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PC gamings is alive and kicking


Mr. GOH!
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PC gaming is alive and well indeed. This thread is to post evidence against that tired old argument that PC gaming is on its last legs.

 

I suppose the strongest evidence is the huge success of several MMO's and PC-only franchises. But this thread is for you, the posters, to present your evidence.

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Where else am I going to play Minesweeper or Solitaire while I waste away behind a desk in a high-rise building?

 

Aside from that, the customizability offered by PC games will forever tower over console games, until Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft put aside their differences, join forces, and unleash the ultimate console that taps into your central nervous system, and society collapses. (Unless PC beats them to that, long live the PC)

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Damn completely forgot to reply to this :P

 

As I said on the other thread, PC gaming is doing very well for it and I'm sure there's many people who'd love to be this dead.

It is however not a huge a money pot for many publishers* as the consoles are. So I can see why they'd go to 'greener' pastures.

It has however left huge gaps for the indies to come in (which btw Valve is indie, indie doesn't just mean small developer) and they're really taking advantage of the land pretty much devoid of publisher influence. They're messing about with game ideas, genres, distribution models, business models. It's a pretty exciting time. It's like when VG first started n you had young harry making his game in his bedroom after school n selling it by post on the adverts in a gaming bag. Everything is a bubbling pit of ideas n freedom. It's cheap enough that you don't have to confirm to what the marketing stats tell you, you can take a risk n win big.

Minecraft, whether you like the game or not, is something to be marvelled at. It's something that would never happen on console. The lone dev, out on his own, making a quirky game with very retro-like graphics, releasing and charging for an alpha game, no advertising budget, it's a disaster waiting to happen for a console game. But on PC he's made €800K and rising and set up his own game studio.

 

Oh n then theres this:

RPS list of 2011 PC games

 

Not complete, but you can't help but salivate at the line up.

 

*Activision gets 70% of it's income from PC. You ever heard Bobby Kotick say a bad ting about PC gaming? He's slagged off XBL, threatened to leave PS3. But he knows PC is his honeypot.

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Oh as the future consoles are more than likely fucked in favour of PC's.

 

So firstly before I say this: I'm speaking about the back end. If you wish discuss the service/microconsole in-depth then make a thread for it.

Onlive is ran on PC.s But it's a console experience. You get your dinky device hook it up to the TV, pretty much issue free. It's in a closed environment, no control panels n regedit to scare folks away. It uses control pads or kb/m. But on the back-end, the thing running the games is PCs (Well servers running VM's to be precise).

Should, and the model more than likely will, this take off you're going to find that people can get their 'cheap' console experience, but running PC games. So as more folks move to this more developers make PC games to take advantage of Onlive & co. Which means more PC games n support for PC for the folks who make and/or run their own home PC's.

Of course that could have the detrimental effect of making it the land of publishers again.

 

As for the cost building issues:

1. Computers come in costs ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands. If you don't want to play Crysis 2 across 6 screens with settings to the max, then you don't need to buy a high-end PC that'll do all that. If you just want to play some simple indie games, or go through some old titles, or just casual things, then things as cheap n small as a nettop would do you dandy and most of those are on par with a console.

2. You don't have to build a PC. It's just a highly recommend thing to do. Both because it's much cheaper, and it's also a sort of right of passage thing that makes your PC yours. It's like Jedi making their lightsabers. It's also not too hard. Things only tend to go in the slot they're designed for, and for the most part just ignore most the numbers n gibberish. Come on TV's and such are even worse and most people manage to buy those without making a fuss.

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Oh as the future consoles are more than likely fucked in favour of PC's.

 

So firstly before I say this: I'm speaking about the back end. If you wish discuss the service/microconsole in-depth then make a thread for it.

Onlive is ran on PC.s But it's a console experience. You get your dinky device hook it up to the TV, pretty much issue free. It's in a closed environment, no control panels n regedit to scare folks away. It uses control pads or kb/m. But on the back-end, the thing running the games is PCs (Well servers running VM's to be precise).

Should, and the model more than likely will, this take off you're going to find that people can get their 'cheap' console experience, but running PC games. So as more folks move to this more developers make PC games to take advantage of Onlive & co. Which means more PC games n support for PC for the folks who make and/or run their own home PC's.

Of course that could have the detrimental effect of making it the land of publishers again.

 

Also, Onlive will start being installed inside BlueRay players out of the box in the near future. If it get's enough backing I don't see why it wouldn't start coming standard in televisions themselves. As soon as it gets a larger backlog of games I can see it killing future consoles if they don't adapt. The biggest hurdle for things like Onlive is they require internet connection but with the continued push for a national broadband plan it's only a matter of time before everyone has reliable( or at least more reliable ) internet that being online for it to work will not be an issue.

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PC he's made €800K and rising and set up his own game studio.

 

Oh n then theres this:

RPS list of 2011 PC games

 

Not complete, but you can't help but salivate at the line up.

 

Criminy, I hadn't even heard of a lot of those.

 

But lol they have Diablo III in 2011. Hell, I'm half expecting a delay for RAGE.

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  • 1 month later...

The whole 'PC gaming is dead' mantra is a fallacy that's been around as long as consoles have. As soon as there's a new generation of consoles, there's a drop off in the amount of PC games being released and sales decrease. The latest generation of consoles saw the biggest migration of developers that I can remember and I believe that's more indicitive of the increase in people getting into gaming this generation than the health of the PC gaming industry. With more new gamers starting their gaming careers on consoles than ever before, it's no wonder we saw such a large migration. Like the generations before however, developers soon realize that PC gamers aren't an insignificant minority and start coming back over a generations lifecycle. This is why it felt like PC gaming was the strongest it had been in years back before the release of the latest generation. In otherwords, PC gaming ebbs and flows in unison with the console generations.

 

I think things are changing this generation however. With the console manufacturers saying they want to squeeze more life out of this generations consoles than ever before, the PC should have more time to recover from the initial migration and grow stronger. The ever-increasing strength of Steam has also helped immensely in keeping PC gaming alive and kicking and it seems more and more up and coming independant developers are seeing the benefits of releasing PC games.

 

In my opinion, PC gaming is stronger than it's ever been right now and it's only getting stronger. That said, expect the advent of the next generation of consoles to coincide with a drop-off in PC releases.

 

Disclaimer: The above is my own analysis and should not be treated as fact.

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Yeah PC gaming is alive and well. We get a lot of the multiplatform games (although it is annoying still having publishers fuck us over with DLC here and there, some fantastic PC exclusives of the big boys ), but this increasing level of incredibly unique indie games popping up on PC is something else. And its only going to get bigger

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Skyrim, Portal 2, Deus Ex, Witcher 2, mult-plat titles, Crysis 2, Dragon Age 2 (for those that care), Call of Duty 8, Battlefield 3, probably a fair few I'm missing. I'll scan GAME in a bit n get back to you.

 

edit: only by a few seconds.

 

Subversion I'm eyeing up, but I'm unsure if t'll ever come. Space Marine I knew of but I thought that's not due til next year? Diablo III I'm embarrassed for missing out. Though not as much as forgetting about that list :P

Guild wars I'm kinda interested in too. Brink n Arkham City I stuck under "Multi-Plats" as I'm unsure whether they're worth getting as PC over console. Though AA was nice looking on PC and tied up with a 360 pad.

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