Piracy not reason consoles won

It is interesting to note how well 8800 still runs most games out there (even newest ones) with high resolutions and all the bells and whistles turned on, considering the fact that it is more than 3 years old. Last generation, running HL2, Doom 3, and Far Cry on a Geforce 3 with high resolutions, close to max settings, and high AA and AF would seem out of question. This could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it.

 

But people with generic laptops (as in for work) are generally not interested in gaming besides flash games to kill time or such. Laptops are primarly a mobile platform for work not meant for serious gaming. If your laptop can play advanced games then when being mobile then that is good and that person has choosen a gaming platform becouse he likes games that are not flash based only. Wake me up when you can take your 360/PS3 and a HDTV with you on the flightplane and be allowed to connect it to the power outlet for free...

Yes it will cost more from day one but in the long run the difference will be smaller due to cheaper games though still a difference. And yes 360 arcade is much cheaper with no HDD, a "crippled system" stacked against a system that costs more but does far more and gives you by far more per dollar. Like comparing an "el-cheapo DVD player" vs a quality "Blu-ray player with digital TV tuner, built in HDD and advanced features". Each one is well worth their price for what you seek but one clearly gives you far more and naturally costs more. It is called premium stuff and while it might not sell as well as the cheap 'on the front shelf' promoted product there still are lots of people that are interested in the premium stuff a bit deeper into the store so to say.

 

What is really interesting is that despite this you have the usual console fan stereotypes spamming FUD left and right that you need to uppgrade every 3 months and "a decent gaming rig will run you $500 alone for the GPU". Then you also have the ones saying "bu bu bu.. X game runs worse than on the 360 and my PC cost me 800$ and I am only trying to run it at 2560x1600 with 16xAA and super ultra settings, better to get the 360 version"!

 

I'm still debating whether to get BC2 on PC or 360. If I go PC, I'll also need (want, actually) to get a 5870, which last time I checked was about $400. Pretty expensive choice.

 

But it is an option to get the best out of the game at insane resolutions. You dont need even close to that to still get a much better experience visually and perfomance wise.

 

The problem with PC gaming is that you, as a developer, is dealing with:
1. A decimal order of magnitude performance difference between the lowest and the highest performing CPU.
2. Two decimal orders of difference of magnitude for GPU performance between three year old IGPs and state of the art GPUs.
3. A decimal order of magnitude difference in RAM
4. Various operating systems (XP/Vista/Win 7) and graphics APIs (dx 8/9/10/11).

In practice and endless number of configurations that your QA needs to test for, and you as a game developer needs to accomodate. That's a lot of work spent on scaling options and testing.

The relative number of "Gaming" PCs to regular lap/desktops is small, - and dwindling. This means that the economics for supporting high end PC gaming is eroding. Crysis is probably the last PC-only high end game we will see. All others will be console ports with options for higher visual fidelity, but not for ground breaking new game play mechanics. In fact if it weren't for console ports, high end PC gaming would have been dead a long time ago (who'd buy a $400 GPU to play a handful of games?).

The reason WoW is succesful is (besides being addictive to certain types of persons) that it runs on every damn POS PC out there.

If you want to know the future of PC gaming, go to www.bigfishgames.com as painful as it is.

Cheers

 

Ofcourse since a big part of the worlds population have a PC and cheaper PCs these days allows poor country people to buy one for work or media which would otherwise have not been able to afford a PC. 360/PS3 units-in-homes would also fare bad against this enormous number of regular PCs found in most homes around the world. Say if decent part of population in... Africa would have bought a regular PC then the 'gaming PC vs regular PC' ratio would be changed in favor of regular PCs yet the amount of sold gaming PCs would still be increasing yet ratios would not reflect this.

I thought it was an article/blog but lol, refer to my post above about FUD.

 

The reason consoles won over PC is because of ignorance. You have idiots from magazines (outside of PC oriented) saying you need a $2000 to get the same performance as a PS3.

You guys ever seen an episode with Michael Pachter on this gametrailers show with these other 2 idiots who's names escape me? They said there's nothing the PC can do that the PS3 can't, and that you need a 2000 bucks "DUAL QUAD" to even keep up with the PS3.

 

Yeah, I've had far fewer problems with video card drivers in recent years, but having to go back to an old driver to get a game (that I purchased off Steam only last month) to work was an unwelcome blast from the past. Before that, the last big "upgrade downgrade" problem that I had was new drivers required to run Bioshock that broke fan speed control (100% fanspeed lols - problem wasn't fixed for well over a year).

Live certainly can be a curse (I dislike the lack of dedicated servers for most games) but it definitely has its perks, as NRP mentioned. I know folks who are former PC gamers who, on balance, prefer the Live experience where everything just works with everything, and where co-op gaming isn't just possible - it's actively encouraged.

For them the PC is the "good enough" option, whilst Live is the ideal. I like selecting favourite servers with a good crowd that game on them, but I don't necessarily want to be "friends" with all these people.

I think you're in danger of making an artificial distinction between gamer/none gamer and gaming laptop/none gaming laptop.

I know plenty of keen gamers with generic laptops - they just do their "high end" gaming on their consoles. I also know some WoW addicts who do some incredibly "serious" gaming on their Intel integrated graphics laptops.

Everyone is a gamer of one sort or another. Gaming is part of human nature - this is something Nintendo in particular have cracked on to (along with all kinds of flash/phone developers). I think it's a risky business trying to categorise someone based on what kind of laptop they have, or whether they're prepared to muck around with drivers.

 

Compared to Xbox and Playstation brand PC dont have a marketing and hype machine (Sony/Ms) behind it that spends lots of money to promote respective product and also cater to fanboys/people on payroll for them to spread hype. They are the ones taking the major loss and the really system pushing titles are often funded by these corporations that can manage the losses. The developer gets a "out of jail card". Though this gen losses seems quite big for both of them...

 

I should have made it clearer. What I meant is people with generic laptops dont buy those laptops to play games. Most laptops out there to buy are not well suited for games. Ofcourse the owner can still be a gamer and go home and play on their console or stationary PC... or both.

 

I'm not sure. How likely is it that more tasks will be offloaded to the gpu in the future?What are devs going to be able to do with DX11, OpenCL, etc? Seems like some extra gpu power would be a wise investment if I don't want to have to upgrade every year or so. Which kinda brings us back to the original point.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to paint PC gaming in a bad light here. Battlefield historically has always the type of game that I prefer to play on PC (it's probably the only game I would play on PC). But BC2 has really improved the gameplay compared to previous console versions. It now has most of the scale and complexity that I've come to expect since BF2. For me, the choice isn't so simple.

 

actually yes it is best to go with DX11 card and be prepared. I am still waiting only for the reason that GTX480 will soon be released and IMO it looks like the beast I want!

 

I wouldn't really argue with you there my good man. PC gaming is certainly cheaper in the long run and you most definitely do get more bang for buck... however i think the "reptuation" that PC gaming has in the minds of those on the outside is that it's far cheaper and convenient to game on a console.

It's rather ironic too, as i built a monster rig in 2008 for £800 just to play crysis. Ended up spending all that money, not even being able to max the game out, and then after seeing my GPU's retail price slashed in two as NV released they're newer chip almost about a month later, i was rather peaved. Add to it the constant updates, dodgy driver/compatability issues i was having, also learning that to even make crysis look good i had to start fiddling with config files... after all that I went out and bought a PS3 and never looked back.

Now my PC is just used for more PC centric titles (e.g. Dragon Age Origins) and Valve games, and i do the majority of my gaming on my PS3....

 

I wonder how are they going to implement that in a way that it will not be cracked in a short time. Unless they use a really elaborate technique like Starforce's VM + communications encryption I don't see a way to prevent cracked versions for single player use from showing up soon after release.

I also do hope it succeeds, people who make videogames deserve both to be paid and respected, as hard as that is to understand for some people.

 

but its not anecdotal evidence at all, its based on the actual sales data (the $ value of physical + downloadable music total, have dramatically decreased)

sorry mate but thats a unbelievably stupid comment, so much so I assume you must be taking the piss

Theres a lot of evidence around If u look at the 2 biggest titles in the UK last year. MW2,fifa10 (though its a similar story with most games) from memory the sales figures were ~98% consoles, ~2%pc. yet the actual ppl playing on online servers were no way near a 50:1 ratio

 

You mean the sales number for only UK that also exclude digital sales? Hoo-kay maybe that is the world for some.. whatever rocks your boat to skew reality!


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/infinity-ward-defends-uk-mw2-pc-sales

Thanks for letting me showcase another type of FUD. Also IIRC first MW has sold well over 1 million on PC.

 

why not ?

 

From what I read all Ubisoft games will be Steam based as in it ties itself to Steam like MW2, DOWII etc. That + live key check should do good to protect the IP.

 

I think Microsoft's decision to enter console market is what really started the decline of PC gaming as a whole. I don't know if it was inevitable or not, but if MS never entered console business, we might be looking at a different picture.