The death of PC games is near - Revisited

Great Debates
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Actually, a cool MMORPG I’ve seen thats in development is Pirates of the Burning Sea…which is, of course, about pirates during the 17th century. And though I’ve been playing MMORPG, RPG, MUDS and MOOS and even pen and paper games, I’m STILL not all orc’ed and elved out yet. :stuck_out_tongue:

As for innovations, I think in the case of PC games there is still plenty…but its mainly evolutionary instead of revolutionary (for the most part). You have a point about the sequels, though of course I didn’t list many of the new titles coming out that are new (you mentioned Supreme Commander, though of course thats a spin off from an earlier game…I’m also looking forward to the new Warhammer game that looks to be like a Total War type game in the Warhammer universe)…nor did you mention at a lot of console games are sequels or spinnoffs of earlier games. Especially the most popular console games IMHO.

-XT

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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.
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Second Life is huge, I believe over 1 million subscribers, and growing fast. All kinds of press.

Get this - Reuters (and I think AP) have both opened virtual news offices in Second Life, and a couple ad agencies have also opened branches.

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Second Life isn’t a game, exactly. Yeah, it has a gamelike interface, but it’s more of a collective art world - the users create the space that they move around in.

But I get your point. While it would be technically feasible to run the SL client on a console, creating your own content would be ridiculously hard to impossible.

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[QUOTE=Alien]
Last year Gozu started a thread claiming the death of pc gaming was near, citing the upcoming release of next generation consoles like Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. I disagreed (politely).

I’m not going to rehash what I said then, but the heart of my argument (IIRC) was that the next gen consoles would not be more powerful than pcs, or have more features, and that the gaming experience (couch people vs chair people) allows for both platforms to coexist in the market place.

Last week NVIDIA released the Geforce 8800 pc graphic card, and AnandTech (an authoritative source on computer hardware) had the following writeup:
So I was right. Or maybe not? Is pc gaming coming to an end? Discuss.
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Well, as I see it, PCs definitely have more raw power than all the new consoles. But raw power isn’t everything. Consoles are designed with games in mind and are perfectly tuned for that purpose. More importantly, games can be optimized to much greater extent thanks to the static nature of the hardware.

In practice, most of the best-looking games I am aware of are out or coming out on consoles. Gears of War and Viva Pinata look better than anything PC games have to offer imho. Upcoming PS3 titles also outclass any outcoming PC games visually. There are no PC games that look better than games like Motorstorm, Metal Gear Solid 4, Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Heavenly Sword among others. Gametrailers has got good footage of these games and more .

The only PC games I can think of that can rival these are Bioshock and the Far Cry sequel (and maybe that Tchernobyl game that keeps getting delayed). Overall, I give the advantage to consoles.

The bottom line is they’re cheaper, have more quality games, are often more fun to play and thanks to the growing ubiquity of HDTVs and 5.1 sound systems, their looks and sounds have nothing to envy to PCs(yet. No doubt it’ll change in 3 years).

So, I will admit that PC gaming isn’t near death yet (say thanks to WoW) but It’s definitely stagnating at best.

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[QUOTE=Gozu]
Well, as I see it, PCs definitely have more raw power than all the new consoles. But raw power isn’t everything. Consoles are designed with games in mind and are perfectly tuned for that purpose. More importantly, games can be optimized to much greater extent thanks to the static nature of the hardware.

In practice, most of the best-looking games I am aware of are out or coming out on consoles. Gears of War and Viva Pinata look better than anything PC games have to offer imho. Upcoming PS3 titles also outclass any outcoming PC games visually. There are no PC games that look better than games like Motorstorm, Metal Gear Solid 4, Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Heavenly Sword among others. Gametrailers has got good footage of these games and more .

The only PC games I can think of that can rival these are Bioshock and the Far Cry sequel (and maybe that Tchernobyl game that keeps getting delayed). Overall, I give the advantage to consoles.

The bottom line is they’re cheaper, have more quality games, are often more fun to play and thanks to the growing ubiquity of HDTVs and 5.1 sound systems, their looks and sounds have nothing to envy to PCs(yet. No doubt it’ll change in 3 years).

So, I will admit that PC gaming isn’t near death yet (say thanks to WoW) but It’s definitely stagnating at best.
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(I would like to mention that from a gamers point of view it’s about having fun while playing games. Graphics are important because it moves the technology forward more than anything else.)
I often come by this argument, but I’ve never see anyone referring to credible cites to prove it. The best piece of information I have come across is at the very respected Bjorn3D site, in an indepth review of the Xbox 360 GPU. (warning: technical)

Obviously, there’s an advantage to developing games on a closed system. But all hardware has its limits, and both the 360 and the PS3 is up against the new 8800 graphic cards from NVIDIA. To compare: The PS3 GPU is quite similar to a 7800GTX, released in June 2005 (cite). The Xbox 360 GPU is harder to pinpoint as it was developed independently from (at that time) ATI’s next pc graphic card, but generally its compared to the x1800xt, released in October 2005, (R420 - R520 mix) (cite)

When you compare the new 8800GTX to these previous graphic cards, you’ll see that the 8800 already outperforms console GPUs by 50% - 100% (cite1, cite2,
cite3). At the highest pc resolution (2560 x 1600), these older GPU’s are sometimes outperformed by several hundred percents (cite). On top of that, the 8800 has crucial next generation rendering techniques in DX10, such as Shader 4.0, which are not present in the new consoles.

So, I have to disagree strongly that console games has better graphics than pc games. It isn’t even logical. You say that raw power isn’t everything, but designers aside, it is. What it comes down to is the amount the data that can be processed per clock cycle. More data = more details. More details = better graphics. Have a look at the console-developed game Republic Commando (later ported to PC), released in 2005, which Gamespot claimed “looks fantastic on both the PC and Xbox, with excellent character models”. Play the game, and you’ll see that it doesn’t. It looks very average, actually: image1, image2, image3). And when compared to a game such as F.E.A.R (also 2005) it’s like night and day: (image1, image2, image3, image4).

Of course, these F.E.A.R images are taken with a newer GPU (and F.E.A.R. was later ported to 360 with enhanced lightning) than those in the previous console generation. But that was your point, wasn’t it? That consoles can keep up for years graphically?

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[QUOTE=Alien]
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.
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Meaning in ways, that the economic line between consoles and PC’s has become real fuzzy. Of course with PC’s you have tons of variety that the consoles will never match unless they start looking to a standard platform/os that will run other machines games. Part of the appeal there as well is if I don’t like a game, but someone I know does, it will run on a huge cross section of PC’s.

IMHO it would be childs play for microsoft to make an xbox run pc software and grey that line alot. Many present day laptops are little more upgradable than a console system.

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[QUOTE=Alien]

So, I have to disagree strongly that console games has better graphics than pc games. It isn’t even logical. You say that raw power isn’t everything, but designers aside, it is. What it comes down to is the amount the data that can be processed per clock cycle. More data = more details. More details = better graphics.
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I think you’re still confusing *potential *with actual results. Use your eyes. Take a look at gameplay videos of the titles I mentionned previously. At least the White Knight video to which I have linked if you don’t have the time or inclination to watch more. PC games could look better than console games though, I agree with that.

Two things:

Do NOT use ports to find out which system has better graphics. Ever. The best looking games tend to be exclusives.

I am only talking about xbox360 and PS3 games, and only for the first half of a console’s lifecycle. PCs do catch up eventually, when they’re so overwhelmingly overpowered compared to their consoles counterparts (Think 3 Ghz PC with 1Gb ram and 256mb gpu ram compared with 300-733 mhz, 32-64 ram console as became the case around 2004) that all the optimization and art in the world cannot bridge the gap anymore.

Yep. I firmly believe that, until 2009, most of the best looking games will be on consoles.

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[QUOTE=drachillix]
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.
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You’re running Battlefield with 512 MB of ram? Wow.

Now that’s just blatantly untrue. I dare you to pick a bleeding edge card that retailed for $500+ within the last 12 months for which the price has dropped ANYWHERE NEAR $125. For the record, the 6600 was a lower middle range card when it came out. Also, the bleeding edge GPUs cost between $1200 and $2400 nowadays (dual and quad SLI).

I wholeheartedly agree.

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Right now, I think the market for PC games suffers from a lack of definition. PC games are, in essence, the ones that consoles can’t do: complicated GUI, keyboard interface, multi-disc install, where the ability to save your game is a must. That’s pretty vague, and doesn’t target a particular genre well.

Until PCs can really define themselves clearly, the market will be satisfied with whatever consoles leave on the cutting room floor. PC game design really exploded with the introduction of the graphics and video cards, which allowed game designers to really flex their creative muscles and expand out into new game types — instead of writing new graphics engines, designers could use the built-in tools and spend their time on the creative bits. The problem now, as I see it, is that graphics and video have become almost too diverse, and cross-developing a PC game for the different combinations of hardware is incredibly time-consuming. Platforms don’t have this problem to the same degree.

The latest hardware revolution for PC appears to be the introduction of a physics co-processor card, which suggests the technology is pushing toward shooter-style first-person realism along the lines of Half-Life 2, emphasizing real physical interactive environments, gravity, conductivity, buoyancy, magnetism, fire, collision, and all that other stuff that makes PC games more “real.” No console has an on-board physics co-processor, right?

It remains to be seen if this new hardware will be a mere cosmetic upgrade, or whether a physics processor will be de rigueur in gaming. I do think that the future of PC games depends on a hardware revolution that allows designers to spend less time doing the standard, boring programming — like physics and AI and 3-D modeling — and more time thinking of cool stuff to do.

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Company of Heroes is an RTS game that just came out a couple months ago. On the website, click on Gallery, then watch the In-Game Engine Demo. Parts of the movie appear in the finished game as cutscenes, and other parts are just showing off the game engine. I have a pretty high end PC, and the game looks almost that good on my system. It looks better than Oblivion if you ask me.

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I wonder if the success of World of Warcraft is actually causing problems for other PC game manufacturers? Most of us live in a world of fixed budgets, and if we’re shelling out $15 a month or $300 a year on WoW, then that’s likely money not spent on other PC games.

I don’t believe that graphics performance is directly equatable between platforms. Games on the PC have to go through all sorts of layers (DirectX, file system, etc), and general-purpose layers at that, and there are all sorts of other things running in the background; consoles are very much stripped down.

I do believe that HD is a great boost for consoles over PCs. HD displays are expensive, and they are fast first appearing in living rooms, not on office desks.

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[QUOTE=Quartz]
I wonder if the success of World of Warcraft is actually causing problems for other PC game manufacturers? Most of us live in a world of fixed budgets, and if we’re shelling out $15 a month or $300 a year on WoW, then that’s likely money not spent on other PC games.
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As a WoW player I’ll give you my thoughts on this…FWIW. I don’t think, by and large, most WoW players are concerned with the money wrt other PC games. I’d say more than the money, its the time sink aspects that prevent a lot of WoW players from buying as many PC games as they might have (I’m guessing here…I’m not even sure that its the case that WoW players are buying less games, or that even if this is the case, that its having any kind of measurable impact on the PC game market). From my own perspective, I’m buying less games because I simply have less time to play them. For instance, I have a copy of Company of Hero’s on my desk right now…and I’ve hardly played it. Also, the new Warhammer game is out (both the expansion for Warhammer 40k and the new Warhammer: Mark of Chaos)…and I would LOVE to play them both. But I know there isn’t time, so I haven’t picked up either of them and probably won’t any time soon. I have my hands full with the new Total War Medieval II and WoW (ramping up for the PvP patch coming either this week or next and getting ready for the expansion in January).

-XT

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[QUOTE=Fish]
Right now, I think the market for PC games suffers from a lack of definition. PC games are, in essence, the ones that consoles can’t do: complicated GUI, keyboard interface, multi-disc install, where the ability to save your game is a must. That’s pretty vague, and doesn’t target a particular genre well.

Until PCs can really define themselves clearly, the market will be satisfied with whatever consoles leave on the cutting room floor. PC game design really exploded with the introduction of the graphics and video cards…
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Speaking as a 25-year PC game enthusiast, I gotta tell you, I cannot disagree more. PC gaming was at the peak of its creativity and innovation in the late 80’s, and was defined by games wherein fancy graphics WEREN’T the end all and be all of game design. Pirates!, SimCity, M.U.L.E., Gunship, M1 Tank Platoon, The Ancient Art of War, the first three or four Ultimas, more games with “Quest” in the title than I can count… these were all CGA graphics games. Civilization, TIE Fighter, X-Com, Harpoon, Lemmings, Master of Orion, Star Control, Elite, Dune II, Earl Weaver Baseball, all preceded the centrality of the graphics card as the gaming platform’s main concern. I even question whether or not graphics cards made FPS games possible, since “Wolfenstein 3D” and “Doom” came out quite a long time ago and could be played on almost any machine.

I cannot think of a single game type that was created after the rise of after market graphics cards in the mid to late 90’s except the MMORPG - which was, of course, largely made possible by the Internet, not the big time graphics cards.

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You won’t find the likes of this on the consoles…

Forge of Freedom

Granted wargames are a niche market of a niche market, but enough publishers
obviously feel that they can make a profit catering to said market.

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[QUOTE=John DiFool]
You won’t find the likes of this on the consoles…

Forge of Freedom

Granted wargames are a niche market of a niche market, but enough publishers
obviously feel that they can make a profit catering to said market.
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Well, there are turned-based wargames on consoles, although they are often somewhat simplistic compared to PC turn-based wargames. A few examples off the top of my head:

Front Mission 4, PS2
Dai Senryaku VII, Xbox
Fire Emblem series, Gamecube and GBA
Final Fantasy Tactics, PS2 and GBA
Advance Wars, GBA
Military Madness, TurboGrafx-16 (later released as Nectaris on PS1)

I believe there was a port of Panzer General on the PS1.

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I completely stopped even following computer game news years ago. The last game I bought was some golf title I don’t even remember. It’s weird and a little sad…there was a time when I was absolutely fanatical about computer games. I’d gladly plunk down $40 for some cheapo arcade port and spend hours just reading aobut them. Now I have a steady job and a car and all kinds of resources for researching games…and I just don’t care.

The three huge issues for me: 1. Hardware requirements. Been getting steadily more and more byzantine for years; an utter nightmare now, and I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in working for a game. 2. Bugs. I’m bewildered at how bug-riddled releases have become acceptable and I should just put up with them and wait however long it takes to get the patch. 3. Nearly all of it is way too freakin’ DIFFICULT. The modern shooters are a morass of keyboard commands and weapons and enemies and levels, and I dread anything called a “simulator”.

What would bring me, and undoubtedly lots of other, players back would be a return to games that emphasize a computer’s strengths. Depth of gameplay, graphics, complexity. Not hideously broken and ludicrously designed puzzles (I’m looking at YOU, Riven) or the threat of dying every five seconds. Titanic: Adventure Out of Time was a fantastic game without crippling time limits or 5000-gigashploitz graphic requirements.

All that’s required is a return to fudamentals. Fun. Enjoyment. Depth. Quality of product. Simplicity. Produce games that are worth the trouble, and the customers will come back in droves.

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I’m going to summarize my arguments from a year and a half ago because they haven’t essentially changed:

  1. The relative technical specs of the different platforms don’t matter much.
  • because -
  1. Consoles have a larger customer base.
  • which means -
  1. Consoles games can have bigger development budgets.
  • which means -
  1. Console games tend to be higher quality even if the hardware they’re running on is inferior.
  • which means -
  1. Few big-budget high profile games are made targeted at the PC. Instead what you mostly see is budget titles, casual games, and ports.

WoW and the Sims are the major exceptions of course. But both rely on internet connectivity, which is still somewhat limited in the console market. I wouldn’t be surprised to see MMORPGs and other social games migrate to the consoles as well as the number of connected consoles increases.

(It’s kind of amazing to me that first-person shooters have migrated. Most people agree that the twin joystick control scheme is inferior to mouse-and-keyboard. But the economic pressure was just too great.)

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[QUOTE=Pochacco]
WoW and the Sims are the major exceptions of course. But both rely on internet connectivity
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Why does “The Sims” rely on Internet connectivity?

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It doesn’t, but you can download a very large number of items for it. Some people would say that’s half the fun.

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[QUOTE=Pochacco]

  1. Few big-budget high profile games are made targeted at the PC.
    [/QUOTE]

Except for every major title in turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, flight/combat simulation, etc, etc, etc, etc. There are a substantial number of genres that consoles really suck at, mostly due to interface issues that aren’t going away any time very soon. Consoles might have adventure, racing sewn up and moving that way on shooters, but they’re hardly the be-all end-all of gaming you’re making them out to be.