PC gaming getting more expensive makes this far less likely. Game development costs are higher necessitating a larger potential market to sell to. Sky rocketing prices of high end PC parts shrinks the market.
Sony PS6, Microsoft neXt Series - 10th gen console speculation [2020]
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
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I guess the question then is why Pc was the high-end in the 90s-2000s but cannot reclaim that again as Silent_Buddha suggests. And I guess the obvio0us answer to that is cost as Seanspeed says. The market for that high-end visual is too small to sustain a Crysis-level blowout. We need an evolution in game development to bring the costs right down so they aren't prohibitive and you can throw whatever you want at a gaming device without incurring more and more costs. ML might be a revolution there, either in content creation or real-time content generation.
Back then games were so much cheaper to make far less sales were required for a profit.
arandomguy
Veteran
It get's shot down because people do not like the implications but the business model is flawed on the PC in terms of incentivizing targeting high end hardware from the software side in broad sense. It costs more both on the hardware side and the software side to deliver, but only one side really earns more.
The PC gaming market accepts paying for hardware but not for software. But the software side does not see any of the money that goes to the hardware, while at the same time would incur more costs and potentially see less money (due to loss of volume) from targeting high end hardware. But the PC gaming market, at least up to now, will not accept paying more for software for a better experience. Neither high end hardware buyers will accept nor those lower down the stack.
The only semi workaround we currently have is in hardware/software partnerships (which hardware vendors can leverage to sell hardware), but this is limited because the audience is wary of hardware/software tie-ins and associations.
Star Citizen is an unreleased glorified interactive concept tech demo
Until its released as a fully fledged game it doesnt count. It swallows more money than it outputs in product.
I guess the PC space should test this by selling improved quality modes for games, although I'm not sure how scalable the development would be to separate out more expensive builds for players who want to take advantage of them.
The way I see gaming on PC is a piracy infested platform with a different gaming mindset.
Few PC games designed exclusively for the platform take fully advantage of the hardware. The most successful exclusive PC games reflect the type of gamer tastes that were present during the PS2 era and before.
RPGs, MMORPGs, strategy games, sims, building games. And now F2P games.
The list here is actually quite revealing
en.wikipedia.org
I have to say that although the GPCMR tend to blame consoles for PCs not been taken fully advantage it is actually the reverse. Every console generation represents the next shift in gaming development. Consoles present a safe space of sales and a unified experience. Developers know exactly what to target for. Marketing on consoles work much better. Games on consoles are targeting the living room, the big screen where movies, series, sports and cartoons are experienced. Technology is built around taking advantage small resources in hardware efficiently and to bring the best possible experience on the living room. Those games scale up awesomely on PCs. When PC and console architecture became more common, we saw bigger support and higher diversity of games on PCs and more games that push the hardware. In the old times we were waiting for some technological outlier to bring something new on the table like Doom 3 or Crysis which was rare. And quite often they don't bring as much revenue. It essentially happened exactly what Bill Gates wanted when he wanted to create an entertainment gaming box that would bridge game development between PCs and Consoles since consoles before, were directly competing with PC gaming. He was very worried because the vision of entertainment and gaming from Windows was not expanding at the same rate as the Playstation was. Windows were going to become irrelevant in the entertainment industry. But here we have consoles, pumping impressively gaming on PCs with high budget multiplatform titles.
I doubt we would have seen Cyberpunk 2077 pumping so much muscle if it wasn't also for the Consoles market ensuring more sales and a next generational shift with PS5 and XBOX Series.
Few PC games designed exclusively for the platform take fully advantage of the hardware. The most successful exclusive PC games reflect the type of gamer tastes that were present during the PS2 era and before.
RPGs, MMORPGs, strategy games, sims, building games. And now F2P games.
The list here is actually quite revealing
List of best-selling PC games - Wikipedia
I have to say that although the GPCMR tend to blame consoles for PCs not been taken fully advantage it is actually the reverse. Every console generation represents the next shift in gaming development. Consoles present a safe space of sales and a unified experience. Developers know exactly what to target for. Marketing on consoles work much better. Games on consoles are targeting the living room, the big screen where movies, series, sports and cartoons are experienced. Technology is built around taking advantage small resources in hardware efficiently and to bring the best possible experience on the living room. Those games scale up awesomely on PCs. When PC and console architecture became more common, we saw bigger support and higher diversity of games on PCs and more games that push the hardware. In the old times we were waiting for some technological outlier to bring something new on the table like Doom 3 or Crysis which was rare. And quite often they don't bring as much revenue. It essentially happened exactly what Bill Gates wanted when he wanted to create an entertainment gaming box that would bridge game development between PCs and Consoles since consoles before, were directly competing with PC gaming. He was very worried because the vision of entertainment and gaming from Windows was not expanding at the same rate as the Playstation was. Windows were going to become irrelevant in the entertainment industry. But here we have consoles, pumping impressively gaming on PCs with high budget multiplatform titles.
I doubt we would have seen Cyberpunk 2077 pumping so much muscle if it wasn't also for the Consoles market ensuring more sales and a next generational shift with PS5 and XBOX Series.
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Developing a high-end AAA PC exclusive may not be feasible for most devs. Building an engine with features that exists beyond console gaming should not be. Most development cost comes from content production not engine design. I don’t believe that PC is so small that all devs can do is offer compatibility support.
Cross gen game development already involves scaling down and removing features on lower hardware like the NS.
Support of DLSS is practically broad even though it’s not on consoles. RT will continue to grow in the PC space even with its limited scope on consoles.
Upscaling tech in the PC space continues to mature while gpu are still growing in flop performance. It’s creating a circumstance where PC gpus will have a big reservoir of untapped performance. Outside of foregoing upscale tech at 4K or throwing all settings to max, there is not much to absorb the extra performance.
Nvidia, Intel and AMD will still need need to sell these newer generations of tech. I imagine they will continue to use marketing deals to push features or techniques that don’t exists on consoles. It’s advantageous for them to create and maintain a discernible visual difference between consoles and PC tech.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
True for the vast majority of AAA developers, unless you have basically unlimited funds (like Star Citizen that you mentioned). For any other developer the reality of modern game creation means that if you want to have a AAA budget you basically have to also sell your games on console. And as console developers are finding out, even consoles aren't enough to sustain AAA development anymore so they need to also release their games on PC.
And that's the point. Developers should do as PC developers did in the 90's and early 2000's, target the best hardware or the best future hardware (announced or unannounced) and then scale down to less powerful and/or currently released hardware (less powerful PC or consoles, it's all the same).
Instead, we've now had over a decade where developers target midlevel to low end hardware (consoles) and then attempt to scale up to better hardware (PC or mid-gen refresh) and down to worse hardware (PC, NSW or current gen with PS4/XBO).
This generation is showing the holes that this can result in. The better looking cross-gen games have obviously at least attempted to target the current generation of consoles, but still aren't targeting the best hardware that the games will release on while the worst looking cross-gen games were obviously targeting the previous generation and then the developers attempted to scale some things up to take advantage of current gen console features.
Regards,
SB
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Cost is certainly an issue and it not only affects PC only development but console only development. Hence console only AAA game releases are quickly dying out.
Cost of AAA development is going to increase significantly for any developer that wants to attempt to fully target current generation hardware that they have to release on all platforms that they can reach, PC and console (even NSW for some AAA developers). Even platform holders with a vested interest have to wrangle with keeping a title exclusive to potentially boost hardware sales or release on another platform to defray the increasingly high cost of development. For platform holders, the middle ground is PC as it has limited impact on console sales. But even there we see erosion of that concept as Microsoft isn't shy about releasing select MS developed titles on other platforms (PlayStation and NSW).
So, we're back at the point that 90's and early 2000's PC developers had to wrangle with, how best to tackle a market with such a diverse set of hardware and hardware performance? For the best developers the answer was to target the best hardware (whether it existed yet or not) and then scale the game back for everyone else. For the worst developers, they would target a lower hardware spec and then either attempt to scale up or just not bother and only scale down to even lower hardware. And for the worst and laziest they targeted the lowest and that was all you got.
Basically the best looking games were derived from developers that targeted the best hardware. Doing so meant that even when scaled down to worst hardware those games at the lower scaled down settings would generally look significantly better than the games that targeted lower hardware in the first place ... when they both ran on the same hardware.
It isn't about PC development versus console development. It's all about targeting the best hardware and scaling back to worse hardware (not worse as in bad but WRT performance and capabilities), if the goal is to have the best looking game. Doing so will generally result in a better looking game as all hardware levels than targeting a lower hardware spec.
Regards,
SB
Everything has to do with economics. There is too much cross gen because not enough next gen console hardware is in consumer hands. The same is going for PC too. The high end PCs are not enough.
If it was financially viable or made much sense they would have been targeting high end PCs first. But the PC market isn't enough. Targeting the largest install base ensures that the game will run at it's best there, and improve on whatever can be achieved on the high end hardware. Thats why we get those crazy high framerates and high or ultra at 4k on high end PCs. Targeting high end hardware first and scaling down might result in a significantly more compromised experience for the bigger bases. Which if you think about it, thats what happened with Cyberpunk 2077.
Back in the old days the PC and console markets were more discrete and costs of making games were lower, so devs could target PCs hardware which was much more advanced in feature sets and expect to get some profit easier even with piracy around and no console release, or a console release that was highly compromised.
edit: I mean COD MW2 was targeting 60fps at the highest possible fidelity that can be achieved on the bigger userbases. I think optimizations would have been a HUGE pain in the ass if they went full on on the high end and then try to figure out what to cut and optimize for the weaker hardware to run at 60fps and still look impressive.
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Why spend $100 million to target the best possible PC, a small market that doesn't pay a premium for the investment, and sacle down, when you could instead spend $50 million to target a common denominator which the high-end PC market will buy anyway?
You need to present an econmic reason why it's better business to spend more on higher quality experienced by a tiny fraction of the market. Typically in business I think this is for the Halo Effect, but the PR of that is probably not worth the direct marketing you could get for less investment.
Is it (that much)? Or is the bar just raising at performance level? You do not need 4080 class hardware to surpass the consoles by large margins. The average PC gamer is looking to buy xx60 products (like the 1060, 960 etc etc). The general understanding is the PC market is actually growing, and fast.
Thats a software problem, not a hardware one. Developing games is expensive at those scales. However i think we are simply a shift in that market, a more general approach. Consoles arent really seeing that much exclusives either anymore as they have done in the 90's/2000's, were in the age of uniform platform development for games.
Now it is up to scaling, and UE5 does seem to be quite capable there.
The way I see gaming on PC is a piracy infested platform with a different gaming mindset.
Few PC games designed exclusively for the platform take fully advantage of the hardware. The most successful exclusive PC games reflect the type of gamer tastes that were present during the PS2 era and before.
RPGs, MMORPGs, strategy games, sims, building games. And now F2P games.
The list here is actually quite revealing
List of best-selling PC games - Wikipedia
I have to say that although the GPCMR tend to blame consoles for PCs not been taken fully advantage it is actually the reverse. Every console generation represents the next shift in gaming development. Consoles present a safe space of sales and a unified experience. Developers know exactly what to target for. Marketing on consoles work much better. Games on consoles are targeting the living room, the big screen where movies, series, sports and cartoons are experienced. Technology is built around taking advantage small resources in hardware efficiently and to bring the best possible experience on the living room. Those games scale up awesomely on PCs. When PC and console architecture became more common, we saw bigger support and higher diversity of games on PCs and more games that push the hardware. In the old times we were waiting for some technological outlier to bring something new on the table like Doom 3 or Crysis which was rare. And quite often they don't bring as much revenue. It essentially happened exactly what Bill Gates wanted when he wanted to create an entertainment gaming box that would bridge game development between PCs and Consoles since consoles before, were directly competing with PC gaming. He was very worried because the vision of entertainment and gaming from Windows was not expanding at the same rate as the Playstation was. Windows were going to become irrelevant in the entertainment industry. But here we have consoles, pumping impressively gaming on PCs with high budget multiplatform titles.
I doubt we would have seen Cyberpunk 2077 pumping so much muscle if it wasn't also for the Consoles market ensuring more sales and a next generational shift with PS5 and XBOX Series.
Anything to back up the claim that the PC is a piracy-infested platform today? Its not 2005 anymore unfortunately. That different mindset claim is a weird one too.
Exclusive games are a dead-end, look at Xbox and now PS also following that same mindset. The PC sees ports from Sony and MS, with mostly the technically best version being on the PC if you have the hardware. In special with Sony games scaling upwards very nicely in RT, fidelity settings, ultrawide, framerates and resolutions. Its quite the difference imo (spiderman for example).
The living room argument was a valid one 10+ years ago, not so much today anymore as the PC lives perfectly fine in the living room connected to the TV setup just as fine as the consoles do.
And as explained before, scaling is the future really. Properiatary engines are not going to dominate anymore, its things like UE5 who will.
PC market is the biggest one when looking at a singular platform, IE PS or Xbox. I might even think that its larger than those combined, looking at GPU sales, theres over 30m RTX2060S or better in the dGPU space, let alone laptop market.
Couldnt agree more with this post, and perhaps were seeing this with UE5 engines.
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There you go.
PC piracy survey results: 35 percent of PC gamers pirate
50,000 PC gamers told us whether they pirate games, and why.
Plus everyone I know who owns a PC pirates. I am one of them too. It is significantly easier. On consoles it is significantly harder.
And yes games scale up and yes nobody said that games dont run better on the PC. I didnt say anything that implied the opposite. I am not sure what you are arguing there.
What I explained is why Devs are rarely attempting to take fully advantage of the high end PC hardware and scale down, but instead target the larger base and scale up from there to the higher end.
As for the living room, again the point wasn't about PCs being suitable for the living room, but about the consoles being by default designed for the living room and by default having a more standardized hardware. Therefore developers are more often making high budget games for multiplatform (PC and consoles) or consoles than just for PC. Basically the existence of consoles benefits the PC space now. Making games like lets say Crysis that markets the high end experience that doesnt run so great on lesser hardware doesn't bring the desired results in terms of revenue.
And btw this isnt a PC vs Console discussion.
If +30% is pirating their games on PC, then the PC gaming market is even bigger than i ever imagined. With in mind that piracy was a much larger factor 20 years ago.
Its all about scaling across different hardware and platform these days, even Playstation games are trending towards that direction. Its the way forward, the only change we'd like to see is what SB described.
Not really.
Re-review your discussion before even interacting with me today in this topic. All you do is comparing PC vs Console with its advantages/disadvantages between these platforms.
Yet in Japan pc gaming is expanding.
I think MS / Valve / Epic need to tailor the pc experience to be much more about ease use. Windows should have a game skin that you can just load into to paly games , steam os as found on steam deck would make for great small pcs.
Pricing isn't an issue since the cost of PC gaming isn't much above console gaming and if pre built systems are done right you can grow into higher end hardware.
I think MS / Valve / Epic need to tailor the pc experience to be much more about ease use. Windows should have a game skin that you can just load into to paly games , steam os as found on steam deck would make for great small pcs.
Pricing isn't an issue since the cost of PC gaming isn't much above console gaming and if pre built systems are done right you can grow into higher end hardware.
I speculate that consoles are dying, and will be replaced by generic PCs that anyone can either buy pre-built from Sony or MS, or build themselves.
Nintendo will continue doing their own thing with portables... except an ever increasing portable PC market will chip away at that, and they'll eventually fold into smart phones and PC.
Nintendo is one WiiU disaster away from going that route. Once all the old guard is done that have no allegiance to their traditional values and just want to make the most money possible, they'll release everything everywhere they can.
And that's it. MS has been building up towards this cloud service, which will eventually just be PC servers running their PC games, and "BC games" will use the old console servers. Sony will follow suit.. they'll continue to port their games to PC and build up a library... then once consoles start becoming replaced, they continue on with generic PC boxes.
There's an ENTIRE generation of kids coming into adulthood that don't have ANY allegiance to consoles... they'd rather be on their phones. Cloud will be huge, and the console makers would be smart to get on that sooner than later.
Nintendo will continue doing their own thing with portables... except an ever increasing portable PC market will chip away at that, and they'll eventually fold into smart phones and PC.
Nintendo is one WiiU disaster away from going that route. Once all the old guard is done that have no allegiance to their traditional values and just want to make the most money possible, they'll release everything everywhere they can.
And that's it. MS has been building up towards this cloud service, which will eventually just be PC servers running their PC games, and "BC games" will use the old console servers. Sony will follow suit.. they'll continue to port their games to PC and build up a library... then once consoles start becoming replaced, they continue on with generic PC boxes.
There's an ENTIRE generation of kids coming into adulthood that don't have ANY allegiance to consoles... they'd rather be on their phones. Cloud will be huge, and the console makers would be smart to get on that sooner than later.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
As we've seen throughout the years, graphics in games is just another form of marketing. From "shots" on the back of boxes to advertisements in magazines and now reviews and other factors. Graphics nowadays has minimal impact on gameplay, yet it has significantly more clout WRT marketing.
I remember when PC screenshots were used to market console versions of games. That was fairly common up until the point where consoles became the primary dev. target and even then it's not uncommon to see PC footage used in advertisements for the console versions of games.
To put it another way, why do companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and brand image? For the same reason that publishers prefer to sell their games based on a screenshot of their game rather than a video of their game. Screenshots don't generally show rendering artifacts that are far more noticeable when a game is in motion (especially temporal artifacts). In both cases you are investing money to elevate the consumer consciousness that your product is the best for the target market because of X thing. In the case of games, unfortunately (IMO), this tends to be dominated by discussions about graphics rather than the far more important gameplay (again, IMO).
For games, graphics have historically been a large selling point regardless of whether that level of graphics exists only on X platform but not Y or Z platforms. Or in the case of PC on A000001 combination of hardware but not on A000002, A000003 ... AXXXXXX combination of hardware.
Graphics, thankfully aren't the only reason people buy games, but WRT a AAA publisher or AAA developer marketing their game it's likely by far the largest marketable point for their game. And thus unfortunately to the detriment of AAA games, publishers and developers with that level of budgeting (AAA) will quite happily sacrifice gameplay in order to be able to claim to have the best graphics or at least competitive graphics if they can't have the best.
Basically for AAA developers, graphics set the stage for both initial gamer investment as well as it's potential pool of buyers. The worse the graphics the fewer people will pre-order it and the fewer people will consider potentially forking over 60-70 USD on the game.
So, if a AAA developer can distance themselves from other AAA developers by having noticeably better or more pleasing graphics they'll in turn be rewarded by greater consumer interest which leads to greater pre-orders and as long as the gameplay isn't complete dog shite (pardon my language) then also increased lifetime sales.
NOTE - I'm not saying graphics are the ONLY reason people buy games, but prior to a game coming out, other than developer/IP reputation and name recognition, graphics are by far the most important thing for a AAA game to have.
BTW - unlikely those large investments in marketing, targeting the best hardware will generally mean a better looking game all the way down the hardware chain as long as the developers are at least relatively competent with making a scalable engine.
Or think of it another way. As a AAA developer you'll most likely need to sell well on PC in addition to selling well on PS and XB and for some publishers you even need to sell well on NSW in addition to PC, PS and XB. You can just half ass it on PC and get X level of sales or you can treat it like a proper platform and get a greater level of sales. Basically, as a developer, are you feeling lazy and want to just leave money on the table or not?
Regards,
SB
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I don't think consoles will die. We have one wave of consoles left at the end of transistor shrinking and that will be supported indefinitely until we find a new way of producing chips or internet becomes fast enough where streaming is a viable replacement. PC components will hit the same wall. I wonder what happens to all these hardware companies once we get to that final 1nm since they dont have a software business like consoles makers do.
I described the market and the economics. If that for you is perceived as a platform comparison about which one is the better one then we will never have a sane discussion. You can exist in your own bubble of existence. Nothing in my arguments was about which is the better place to play
Plus if you dont want interactions with you dont even bother starting one by quoting me in the first place especially if you cant comprehend properly what is being said and take things personally for no real reason
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