Who Killed PC Gaming?

[Sir_Brizz]

Just a note, but the majority of console owners (this gen) own HDTVs, so that's mostly a moot point.

Also, a game running all the bells and whistles of shaders, higher poly models, longer draw distance, etc. @640x480 looks better than a pop-up ridden, lower poly, dx8 shaders, etc. @1600x1200. It doesn't look as crisp, but it more closely imitates life. (granted, this is my opinion but I'll certainly take
Very high @640x400 (well, it was 1280x800 which I then downscaled to 640x400 and then upscaled back to 1280x800 for apples to apples comparison

Fuzzy reality-ish > crisp mediocre videogame. That's how I see it, at least.

You're still running circles around my point, though. You're correct, running with bells and whistles at a lower res usually looks better, but I fail to see how that proves your point that consoles are just easier in that regard.

Whether it's lack of education or unrealistic expectations, your point pretty much proves what I was originally saying. Any modern PC is going to be able to reasonably smash a console in terms of framerate at the same resolutions.

Also, what is classed as an HDTV? I have a TV that can do 480p, but that's 640x480 and I wouldn't consider that an HD resolution, personally. I'd love for you to show me a game that is on both PC and a console that I can't run better at 640x480 with the limited bells and whistles they have enabled (and a boatload more). I don't think you'll find one, and my machine is (mostly) 4 years old.

The only thing a console has is that it is plug and play. You still have to deal with performance issues in lots of games, even though they are specifically made for consoles. And once you have a performance problem, your only recourse is to force the resolution lower. Hardly any console games have detail graphics setting, or graphics settings at all.

So, rolling this back into my original point, if you know what your computer is capable of, you shouldn't have problems. People just assume that every game should run on every PC at max detail, and that doesn't even apply to the consoles. This is a key issue that UT3 has, IMO, people think they should be able to run it at the same settings as they did in UT2004 on the same computer they played UT2004 on. It's just unrealistic, it's not going to happen.

It is also important to note that I'm not downplaying the importance the convenience factor on consoles, I'm simply pointing out that it is a misnomer to say that you have to do more work than turn on a game and start playing for it to run smoothly at its default settings on a machine that meets the recommended specs (in general, there are still just unoptimized games [which also happen to exist on consoles! Imagine that!]).

 

[Dogger]

Developers are what are ruining PC gaming, the use of the word exclusive and the PC gaming Allience.

Not making a game for the PC because it works better for the console, "even though they still are trying to jam that cube in the circular hole that is RTS' on consoles" is just insulting. PC games are just too hard to make, with PC gamers too hard to please and nobody wants that responseability.

 

[213]

There were over 100K downloads on that top 100 list. I know it can be argued that literally none of those would have otherwise resulted in sales if the offenders could not have downloaded the titles, but the mere fact that it could have counted for over 5 million in sales in that list says a lot. That is a huge chunk of money. To boot, those numbers only represent a small portion of pirated PC software, games in particular.

Both my xbox and 360 are pirated. I've got dozens of games on each system, along with literally thousands of roms from older console emulators.

Here's the funny part though,.. not more than a handful of those games held my attention for more than a few nights each, tops.

I've pirated 2 games on PC, both were because of DRMs that killed my ability to play the legit copies I'd already bought.

I think the developers/market are just trying to find that sweet timing niche where they'll get paid often enough to keep a steady income coming in all the time, and not have dry seasons. So I think, from what I'm seeing as a gamer these last few years is that games are being made specifically to have a certain "play value shelf life".

I mean, you can't get people to subscribe to monthly fees for every game type, but no one has hit that perfect "development time vs. pay off" ratio on a regular basis yet. All the timing is still being tested and reworked it seems from studio to studio.

While they putter around it, some not even realizing that they're doing it, or being directed towards this by publishers etc, we are the guinea pigs that have to swallow all the formula variations.

Could be I'm way off here, I've never worked in the game industry myself. But I cannot imagine it's easy to keep funding coming in while you and your coders work on new and innovative engine code, when you're constantly being whipped by publishers and "funders" to show them something splashy and flashy that they think looks like the last big hit.

 

[q_mi_4_3]

Developers are what are ruining PC gaming, the use of the word exclusive and the PC gaming Allience.

Not making a game for the PC because it works better for the console, "even though they still are trying to jam that cube in the circular hole that is RTS' on consoles" is just insulting. PC games are just too hard to make, with PC gamers too hard to please and nobody wants that responseability.

It is true that they prefer console development, where they can get many sales with less effort. I think the question we need to ask is should we accept less games for PC but of PC quality, or more multiplatform games with PC included. Obviously a console port is unacceptable, but it would be unrealistic to think PC gamers can convince the developers to favor the PC again without agreeing to some compromise.

I prefer to relax and my nice comfy leather couch is WAY more relaxing than my (admittedly nice) computer chair. Add in a nice 1000 watt surround sound system (not that logitech's aren't nice, but a 200 watt system even really close fails to impress as much as good theatre speakers). You enjoying being poised forward and hurting your neck after an hour may work for you but I prefer to lean back and enjoy myself.

There are nice computer sound systems out there too, and I still don't agree with the reasoning for the couch but I'm not going to bother to argue it. I sit on my chair just fine, with my neck and back straight.

 

[-=WolverinE=-]

Wow, dragonfliet, your point is completely flawed. Have you EVER seen a big console title (meaning lots of eye candy) on a SD TV? You can't compare it to the PC screenshot you've posted. It looks so terrible I don't want to remember seeing Army Of Two and Street Fighter 4 like that... Oh and one more thing...how many people do you think use HDMI to connect their console to their TV? The majority you would say? But that majority might be 55% and the rest would be using the standard video output, which again gives you 480p resolution.

Your point that consoles last longer is also not true. The PS2 is a legend about it, but everything else faded in two years time. And from what I'm seeing, the 360 is also dying, while my PC (which I bought one year, seven months and 14 days ago) is still playing everything I want on my monitor's native resolution on the highest settings.

 

[elmuerte]

I don't need to buy an expensive HDTV to play games on my PC. I also don't need to buy a couch to sit on while playing games on my PC.

 

[{Ogre}Spin]

I have seen no evidence of the x360 dying, far from it. Several friends have bought one in the last 3 months, a couple more planning to buy in the next couple of months. The thing that has swung it for them? Easily piratable games.

As for gaming on the sofa...I have a PC hooked up to my 32" as well as an x360, but I tend to play most PC games on a monitor elsewhere, I just find that there are different situations for different games. I play racing games sat in beanbags, I play FPS/RTS at a desk.

Oh, one other thing that's relevant to what's been posted, almost all my friends are using SDTV for their consoles. Personally I find that retarded (tried burnout paradise on an SDTV set once and you can't even read the interface) but you can't explain it to them, they just rave about the quality with no understanding of resolution. Then again, these were the same people who thought that NFS:MW looked better on their xbox1 than on my pc, despite my running at 1280x1024 simply because I turned down some shader detail (overpowering bloom and motion blur)

 

[Severin]

If Pc gaming is dying (which is moot Imo) my list of causes in no particular order looks like this:-

Microsoft deciding that Xbox would be the Microsoft gaming platform of choice and as a result seeing the pc platform as a competitor. This lead to them buying out many talented Pc development houses and making them console developers. Then there was the Dx10 issue on which I will just quote elmuerte

Of course a lot of people think of useless excuses for DirectX10 not being on WinXP. Like, vista has a different driver model, but that's completely bull****. The reason why DirectX10 isn't on XP is because Microsoft wanted to use that as argument to move people to Vista.

The Gaming industry as a whole decided to ignore 85% (number from ass) of their market and aimed at the latest technology and the to few percent of pc's with the hardware to play their game properly. This was not really the fault of the industry they were catering to the mind set of their target audience who wanted eye candy and were prepared to pay 10 times the cost of a game just to get their machine to run it properly. Nothing wrong with that, but these people constitute a tiny fraction of the market as a whole. Most 'casual' gamers will look at a game and say "will it run on my pc ?" If not then they will look at something that will. Compared to the console market where as long as you own the console you know any game available will run and look like it did in the marketing.

Intel: integrated graphics this is a terrible ball and chain around the pc gaming scene. The average Joe public will by a pc with integrated graphics see the misleading blurb about high peformance and then wonder why their games don't work or run like a dead dog in glue. Generally people don't like spending a largish chunk of money on something that claims to do a job only to find that they need to spend nearly the same again to actually achive the desired results.

Business practice: It seems to me that the industry is now focused on pushing units out of the door to make the balance sheet look good rather than developing a high quality product that works correctly out of the box.

This imo just alienates their public and again pushes people towards consoles where there is generally a higher level of quality control applied. Hopefully companies will learn that pushing substandard or unfinished product out the door is not really a good long term business practice and just turns people off your company.

Piracy/DRM wars: This has been going on from pretty much day one when someone decided to put their game onto a tape/disk and try and sell it. This has not got in the way of the gaming industry as a whole becoming massive and worth billions of whatever currency you care to name. Again imo the only people who suffer from this to any degree are the people who are prepared to obtain their games legitimately.

Having said that. For the most part it is a non issue for the majority of people as they don't understand how this effects them or don't care.

 

[ambershee]

I don't need to buy an expensive HDTV to play games on my PC. I also don't need to buy a couch to sit on while playing games on my PC.

You do however, have a more expensive and better HDTV - your PC display (unless you're still rocking a CRT, of course).

 

[dragonfliet]

You're still running circles around my point, though. You're correct, running with bells and whistles at a lower res usually looks better, but I fail to see how that proves your point that consoles are just easier in that regard...
Also, what is classed as an HDTV? I have a TV that can do 480p, but that's 640x480 and I wouldn't consider that an HD resolution, personally. I'd love for you to show me a game that is on both PC and a console that I can't run better at 640x480 with the limited bells and whistles they have enabled (and a boatload more). I don't think you'll find one, and my machine is (mostly) 4 years old...

I think you're missing my point Brizz. I'm not arging that consoles are better. In fact, I was justifying the expense of PC gaming to my wife the other day (because it drives her nuts to buy a computer every 2 or 3 years). What I'm saying is that for the average consumer, consoles just make more sense. If they look at a box, that's pretty much the picture they'll get even with an SD television (it won't be as sharp, but it'll still look pretty much like the box) unlike that same uneducated (in computer terms) person trying to play it on their 4 year old computer that they bought at the same time as their 360 it will look like poo and will frustrate them.

Let me reiterate: it isn't that consoles are better or more powerful (though a game on 360 now will look better than a game on a computer bought at the same time the 360 came out at 720p), but that they are easier for the average joe to pop in the disk and have the game look like it's supposed to and play at an acceptable fps (provided the dev did their job right). Because of this ease, people who aren't hardcore pc nuts have flocked to consoles.

as for HDTVs, you can go ahead and follow the link, which breaki it down into LCD, plasma, projection, etc. They are also referring to HD resolutions (your tv would NOT qualify as HD. Perhaps EDTV when they were pushing that--which added progressive scan to SD resolutions), which is going to be >1024 x 600 or something silly like that, but it mostly means 720p or better. You can check out wiki if you're really asking that question, but otherwise you're just being argumentative.


q_mi: the couch is my preference, you have yours, that's fine. As for the sound system, a friend of mine is rocking the logitech z5500 surround system and it's quite nice, but it doesn't beat (not by a LONG shot) an actual home theatre system with Polk Audio towers and monitor surrounds coupled with a 250Watt sub.

Wolverine: the xbox 360 has been out just shy of 4 years, cost $400 when it came out and is games on it still look pretty damned good and are very fun to play. (and at 720p to boot). It isn't going anywhere soon, no matter what your friends may say. Because of the limited hardware of the system, games will continue to look better as devs take advantage and learn the system (same for ps3, I might add). It's fine to prefer your PC, but even if you spend $2,000 four years ago, the PC would be lagging by now without a gfx card upgrade.

 

[elmuerte]

You do however, have a more expensive and better HDTV - your PC display (unless you're still rocking a CRT, of course).

It's not more expensive. And it's not "HD", my primary TFT is a 20" 1680x1050, which isn't an "HD" resolution (i.e 720 or 1080). And it sits on my desktop about 60cm away from me. The screen is way to small if you want to use it while sitting on a couch. Also, the inputs are VGA and DVI, it doesn't have any speakers, because I have a other system for that. No... how is this setup useful for console gaming?

 

[Grobut]

q_mi: the couch is my preference, you have yours, that's fine. As for the sound system, a friend of mine is rocking the logitech z5500 surround system and it's quite nice, but it doesn't beat (not by a LONG shot) an actual home theatre system with Polk Audio towers and monitor surrounds coupled with a 250Watt sub.

You do realize you could hook all that up to your PC, right? either by connecting the PC to your TV and its audio system, and playing it from your couch, or you could just plain hook up a huge audio system directly to your PC, just as you could hook up a HDTV instead of a PC screen if you wanted.

It's not like PC's can only use speaker systems marketed to the PC, anything will do actually, from the crappiest of earbuds to the monster sound rigs they use at concerts, if you really want the big expensive 7.1 surround home theater sound on your PC, you can have it, just plug the PC into the AMP and off you go.


A freind of mine does it via the TV, so we can sit on his couch and watch a movie playing from the PC on the big screen and the big sound system, or we can plug in a pair of gamepads and play PC games from the couch (sadly the selection of PC games that will do this is quite limited, but that's not the PC's fault, it's capable of it, it just needs the games, so it's mostly old racing games and Emulators that gets played), i do it too, although my TV does not have the big sound system.

 

[Bersy]

Well an interesting phenomenon with a lot of kids these days is their attention span is literally next to ZERO. You can thank whatever you like for that, but the point is (and I see this day in day out) These kids can't even bring themselves to browse an article longer than a page regardless of whether it's to do with a subject that has deep ramifications for them..

I suspect that a large portion of these same kids could never manage to get through the installation of a game onto a hard drive, let alone downloading patches, dealing with OS and hardware inconsistencies that result in crashing or poor performance.. which is still prevalent and will probably continue to be for a long while. Remember how incomplete and buggy UT3 was in Nov 2007? When I first installed the thing it ran in 320x240 resolution even when the real res was higher.. It looked like complete ass (until I fixed it of course)! How many more people had this experience.. a lot. Of those, how many knew what the problem was to fix it? How many knew (or had the patience) to look on Epic's support forum for answers? How many of those found the answer and successfully applied it? You get what I'm saying...

PC games really need certain things to keep players.. I'm not gonna try to think of it all here, but the one that stands out to me: development teams that aren't rushing to get the titles out without proper testing and quality control. The games should just work. Which is no easy task when you've got so many competing brands of hardware, and multiple OS's to deal with. But that's the platform you chose so you'd better damn well try. You only create headaches for yourself and your customers when you rush. Think your product out, the platform demands it.

And even then, make the game easy (read: automated) to patch, make it easy to find support. If you put "community" features in your game, make them decent and actually USE them.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I think you're missing my point Brizz. I'm not arging that consoles are better. In fact, I was justifying the expense of PC gaming to my wife the other day (because it drives her nuts to buy a computer every 2 or 3 years). What I'm saying is that for the average consumer, consoles just make more sense. If they look at a box, that's pretty much the picture they'll get even with an SD television (it won't be as sharp, but it'll still look pretty much like the box) unlike that same uneducated (in computer terms) person trying to play it on their 4 year old computer that they bought at the same time as their 360 it will look like poo and will frustrate them.

Let me reiterate: it isn't that consoles are better or more powerful (though a game on 360 now will look better than a game on a computer bought at the same time the 360 came out at 720p), but that they are easier for the average joe to pop in the disk and have the game look like it's supposed to and play at an acceptable fps (provided the dev did their job right). Because of this ease, people who aren't hardcore pc nuts have flocked to consoles.

And I disagree. With the proper information, PCs are not more complex than consoles. I've yet to find a game over the past few years that won't run and look fine on the default settings it selects on the first run and it looks fine. That was what I was talking about in my original post, anyway. The complaint was that in PC games you have to deal with system requirements being wrong and games running like slideshows without being extensively tweaked, and that is just wrong.

 

[ambershee]

It's not more expensive. And it's not "HD", my primary TFT is a 20" 1680x1050, which isn't an "HD" resolution (i.e 720 or 1080). And it sits on my desktop about 60cm away from me. The screen is way to small if you want to use it while sitting on a couch. Also, the inputs are VGA and DVI, it doesn't have any speakers, because I have a other system for that. No... how is this setup useful for console gaming?

1680x1050 is HD - it's just not a commonly used display resolution. I use my second PC display with my 360 all the time and it's just fine (and gives a much better picture than a TV) - it's just a question of where you're sitting. Who says console games have to be played from six feet away?

 

[elmuerte]

1680x1050 is HD - it's just not a commonly used display resolution. I use my second PC display with my 360 all the time and it's just fine (and gives a much better picture than a TV) - it's just a question of where you're sitting. Who says console games have to be played from six feet away?

Are you kidding me, 1680x1050 is a very common resolution for widescreen TFTs, and it's not FullHD (i.e. 1080) or HDReady (i.e. 720), so it's not a "HD" resolution.

...

tl;dr

 

[Hadmar]

read that back again and see how many casual pc users have any idea what the hell you're talking about.

Just wanted to point out that that's nothing a casual PC user has to have an idea about. It's the programmers job to don't screw something that simple up.

 

[srø]

The butler did it!

 

[Bersy]

tl;dr

Oh how witty.

 

[Phopojijo]

PC Gaming can do everything consoles can do, but often aren't programmed to.

Splitscreen? Yep.
Play on your couch with controllers? Yep.
Attach to your TV? Yep.
Play directly from optical media without installation (or maybe even flash memory now)? Yep.

The problem is getting someone with marketing muscle to say "Don't bother buying a console... take your existing PC, pop in a better videocard/potentially power supply at a local small business, attach it to your TV... save money on the system and get games cheaper"