Well, one last round of comments for me to avoid taking this thread too far off topic...
How come Blizzard and Valve accountants disagree so much? Certainly, without inside information we are just speculating. I will admit that both companies are not really pushing the graphics detail much, but for example, left for dead 2 on a triple monitor is actually pushing a 5800 class GPU.
Sure but Valve is also supported by being the premiere online direct download outlet for a variety of publishers on PC. That gives them a unique opportunity to avoid having to lose their independance due to the spiral of lower ROI + increased dev cost. You'll also notice they've increased their efforts on console while at the same time taking the plunge into the Apple Mac market.
Blizzard could see the writing on the wall, even with the cash cow that is WoW and merged with Activision which has a large stake in consoles.
There is also the fact that hardware from both nVidia and ATI is generating profits and this is undeniably connected to PC game sales. The moment I see either ATI or nVidia leave the graphics market is when I will start to get concerned.
Graphics hardware profitability is completely unaffected by pirating, yet another offshoot that's even more off-top, although on-top with the off-shoot of Publishers moving more dollars to console.
It's off topic, sure, but not as much as it seems. Graphics performance is a big part of this forum and the discussion is about whether or not the consoles, indirectly by lowering the baseline for development, are affecting the need for fast hardware on the PC.
I think the need for performance is there and the right balance between flexibility and raw power may indeed be met by a many (>50) core chip. If they design such a chip, the PC industry (be it pro or for gaming) will provide the demand.
And yet, interestingly, it's not the graphically advanced games on PC that do particularly well justifying a PC only strategy (The Sims, WoW...). Blizzard will continue targetting graphics hardware a couple generations old in order to appeal to the largest base possible which still delivering a somewhat modern looking game.
A lot (althought not all) of the new wave of graphically advanced PC games are either by new startups or those that are going multi-platform to help fund the R&D for those engines and in hopes they'll be able to recoup the costs and perhaps get a decent ROI.
As I "think" Andrew Lauritzen was somewhat hinting at above. Going multiplatform gives the best chance to get a positive ROI from developement of expensive engines and technologies. Throw in the additional expenses of art developement for those increasingly more complex graphical games and you need a broader base to recoup your investment.
I don't think new techniques using tesselation are going to make things cheaper either, so as time goes on, costs will continue to rise.
And at the bottom of the whole pile, you have a virtually immutable price point of ~50 USD that PC games have been stuck at since the mid-90's, and interestingly enough games at the time were trending higher in price (up to the 80+ USD) for PC games prior to that. We can all thank MS for releasing Win95 and Directx leading to the explosion of consumer computers and thus being able to go for volume rather than margins. And even then we saw the death of many good developers and publishers during the heyday of PC gaming.
Bleh, I'm starting to babble and go waay off topic. Anyways, you can have the last point, I'll stop with this offshoot in this thread here.
Regards,
SB
