Alan Wake: Microsoft preparing to leave PC gamers behind (again)

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Also there is something to sitting on a big comfy couch and playing on your big screen tv than on your puny PC monitor

Tell that to my wife who's computer is (exclusively) plugged into the TV/receiver... via one HDMI cable... just like a console or any other device. Also do the math on viewing distances for "puny PC monitors" vs even gigantic TVs. You'll find that the PC monitors are almost always covering a larger percentage of your field of view, and at a much higher relative resolution as well.

Both platforms are capable of *exactly* the same thing here. In fact, this is a PC win since it can do both, and often in better quality (1080p or whatever, many-channel surround)... you can even sit on your big comfy couch with a keyboard if you want.

I was just poking fun at this earlier in the thread, because it's silliness that anyone thinks there's a difference there. A PC does not imply a desk and wired peripherals. If you choose to use it that way, fine, but in that case I would counter with the fact that I don't like consoles because they are hard to balance on my head while gaming

And yeah, tell that "quick download" story to my PS3, which constantly wastes 45+ minutes of my time installing patches and updates when I want to play a game, compared to my PC which already has anything required installed automatically when I want to play. There is *no* excuse for the lack of background auto-updates and the excessive slowness of patches on consoles.

Anyways, enough of that. My only point was to poke fun at the poor excuses that were used when they canceled the PC version before, rather than just admitting the real (and quite valid) reasons Stupid PR...

 

[Mobius1aic]

Why? If you buy it all you're condoning is publishers releasing PC versions many months or even years after the console versions.

No. No. No. No. No.

Remedy, keep your Alan Wake and your console fans like you wanted all along. So they let you down and didn't buy as many copies as you were expecting? Tough. If it has a decent FOV, makes full use of current high end machines and is rock solid I might pick it up on a Steam sale for 10 euros.

Then it sells like shit, and the developers/publishers either blame it on piracy and/or say that PCers have no interest in the game, deciding to halt any further PC development. That could mean no more PC games at all. If the issue IS piracy, then the Gabe Newell approach needs to be in place: create a superior product on a superior platform for distribution so gamers can get their hands on their games quickly and easily. In a way, Onlive is the epitome of this, but most PC gamers like to run the games off their system, with customized options that are beyond what a simple streaming services could reasonably provide, especially in this day and age of regulated internet data plans. The fear of piracy is also creating the problem, not just the act. It's like how terrorism is thrown around in US politics to incite fear among citizens and voters to further push ideologies.

The PC is the true-blue American platform I say! Consoles are the equivalent of totalitarianism!

You're a grand 'ole flag!
You're a high flying flag!
And forever in peace may you wave!

*Waves flag, lights sparklers, guns truck engine, shoots Colt .45/Barret .50 cal/AR-15 in the air*

*Goes off the deep end*

 

[green.pixel]

Hence why almost all AAA pubs have gone to console as the main dev platform with ports to PC (and even ports to PC are being cancelled or stopped for some pubs now

Big pubs went mutliplatform because of the development costs and to maximize revenue, with piracy or not. If there was no piracy at all, on any platform, they would still put games on any platform that can make them money and sales of CoD#234 on PC would still not remotely match those on consoles. All the big PC only/first (the few that were getting made) from 2005 onwards have sold well considering the type of game design they have, little to no marketing, and the appeal of the platform to the mass market consumer, who is necessary for the big budget games to be made at all. PC exclusives (outside of few specific categories) can't get huge budgets because of the limited audience, and the reason for that is that the "platform" is too complicated/confusing/hard/whatever for the mass market.

it is a demographic reality.

Yeah, make it easy to consume or the poor little dears will go away. lol

 

[Grall]

Onlive is the epitome of this

Well, except of course that Onlive isn't the epitome of anything, other than convenience perhaps, especially now that they have expanded onto smartphones and tablets as well.

Onlive's a nice concept in a way, I'll give them that, but I personally prefer to run stuff at much better video quality on my home rig. I'm also concerned it scavenges the PC market rather than adds to it, or would if it was to catch on in any sort of major way (which I'm pretty 100% sure it won't; too niche), since there's basically no point in adding lots of graphics detail and pixel shader stuff that Onlive's computers can't handle or will just get lost in the (very) lossy realtime compression system they use, why would devs put any extra effort into PC versions of their games?

Well, a pointless concern probably, since Onlive is likely to remain a marginal share of the PC market, should they manage to survive on any kind of long-term basis.

especially in this day and age of regulated internet data plans.

Yeah, there's that too, if one happens to live in the wrong country. I'm happy I'm not american, canadian or australian and getting extorted by my ISP for data they used to be able to deliver just fine in the past, and reasonably should be able to now as well, and even more so in fact with Moore's law constantly pushing the boundaries forwards.

Consoles are the equivalent of totalitarianism!
*Goes off the deep end*

Heh. Well, consoles ARE totalitarianism, especially these days when you can get prosecuted for breaking into the device YOU OWN and have paid money for. You can't even boot up an ecksbocks without getting slapped in the face with commercials on the dashboard, I'll never tolerate that. NEVER.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah, there's that too, if one happens to live in the wrong country. I'm happy I'm not american, canadian or australian and getting extorted by my ISP for data they used to be able to deliver just fine in the past, and reasonably should be able to now as well, and even more so in fact with Moore's law constantly pushing the boundaries forwards.

Infrastructure isn't cheap. Especially if you have a large country to cover with potentially vast distances between metropolitan centers. It's easy and relatively cheap for small countries like Japan/Korea. Much harder for larger countries like the US, Canada, and Russia (especially outside of the larger metropolitan areas).

And then you have something like poor Australia. Large country, not densely populated, except in a couple of cities, and with a vast ocean between them and other countries (much much farther than trans-Atlantic cable). Laying the infrastructure not only within the country itself but then across the Pacific to the US or almost anywhere else is going to be extraordinarily expensive. Hence why they have the most stringent data caps, highest prices for unmetered, and slowest speeds of almost any country.

Unmetered access was initially cheap in the US as both cable and telecom were able to leverage existing copper cable. But as rising demands for data and speed arise, the need to lay down new infrastructure means costs have to go up or you stay at the same relative speed as before. Especially if you don't live in one of the densely packed metropolitan areas (where high speed, unmetered internet is not only available but reasonably priced).

Considering its size, I think the British have the most to complain about. I believe there's still data metering at a lot of their ISPs despite being a relatively small and densely packed country. Then again with as much Government control, regulations, etc. there, I'm surprised they manage to get anything done in that country.

Regards,
SB

 

[TheD]

And then you have something like poor Australia. Large country, not densely populated, except in a couple of cities, and with a vast ocean between them and other countries (much much farther than trans-Atlantic cable). Laying the infrastructure not only within the country itself but then across the Pacific to the US or almost anywhere else is going to be extraordinarily expensive. Hence why they have the most stringent data caps, highest prices for unmetered, and slowest speeds of almost any country.


Regards,
SB

The cost is mostly because we are held hostage by telstra.

They own all the exchanges, make it hard for other ISPs to put DSLAMs into them, charge much higher prices per a port than others and have very high interconnect fees to connect the ISP's PoPs to telstra's PoPs that are connected to the ports in the telstra DSLAMs (that the ISP is renting).

All of that adds up to is about 1/4 the data via a Telstra DSLAM port as a same priced plan via someone else's DSLAM.

But this is all getting very OT.

 

[Argoon]

Agreed SB. And couple to that the fact that most PC games need many patches and driver updates which consoles do but its just a quick download. You have to upgrade your hardware to take advantage of some new graphics features if you are a PC person and that ain't cheap either. Consoles don't have that problem. So those reasons alone are appealing to more and more people to play on consoles. Also there is something to sitting on a big comfy couch and playing on your big screen tv than on your puny PC monitor. It just makes sense why devs don't target PCs anymore. As sad as it maybe to me because I love PC as a gaming platform it is a demographic reality.

Sorry to say this but if you "loved" the PC you wouldn't spout the same bull***** that console gamers used ever since the PS2 era. Gaming on PC is not expensive with a 100€ GPU you can play all the console after thoughts that we have now at max settings, what the PC does is giving you the option to upgrade your hardware BUT is not mandatory to play the majority of games now.
What gaming hobby is more expensive is subjective, that depends on the money that you are willing to spend on it, but lets see, my gaming system was 600€ (A PC 10x more powerful then any console today) on the other end a friend of mine that is a console player has a big full HD TV for 600€ a 7.1 sound system for 200€ ( i game with 35€ headphones ) and a Xbox360, my friend gaming system is more or less 1000€, tell me how can PC gaming be expensive in this case?

 

[Grall]

Infrastructure isn't cheap.

I don't buy that excuse. Capacity in trunk lines have gone up factors of magnitude over the last 10 years. In the 1990s, a T1 line was considered a really really fast connection. Today any 3G cell phone can do several times better, wirelessly over the air. Yet data is more expensive than it's ever been since the bad old dial-up modem days; it doesn't make sense.

Well, it does. From the perspective that the ISPs are bilking americans, canadians and australians. Probably others too.

 

[swaaye]

I guess I'm looking forward to Alan Wake. These games that are "exclusive" for over a year and then get ported are annoying though. Mass Effect was like that too.

 

[suryad]

Whoa whoa whoa fellas, take it easy lol. I apologize if I seem to have offended the gaming gods as Davros would say with my last comment. I am not saying that I am entirely correct. Regardless of what I said, I still am an ardent PC gamer. Driver issues let's see Nvidia keeps crashing on left 4 dead 2 and I am not the only one who has reported this problem. Turns out I have to go and run some command in the game console to turn off multicore support and that will fix the nvidia driver crashes...granted I have not tried it yet but there you go. Also I want to play BF3 but if I want to enjoy it at it's max, I have to get a DX 11 card. I am not saying it's that big of a deal for a PC lover like me, but majority of the console folk don't bother with knowing what DX 11 is or how one can tweak a game engine ini file and get more out of the game, etc etc. We are a different breed and enjoy doing that. Unfortunately you can't do that in consoles and that makes it easier for so many people. They just want to pop in a disc and enjoy with their surround sound home theater setup. That's all. And I think whether I am correct or incorrect does not matter, at least it looks to me that game developers are thinking that way...I cannot think of any other reason other than piracy and what I am talking about for game developers to develop and release more titles for the consoles than for the PC.

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

In the future, Microsoft will be crushed by Biganhard. Everyone, who's anyone know's that.

 

[hughJ]

I kind of look forward to the day when most of the big budget publisher/devs leave the PC space. It will only make more room for indie startups that are not tied down to uninspired, formulaic, lowest common denominator game design. If they want to blame poor sales on piracy, then so be it. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky, but I think I'd be willing to trade away EA, Ubisoft, Activision/Blizzard, and even Bethesda if it meant getting a few more gems like Minecraft every couple years.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I kind of look forward to the day when most of the big budget publisher/devs leave the PC space. It will only make more room for indie startups that are not tied down to uninspired, formulaic, lowest common denominator game design. If they want to blame poor sales on piracy, then so be it. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky, but I think I'd be willing to trade away EA, Ubisoft, Activision/Blizzard, and even Bethesda if it meant getting a few more gems like Minecraft every couple years.

Or gems likes the solid and bugfree Sword of the Stars 2 or Elemental: War of Magic (both by formerly solid and highly acclaimed indy pubs).

I like a good mix of high budget AAA developed titles along with lower mid budget titles (Trine 2 for example is fantastic) and even some low budget indie titles (Dungeon Defenders is absolutely fantastic!).

I think I'd switch almost completely to consoles if there were no big budget AAA games on PC anymore. Many of the same indie games are available on console as well so the biggest benefits of PC gaming (high quality graphics) would no longer hold me to the platform. Although lack of mouse and keyboard would make me hesitate for FPS or RTS (both generally high budget AAA gametypes) type games. Then again since most of those tend to be high budget, except for 4X type games which I just don't get into much anymore due to the lack of any sort of storyline in low/mid budget indie developed 4x games, I don't think it would stop me.

Regards,
SB

 

[joker454]

I kind of look forward to the day when most of the big budget publisher/devs leave the PC space.

My gut is telling me that may very well happen next console gen. I figure next console gen will hit the powerful enough mark to where it will be even more difficult to tell the difference between pc and console games, and given the rampant theft in the pc space I suspect many big publishers will just stop supporting it. This console gen prety much saw the end of the pc exclusive, and next console gen may see the start of some games abandoning the platform entirely. Just speculation on my part of course, but unless they can solve the whole game payment honor system that effectively is in place now I just can't imagine the platform will be supported longer term given diminishing returns between pc and console versions of the same games next gen. (Note I only speak of the hardcore gaming market, not casual gaming market.)

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Honestly I think it's far more likely that the days of consoles are numbered than their already-more-general-purpose cousins. I expect one more console generation, perhaps ever. There's simply no reason to make a device that does so few things well when you can have something far more general that also plays games well. Whether you call that thing a console or a TV or a PC or a set-to-box is pretty irrelevant.

That said, who really cares? We're at the best time for gaming that there really has ever been. There are very few barriers for entry for indi games (so why you say we need AAA games to go away is confusing), and we've honestly crossed the line where there are more good games than there are good movies. The vast majority of good games are multi-platform so the platform is even less of a factor than it has ever been in the past. You pay more, you get a nicer experience, but there are options if you're not an enthusiast.

Honestly I'm not really sure what people are complaining about with the current situation. It's pretty much ideal and will only improve from here I imagine as fewer and fewer devices and configurations start to take over all functionality (beyond games). It's pretty clear that in the future you're only going to have one thing plugged into your TV, if that thing isn't already integrated into the TV itself (which is an irrelevant distinction as well). The sooner the better says I!

 

[pjbliverpool]

If AAA games leave the PC then I can't see me continuing to game at all. Fixed graphics and £40 per game? You've gotta be crazy to settle for that IMO.

 

[joker454]

Honestly I think it's far more likely that the days of consoles are numbered than their already-more-general-purpose cousins. I expect one more console generation, perhaps ever. There's simply no reason to make a device that does so few things well when you can have something far more general that also plays games well. Whether you call that thing a console or a TV or a PC or a set-to-box is pretty irrelevant.

Yup I totally agree, the console as we know it will also go away to be replaced by a more do-it-all box, that's already in the process of happening.

That said, who really cares? We're at the best time for gaming that there really has ever been. There are very few barriers for entry for indi games (so why you say we need AAA games to go away is confusing), and we've honestly crossed the line where there are more good games than there are good movies. The vast majority of good games are multi-platform so the platform is even less of a factor than it has ever been in the past. You pay more, you get a nicer experience, but there are options if you're not an enthusiast.

It is a great time in gaming and I intend to splurge on pc gpu's as I see the pc having it's gaming last hurrah in the next 2 years or so. Indie games, casuals and MMo's will live on but I'm not confident that AAA games will appear on the pc in the future. I liken the pc gaming market to an honor system garage sale. I ask people, would you hold a garage sale, then leave it unattended with a jar on the table saying "please leave payments here"? No one here in their right mind would ever do that, but that is exactly what the pc market is today and I simply don't expect AAA publishers to keep doing it on pc. Pc lived on because it was the only way to get top graphics, but with that possibly coming to an end next console gen to me means pc may finally hit end of line for those major games.

Honestly I'm not really sure what people are complaining about with the current situation. It's pretty much ideal and will only improve from here I imagine as fewer and fewer devices and configurations start to take over all functionality (beyond games). It's pretty clear that in the future you're only going to have one thing plugged into your TV, if that thing isn't already integrated into the TV itself (which is an irrelevant distinction as well). The sooner the better says I!

My only complaint is that devs don't leverage cool pc hardware because pirates have made it unfeasible to do so, which denies me the paying customer the chance to play games the best they can be. We're getting a short repireve now it seems because this console gen is being dragged on so long that devs have no choice but to explore new rendering techniques on pc so as to keep up on the tech curve, hence we're finally seeing some cool new stuff even if their work will just be torrented millions of times. Next console gen then should solve many (most?) of the shortcomings of current consoles so I'm looking forward to that.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

I liken the pc gaming market to an honor system garage sale. I ask people, would you hold a garage sale, then leave it unattended with a jar on the table saying "please leave payments here"? No one here in their right mind would ever do that, but that is exactly what the pc market is today and I simply don't expect AAA publishers to keep doing it on pc.

You could have made the same argument about the music industry, and you would have been wrong You're also making an incorrect distinction between consoles and PCs in this space... consoles are hardly "secure", and PCs can certainly be more secure than they are if the need was there. No, I think it's far more likely that games will simply continue the trend of providing significant "service" infrastructure that requires online access at some frequency. That's the more likely solution on any platform, as any client hardware will never be "secure" enough.

 

[joker454]

You could have made the same argument about the music industry, and you would have been wrong You're also making an incorrect distinction between consoles and PCs in this space... consoles are hardly "secure", and PCs can certainly be more secure than they are if the need was there. No, I think it's far more likely that games will simply continue the trend of providing significant "service" infrastructure that requires online access at some frequency. That's the more likely solution on any platform, as any client hardware will never be "secure" enough.

Depends, the music industry has shifted to Spotify type all you can eat buffet model where most of the artists don't actually make any money, but they still make music because they enjoy it, so it's more akin to the indie gaming model. I don't think AAA publishers would be happy with that sort of model, nor is there any equivalent in the gaming space to the 99 cent music track. Additionally the gaming biz doesn't have the equivalent of the music concert to where they can afford to lose money on the music tracks themselves and make it back on concerts.

Consoles aren't 100% secure but they don't have to be, as the threat of being banned from their respective online services and/or bricking your console by tinkering with it are both excellent deterents.

Requiring online on pc hasn't worked either as that's been cracked as well. I don't really buy the "it can be more secure" argument either as that has been batted around for decades now with little effect. I think their best best it to entirely eliminate retail in the pc space. From what I've gathered from various friends that work at various "large publishers", the point of weakness on pc most of the time is at the dvd replicator. That is where the leaks usually occur, then it gets to the pirates and then it's being played long before the actual game hits the shelf. If they eliminate that entirely and ship only digitally the day before release, like on steam, then that would help a bit as some people that would normally have already finished the game before it was even release maybe would consider buying instead of waiting a week for it to be cracked. I still question if that is enough though. I hope you are right but I'm not particularly hopeful.

 

[Sigfried1977]

... consoles are hardly "secure"

Unless you pay someone to tinker with your 360 or risk bricking it by doing it yourself you are not going to play any sort of pirated software any time soon. If you still go ahead and do it you can at the very least say good bye to Xbox Live.

As for the PS3: that system remains secure to this day as far as I know. Yes, there was a breach, but to everyone's surprise Sony actually managed to plug the hole. Unless you only care about playing old games, piracy isn't an option on that system either.

All things considered, that's actually pretty damn secure. More secure than it's ever been in the past actually.