Victim of Technocide

[Shamus Young]

Victim of Technocide

You can trace the decline of the PC as a gaming platform back to one seemingly useful innovation: the GPU.

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[PedroSteckecilo]

It's probably a good thing Eggo isn't around to see this...

This would descend into madness right quick.

That said I feel Shamus has hit the nail on the head here.

 

[Virgil]

Very nice article, with the unfortunate exception that "sink[ing] $200 into the latest pixel-accelerating toaster oven" is (at this point) even up to $400-500. Assuming you only want one card (and not 3 [http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTYwMywxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==]).

The most bizarre comparison is that the 'everybody' computer is now cheaper than a high-end GPU [http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=ddcwfa1&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&kc=productdetails~inspndt_530s] ($299, and 'good enough' for internets, email, and word processing).

 

[John Funk]

Bang. Right on the head, Shamus.

I don't think I'd ever have started playing WoW if it couldn't run (albeit poorly) on the laptop I got for college.

 

[ratix2]

very interesting article and very true.

but i want to mention this. if you look at the advancements in technology today and where some companies (intel espically) are going it appears as if its all coming full circle. intel, along with nvidia and amd, are working on improving integrated gpus. last i heard intel had plans to replace its integrated gpus with larabee, and while larabee might not be up to snuff with newer cards from nvidia and ati when it launches the fact is though that if it works out it then computers that use a larabee integrated gpu will at least be able to run the games.

you could also blame processors. intel and amd concentraged on the mhz race, making their processors faster. as games required more power fast single core procs just wouldnt cut it, now with fast multicore processors software rendering could very easily make a comeback. the core i7 for example is able to run crysis without a gpu, granted its at the lowest settings and with a horrendus framerate, but it can run it.

 

[Kojiro ftt]

I think it could have been avoided if the marketing of graphics cards didn't get so out of hand. In the beginning, it was Voodoo 2, 3, 4, etc as Shamus has mentioned. But then marketing got involved in naming the chipsets. Next thing you know, you can buy a GeForce 3 and it would actually be WORSE than your GeForce 2, because you bought the retarded GS version, or whatever the tag is they came up with that week. That's when the market became unnavigable. You couldn't just say "I need a better card" and find one with a bigger number than the one you already had. You have to research stuff so you don't get hoodwinked by marketing. To GeForce and ATI, I say a big "Fuck You" and good riddance.

Now I just wish consoles and their games would natively support keyboard and mouse input...

 

[Therumancer]

Almost Lulz worthy when you consider how many people play WoW and such.

Let me put it this way. When the gaming industry went online a lot of producers realized that for a similar investment of money and time they could take your average Epic RPG with it's grind, cutscenes, character customization, etc... and put it online with multiplayer and then sell the $50 asking prices for the base software, plus membership fees (mitigated by the cost of running servers). Even a fly by night MMO with a decent amount of initial hype could make more money than a purely single-player game.

Thus, you saw most of the big single player game developers go over to MMOs. Joe Ybarra, Richard Garriot, and people like that are all involved with MMOs now and they were THE designers for single player games.

What's more with the time spent on MMOs, your typical gamer isn't going to have time to play many other games, which means they aren't going to buy them. I only play WoW fairly seriously and have time to shallowly play a lot of other games because I'm disabled. When I was working this was hardly the case.

Your MMO player is not likely to go back to single player games, rather when they get truely burned out on their MMO of choice they look for ANOTHER MMO.

Console gamers are admittedly a differant braket, and overlap a bit with MMOers because shallow shooters and such are something you can do in between raids. Heck, some hard core people I know keep Portable gaming systems, or even a full fledged console hooked up to another TV next to their PC for those occasional 45-minute+ raid preperation moments (which admittedly are less common now than they used to be).

It's not GPUs that "killed" PC game, it's MMOs that changed it. How many players does WoW have? Okay and then think about how many are on all of the second and third tier MMOs, and even playing those "Free" Korean MMOs (for which you can buy clothes-shop point cards now at Best Buy).

Will things ever go back? Perhaps. But right now the face of the industry changed. Not wanting to constantly upgrade computers to meet the new generation of games was one element, but do not underestimate what MMOs did which was a much, much more signifigant development to gaming in general I think.

The same thing could happen to consoles if someone actually finds a way to make a really good MMO truely function in that enviroment (many companies have talked about it, few have even tried it seems). Then you'll see most of the console gamers playing the MMOs instead of buying individual games, and then the console market will have a dillema.

>>>----Therumancer--->

 

[johnman]

I have a voodoo card in my room....
I wouldnt say its the exact problem, there are many indie, browser and older games that will happily run on your on board gpu. My dell inspiron laptop will run kinghts of the old republic perfectly. But i know its not the same, who wants to play old games when you could be playing Cod or Stalker?
But i still dont thint the pc will ever die as a platform. Mainly because im a PC elitist and cant stand consoles at all.

 

[Cousin_IT]

I remember VooDoo cards...things were simpler back then. Price of competition when it comes to technology seems to be complexity sadly; with each side vying to create the most powerful-& consequently complex-tech they can to dazzle those (few) who understand it, & leave those who dont confused by what this new must have thing is.

 

[HeartAttackBob]

While Shamus makes a damn good point, and I largely agree with him, there is still a decent segment of gaming that relies exclusively on computers.
How many millions of players is World of Warcraft up to? Thirteen? Fourteen? And not a console in sight.

Just because our beloved GTA games (and others) tend to treat the PC version with a level of disdain roughly equivalent to what Yahtzee feels for Quicktime events doesn't mean that PC gaming is dying. More like mutating. True, we're likely to get some yellow redneck supermutants and severely overgrown homicidal cockroaches, but we may also get some friendly and humorous (if hideous) ghouls out of the mix.

We're also seeing consoles (particularly the 360 and ps3) move closer and closer to PC level functionality: playing movies, connecting to the internet, I've even heard of people installing Linux on their PS3... although that probably sets off the "Nerd!" alarm installed in most brains. And from several reports, the 360 performs Seppuku with the same high frequency as any modern PC.

True, the entry requirements to mainstream PC gaming are high, arguably even higher than those to console gaming, but we (The PC Gaming Master Race) have to distinguish ourselves from those ancient grandmas and yapping kiddies who spend their time flailing Wiimotes around their living room... Right?

 

[Lvl 64 Klutz]

Amen to that, it's certainly the reason I've stopped PC gaming long ago. Though I might have to get back into it with Blizzard finally waking from their WoW coma.

 

[Darkowl]

It'd be interesting to know how many PC gamers own a console, and visa versa. Both myself and a lot of my mates who I know through LANS own both a 360 and a gaming PC. For people who do gaming and can afford it, it makes sense that you can get the best of both worlds if you own both.

Provided people don't shift from PCs to consoles entirely, and in the long run a population of PC gamers is maintained, then the PC gaming market won't dwindle - it will just be dwarfed by the console market as they become cheap and widely available enough for all to own, much like the mobile phone. Then PC gamers will have the niche developers, which will be far more likely to produce better products than those designed for the console-hordes.

Except The Sims. Like acne scars, it will always infect the world of the PC.

 

[Sewblon]

I think that the price of all that super hardware is the main thing that prevents most people from getting into current PC gaming. The components of my current computer ran me up 2500 dollars, and then a hard drive failed so now I have to use the Mac mini.

 

[Threesan]

An aspect that was not mentioned:
Console makers routinely take a loss on console sales (or so I believe?). They're drawing on licensing fees based on a sort of monopoly over the development for the system. (And perhaps also making a strategic investment in future market share.) The diversity and interchangability of PC hardware more or less precludes HW revenue from licensing, putting it at a pricing disadvantage. (Granted, coprecessors such as graphics cards are a part of that.)

Also worth mentioning may be that consoles offer reduced development costs, as there are only a few hardware configurations per target console. (Which weighs against the licensing fees...)

There's also harddrive costs, which, while not massive (assuming we don't switch to some more expensive solid-state scheme?), may play an increasingly important role as electronic distribution of games and DLC grows. And in particular if a console ever wants to fully replace a PC.

 

[unangbangkay]

I largely agree with Shamus on the point that the GPU and the rising wall to entry helped in large part to lower the PC's level of dominance, but it's hardly drooling in a retirement home. The more accurate perspective is to see that consoles have risen rather than that the PC has declined.

 

[ratix2]

I think that the price of all that super hardware is the main thing that prevents most people from getting into current PC gaming. The components of my current computer ran me up 2500 dollars, and then a hard drive failed so now I have to use the Mac mini.

unfortuanetly thats ONLY the case if you buy the best on the market or you buy an overpriced dell or alienware. going for parts with the best price/performance ratio over the absolute best available is signifantly cheaper. for example, a computer with a core 2 quad, 4870 1gb and 4gb of ram can cost as little as $700 and will perform only slightly worse than a computer with the best on the market (assuming you dont go multi gpu with dual gpu cards). truth be told its cheaper to buy a gaming rig now then its ever been, even back in the day where all you needed was a computer to run the game (back in the days where a computer would easily run over $1000).

threesan: yes, 2 of the 3 current consoles (the wii being the exception) were losing money on each console sold. microsoft was losing around $100 when the system launched if im not mistaken, while the ps3 was losing as much as $400 per system sold (i believe it orginally cost $1000 to produce, though it might have been $800, can remember). its through game and pheriphal sales that they hoped to make up for the loss. and even then using the controller to use the browser isnt very friendly, espically when typing. and its like this for EVERY console browser, from the psp, to the dsi and wii.

however, consoles are FAR from replacing pc's. using my ps3 as an example here. the internet browser the ps3 has is barely adequate. while it does support flash 9 many sites that use flash have trouble loading, if they load at all. and even many sites that dont have major issues. the loading times for the pages can be very long and it has a habit of stalling out and even crashing the system frequently. adn even using linux on the ps3 doesent work well as a replacement either. linix on the ps3 has jack shit for software compatibility, for the simple purpose that your using linux, the os for which the least amount of consumer software is developed, on a system that uses a powerpc based processor. your pretty much limited to what comes pre-installed on the os and extensions of said software. one of the biggest attractions linux has, wine which allows users to run windows applications on the os, CANNOT even be installed due to the powerpc processor and the issues associated with running x86 code on a powerpc machine (the fact that its impossilbe without a VERY powerful computer, aka supercomputer). installing drivers for devices is also difficult, again because of the powerpc vs. x86 processor. its a neat little thing to try out, but its hardly a useful replacement for a pc.

final point: while there are multiple configurations for pc's (both hardware and software), with newer apis (dx10 in particular) and microsofts movement toward unified driver models, both of which are aimed at increasing compatibility and lessening the burden on developers, that is changing. dx10 was completly rewritten, and while it in and of itself may not seem important its the changes under the hood that ms made that in my opinion will have people thinking that dx10 was a very good thing in the future. dx10 switched from split pixel/vertex shaders to unified shaders. prior to this developers had to code their games for different cards with different configurations of pixel/vertex shaders and play tug of war with getting it to work. 10 pixel and 10 vertex on one card and then 15p and 5v on another, say you need 15 pixel and 5 vertex, well on card 1 you have to go and code it to work there, while its not required on card 2. with unified shaders developers dont have to code this way, they only have to use what they need and the game will use the shaders as they need them, because the shaders are unified and not fixed developers wont need to put as much work into their games in the future as they have in the past.

 

[9of9]

Almost Lulz worthy when you consider how many people play WoW and such.

Let me put it this way. When the gaming industry went online a lot of producers realized that for a similar investment of money and time they could take your average Epic RPG with it's grind, cutscenes, character customization, etc... and put it online with multiplayer and then sell the $50 asking prices for the base software, plus membership fees (mitigated by the cost of running servers). Even a fly by night MMO with a decent amount of initial hype could make more money than a purely single-player game.

Thus, you saw most of the big single player game developers go over to MMOs. Joe Ybarra, Richard Garriot, and people like that are all involved with MMOs now and they were THE designers for single player games.

What's more with the time spent on MMOs, your typical gamer isn't going to have time to play many other games, which means they aren't going to buy them. I only play WoW fairly seriously and have time to shallowly play a lot of other games because I'm disabled. When I was working this was hardly the case.

Your MMO player is not likely to go back to single player games, rather when they get truely burned out on their MMO of choice they look for ANOTHER MMO.

Console gamers are admittedly a differant braket, and overlap a bit with MMOers because shallow shooters and such are something you can do in between raids. Heck, some hard core people I know keep Portable gaming systems, or even a full fledged console hooked up to another TV next to their PC for those occasional 45-minute+ raid preperation moments (which admittedly are less common now than they used to be).

It's not GPUs that "killed" PC game, it's MMOs that changed it. How many players does WoW have? Okay and then think about how many are on all of the second and third tier MMOs, and even playing those "Free" Korean MMOs (for which you can buy clothes-shop point cards now at Best Buy).

Will things ever go back? Perhaps. But right now the face of the industry changed. Not wanting to constantly upgrade computers to meet the new generation of games was one element, but do not underestimate what MMOs did which was a much, much more signifigant development to gaming in general I think.

The same thing could happen to consoles if someone actually finds a way to make a really good MMO truely function in that enviroment (many companies have talked about it, few have even tried it seems). Then you'll see most of the console gamers playing the MMOs instead of buying individual games, and then the console market will have a dillema.

>>>----Therumancer--->

This is so remarkably silly.

I... I don't even know where to begin picking at this.

Okay, so yes, WoW has a lot of subscribers. And we're talking a lot, true enough. First of all though... okay, for starters you're confusing cause and effect here. The main reason that MMOs are actually able to enjoy such tremendous popularity on the PC is precisely because it circumvents Shamus's point - MMOS realise that the vast majority of PC gamers don't have state of the art hardware. This is why there have been more copies of WoW sold than X360s - also why Crysis, for instance, sold so poorly in comparison.

WoW is succesful because it appeals precisely to those hundreds of millions of people that already own PCs even if they're not gamers.

The assumption that PC gamers aren't buying more games because they're all too busy playing WoW is the silliest thing I've heard all month. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work that way.

MMO players play MMOs. But - a. it doesn't prevent them from from playing single-player or competitive multiplayer games on the PC if they've got the hardware to and b. You know, not all PC gamers play WoW >.>

I really don't have the numbers here, so I hope someone will back me up.

But this is essentially the same as arguing that the X360 is selling poorly because everyone's too damned busy playing the Wii, which is ridiculous. The two have massively different audiences. Like the Wii, WoW gets such a large player-base because it's so damned good at ensnaring non-gamers and casual gamers. It's not a case of gamers who would, otherwise be interested in playing, say, Gears of War, or Oblivion or whatever, deciding that they don't need to look for a gaming fix past WoW - just as it's absurd to say people don't buy Halo more because they're content with waggling their Wiimotes in Wii Tennis.

 

[Ray Huling]

This is so remarkably silly.

Only if you don't get the point.

Shamus's point was that the increasingly high buy-in cost to play PC games has resulted in the decline of PC gaming

To which Therumancer replied, 'what decline in PC gaming'?

I... I don't even know where to begin picking at this.

You might be right about that!

The main reason that MMOs are actually able to enjoy such tremendous popularity on the PC is precisely because it circumvents Shamus's point

Yeah!

I mean: your grammatical agreement's a little off, but, yes, Therumancer's arguing that Shamus's argument is irrelevant.

The assumption that PC gamers aren't buying more games because they're all too busy playing WoW is the silliest thing I've heard all month.

All month?

Anyway, why is this a silly assumption? Or: why is it any sillier than assuming that MMO players and players of, I guess, all other PC games (is this really what you're saying? really?) constitute two completely exclusive groups?

Like the Wii, WoW gets such a large player-base because it's so damned good at ensnaring non-gamers and casual gamers.

You're right: it would be good to have some numbers to back this up. I'd be very interested to see the test used to determine the categories a representative sample of WoW players fall into.

Of course, there isn't any such test.

Oh well!