continue to be a gradual shift to the console in terms of numbers. Previous PC differentiators are no longer unique - consoles can now do multiplayer over IP, now support high definition resolutions, are price competitive (you can zing the $600 PS3, but compared to a gaming rig of similar capabilities, its relatively cheaper). Plus, and consoles develop more non-gaming capabilities, the home PC will begin phase out. Just my guess.
drachillix is pretty much spot on. The cost of pc hardware has decreased steadily the over the years, while the cost of consoles has increased. The manufacturing cost of a PS3 is actually $800 - $850, which ends up at about $1.000 when profit is included. You can get a decent gaming pc for less than that these days.
The cost of the Playstation has increased, and the PS3 will sell at a loss along with the XBox 360. Meanwhile the Wii will sell in the US for $200 at a profit. Maybe the lower graphics capability will see the Wii sell less units than it could have, or maybe Sony are aiming too high. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Comparisons to the PC are a bit silly though, as PC gaming is as dead as it’s ever going to get. It’s very much a niche platform. All the new and innovative games are made for consoles, and sometimes ported over to PC as an afterthought. And I say all this as someone who hasn’t owned a console in over ten years.
Both the Xbox and the Playstation increased in price this generation, the Playstation 3 is particularly expensive due to the Blu-ray drive. AFAIK, Sony has stated that games will likely cost more in the future to make up for the loss. I think the Wii will become a success, it’s cheap and innovative, but it is also aimed at a different market.
I can hardly agree that “all the new and innovative games are made for consoles”. On the contrary, my experience is similar to madmonk28’s and xtisme’s. Console ports often feel “dumbed down” in game design (e.g. Republic Commando). Too bad they are also frequently ported to pc with floaty character control and imprecise aiming.
I actually think the release of the next gen will benefit PC games as well as it should be easier to develop high quality multi-platform games without making too many compromises. It will be interesting to see what impact DX10 and XNA, and the diminishing distinction between 360 and the PC, will have on game development.
PC games will die off when more companies did what Activision did with Call of Duy 3: refuse to make a PC version. I’m not sure why they would alienate their customer base, unless <conspiracy theory> they are in cahoots with the console makers by making their games available for consoles and nothing else </conspiracy theory>.
When people are unable to depend upon getting the good stuff for computer they’ll go out and buy a console so they aren’t left behind. Either that or they’ll do without (which is what I’m doing).
I’m exclusively a PC gamer, but from over here, the newer consoles just look like standardized PCs, with different (more limited/easier) “controllers” as opposed to mouse and keyboard. Some of their prices are even comparable. (I’m looking at you, PS3.) I figure in a generation or two the consoles will attempt to eat the PC market, and in doing so become it. I can easily imagine M$ following this design path because it cuts off unauthorized competition and gives them direct control over the parts in the box, so they don’t have to develop for varying hardware. And remember, they’re the ones providing the PC OS’s to most of the the market.
The first hint of this will be bluetooth keyboard/mice setups for these consoles, to open up the other game genres to them. Then: Word For XBox. Mark my words.
Publishers love PC games because they don’t have to pay a royalty to the console manufacturer. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo make $8 - $10 bucks per unit on each console game, but the publisher gets to keep that extra money on a PC title, so the margins are higher. More PC games will probably end up being ports of console versions, but they will keep putting them out.
From a financial standpoint, I think PC games are actually doing ok right now. The lack of good new titles is at least partly due to the fact that World of Warcraft is eating up a huge share of the market. WoW has something like three million subscribers paying 15 bucks a month. That’s roughly the same as selling a million games a month at 50 bucks a unit. A million units over the life of the product is an absolute blockbuster for a PC title. To do that every month is unprecedented, and I think it’s bottoming out the whole market for PC games.
According to Blizzard its more like 7 million (world wide, IIRC). Also, IS there a lack of good PC games? I mean, recently I got Company of Hero’s, I’m currently playing Total War Medieval II (kick ass PC game), and have Neverwinter Nights II waiting in the wings…and there is a whole bunch of other games either out now or coming out very soon for the PC that look VERY good (only so many hours in the day after all, and WoW alone is a huge time sink when one is on the PvP treadmill). On the MMORPG side alone there is a cool looking Warhammer Online game, a Middle Earth online game and something that looks interesting set in the world of Conan (I don’t recall the exact title…I’m at work and don’t have the energy to look it up :)).
And of course, speaking of WoW…the expansion for THAT will be out in January (and looks totally kick ass…I’m currently sharpening my axes and getting my bow set for some serious playage :)).
I agree that both markets can (and have) coexisted.
I disagree that the 8800 (or equivalent) is a watermark for this issue. The nextgen cards exist essentially as potential improvements in the graphics wars – the power is there, and we’ll see games that use it (in compelling ways) in 6-12 months. This does not seem like a death blow to next-gen consoles, and not yet relevant until developers make use of the graphics power.
I would instead (from the previous thread) argue that the HD capabilities of nextgen consoles (excluding Wii) largely insulate consoles from the charge of being graphic-challenged, and console players using HD sets will see little attraction to PC improvements.
My forecast: massive penetration by nextgen consoles by players using HD in the next 12 months (which will be bumpy as titles may be sparse), no real growth in PC gaming.
Yes, but development studios loathe them with a passion because PCs are just a huge undifferentiated mess. It wouldn’t surprise me if it takes as much testing and debugging to release the PC version of a game as it does to relase the Xbox, PS and Nintendo versions. If anything is going to kill the PC as a platform it is lack of content, and development costs are one of the key drivers behind that. Even with DX10 and whatnot, modern PC games are shockingly buggy and just flat-out refuse to work for many buyers, either because of a hinky setup or because they haven’t read the requirements panel properly. So consoles end up as the primary development platform, with a PC port done as a delayed cash-in. In which case, why bother with a PC?
Games like F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2 feel very ‘console’ to me - mainly in that the aiming reticle is huge and the weapons spray all round it, as if to compensate for the inaccuracy of thumb aiming. Civ4 is an exemplar of the PC strengths in gaming but also of its weaknesses - massively buggy on first release and unplayable on a large proportion of PCs because it needed a relatively up-to-date video card.
PC game innovation is certainly not DEAD; as I mentioned, Supreme Commander is a very exciting new title, and there’s certainly other examples. “The Movies” was a neat, innovative game. However, I think most PC gaming enthusiasts will agree that there isn’t the same kind of creative energy in the industry that there was in, say, 1990.
Dumbguy makes a very interesting point about World of Warcraft, though. It’s almost certainly the most financially lucrative PC game ever made, by a mile; others have sold more copies (The Sims, Myst) but they don’t nail you for another $15 every month. The success of World of Warcraft cannot be overstated; it’s the absolute king of online games. I remember the EverQuest people bragging when they hit 500,000 subscribers; WoW is more than ten times as big.
MMORPGs have come hot and heavy since they genre was started by Ultima Online and then vastly improved by EverQuest, but at first companies seemed content to recreate the sword-and-sorcery thing, so they came out with Dark Age of Camelot and stuff like that. Star Wars Galaxies was pretty much DAoC with lasers. They’re still doing this, to my frank amazement; D&D Online was something of a flop this year, and they’re coming out with still more sword-and-sorcery variations. But recently other sorts of MMORPGs have hit the shelves; Eve Online has become quite an obsession for some people, and just yesterday I was looking at a game in Best Buy that was sort of a Mad Max type deal where you tool around in crazy ass cars and blow shit up.
It may simply be that the future of PC gaming is in that sort of game, and what I predict will happen is that you’ll see a sudden wave of innovation where people finally realize that the market doesn’t just want more WoW/EQ clones because there’s only so many paladins and orcs you can take. You’ll see a huge, major-developer released MMORPG about real estate development. A game like “Supreme Commander” or “Civilization 4” will be converted to a full-blown MMORPG. You’ll see a game where you play a professional athlete. There will be an online RPG about spying or stock market trading or being a swashbuckling pirate. Or something like that. The PC offers the depth that these sorts of games really need to be cool.