al_bundy

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews...25_204612.html



i knew i wasn't halucinating for the last few years as pc games sections have gotten smaller. I think i'll rethink my pc upgrade now.

Static Cling

PC game boxes have gotten smaller, too... does that account for it?

Darkfriend

I still have my X-box (because I'm waiting for Fable) but I was always a PC gamer at heart.

I don't think PC games are going extinct anytime soon.

Gallant Pig

I can't imagine why. $500 for a decent computer setup. $250 for a good enough video card. $150 for a good enough sound card. That's not including a nice LCD moniter to play it on.

So basically $900 for a system that will be a slow system in 2.5-3 years.

CaptainMarvel

It's late, but off the top of my head:

Mods (not as in moderators) would be a huge plus in favor of PCs. You buy a single game, and you can sometimes get years' worth of content from a good modding community.

Patching would be another example. Patches used to be a downfall for PC games (since they'd always have at least one patch per game). Now that console games are becoming so complex, bugs are sneaking into console games, and they can't be patched as easily. I ditched Morrowind for the Xbox due to a save game glitch, and I picked up the PC version instead. Not only did it look better, but it also worked fine after the patch.

Real time strategy games are still very popular, and I haven't played a good console version of one yet. That's one genre where PCs are king.

Complexity is another reason. Console games usually (not always) feel "dumbed down" thanks to the simplified console controls.

Graphics would probably still be a huge reason also. I've owned all three consoles. PS2 is looking kind of ugly right now. Gamecube and Xbox games look good, but PC graphics blow them away. There's a reason people chunk down several hundred dollars for a good 3D card... it makes a gigantic difference.

Uniformity of choice is another reason. By this, I mean you don't have "console exclusive" games for PC. A PC game will work on any system that meets certain specs. You don't have exclusive licenses that limit a game to Dells only for 2 years, with a later release for all other PCs later on. That's a problem with console gaming.

There are a lot of pluses to console gaming as well, but PCs still have a helluva lot going for them.

(I think some of your prices are inflated as well. $150 for a good sound card is pretty steep, and you can certainly get an adequate video card for under $250. If you stay a step below the cutting edge technology curve, the computer prices get much more reasonable.)

Gallant Pig

PC gaming used to be so if you bought a current computer, you could play all the games. Well that was about 6-8 years ago. I look back on that as a golden era for computer gaming. The advent of 3D brought that to a close. Then you needed a $100 video card to play games in 3D, sometimes $150. Not a bad era either.

Now the turnaround time for a system to go from fast to slow is too fast. You can't play the latest coolest games with a new computer anymore, so the audience has to have decreased, while the game companies zero in on the ones buying the games and decrease the variety of games they make.

I don't see how companies can justify a $300 price point for a video card or $100 for a sound card. The latest greatest graphics sounds nice, but for me if the game isn't fun then the graphics don't matter and if the game is fun the graphics don't matter a whole lot either.

My 2 game rigs I played games on during my life were a 486 DX-66 and a K6-200 + Celeron 333 (I never could get that bastard to overlock grrrr) with a Voodoo 2 video card. (I owned those last 2 close together for some reason so I group them as the same era.

Good times. Sim City 2000 was the bomb yo.

Original Desmond

There is still room for both Console and PC gaming but i agree that technology is moving so fast on the PC side of things that it makes it very expensive for gamers

There is nothing worse than having a good PC which all the new games will run on but at lower resolutions etc when you really need a great PC for them to run properly and well.

al_bundy

which game can't you play on the latest PC's? Doom 3 is the only one that comes to mind but with that you need a video card that hasn't been released yet to play on the ultra settings.

TheMadMonk

Yeah, they both have their strong and weak points. But every time I see a hot new graphics card advertised at $399 or above, I can't help but think "for that $, I could buy an Xbox, a PS2, and a GameCube"

xVladx

I know that I've become quite disinterested in PC gaming over the last few years. I played quite a bit of Doom, Quake (1 and 2), Unreal Tournament and Half-Life when they first came out. After all that time spent on them and their various mods, I got pretty much burned out on FPS titles. After that, a FPS game had to really offer something different to catch my attention, and that didn't happen until Battlefield 1942. The infantry/vehicle mix, the sheer size of the playing field, and the insane variety of things you could do really set that apart from other FPS games. Of course, the masses of idiots online ruined the game for me over time, but that's another story....

The same thing goes for the RTS genre. After playing quite a lot of Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Starcraft and Total Annihilation (especially TA, which is still my favorite RTS game), every other RTS I tried just felt too similar to what had come before. Sure, there were different units, economies, etc, but I just got tired of the whole concept. Again, a game that was different for the time (Homeworld) got me back into the genre for a short while, but afterwards, it was back to being bored with the genre.

Which leads me to what I think is really going to keep PC gaming from being what it was, the lack of variety. Sure, there's the MMORPGs, but I've never played a game that's impressed me enough to warrant a monthly fee. Practically all of the other big releases are either FPS or RTS titles, with the occasional other release like The Sims or something. If anything, I've been more impressed with the smaller independent PC developers as of late. I've been more impressed by stuff like Gish, N, Ballance, and Treadmarks (one of my long-time favorite PC action titles) than a lot of the big releases I've played lately. Of course, I'm having more and more trouble actually running the bigger releases on my computer nowadays...

The problem is, I just can't see myself upgrading my system any time soon. Sure, it would be nice to be able to turn up a few more details in Battlefield 1942, but I can live with how it looks on my Radeon 7500. And while I am a little curious about Half-Life 2, that's pretty much the only upcoming release that I'm even remotely interested in, and there's no way I'm going to drop hundreds of dollars into upgrades just for one game.

Compare this to console gaming, where (barring a system dying prematurely, like the Dreamcast, Jaguar, Virtual Boy, etc) you know that your investment will always run the titles made for it, and will have titled made for it for at least four or five years. Not only that, but there will be variety. I own both a PS2 and Gamecube, and I've played types of games on both systems that they just don't make on the PC. I've spent hours upon hours on stuff like Ico, Viewtiful Joe, Frequency, Virtua Fighter 4, Burnout, Pikmin, Cubivore, etc. The last couple retail PC games I spent any signifigant amount of time with were BF1942 and GTA3, and one of those is a console port.

Cusm

I was never a super heavy gamer - I had my games I would log 1000s of hours on, but I never had to play everything - I always had my sports on consoles and others on PC. Well I have not played a PC game that has done anything for me since my beloved D2. I have tried a ton of MMORPG, RPG, RTS and FPS, but I have found none that has made me want to upgrade my PC (which is way overdue running AMD Athlon 1Ghz). I am about to upgrade my PC only because I am going to make a media server/HTPC and I do not know what I am going to do for a graphics card yet, I want something to be able to play some games, but on the other hand I do not know of any I want to play that justifies $250-$400.

jeffdsmith

When was this "survey" started? Surely Consoles were the majority before the advent of modern day internet. Most people I knew didn't have PC's unitl the "killer app" of the internet started the PC buying craze., but they sure as hell had a SNES, Genesis or NES.

I knew of several people owning PC's for word processing and the like, but no where on the level of people with gamesystems. Maybe I was stuck in some sort of twilight zone.

fumanstan

Gaming on PC has always been a secondary benefit for most regular users rather then the primary. Personally, its easier for me to justify upgrading my PC when it improves a variety of other things that i also do rather then buy 1 or 2 of the console systems. Plus, sitting in front of the TV with a few friends to play games isn't is relevant to me as it was when i was younger. While its still fun to play on my friends Xbox, its a lot easier for me to play a game for 30 minutes or so on my PC, stop to surf the net, chat, do some research, and then go back to a game.

khai

Well, this survey was taken before Half-Life 2's and The Sims 2's release. The tide will turn back to normal soon.

Get Me Coffee

It's pretty darn easy for me to switch from the two. I'll be playing my xbox in the living room, then pause it and go on my wireless laptop. Simple. I don't even have to turn off my xbox to surf the net or chat.

Outlaw

When did they write this? This article is about 5 years back in time.

Josh H

Yeah, super old news. PC gaming has remained fairly constant in terms of number of good games coming out and number of gamers/sales, while Console gaming gets more and more mainstream every year.

So it's not really that PC gaming is fading, it's just not spreading while consoles which are much cheaper and easier to set up and use have became incredibly successful since the PS1.

Get Me Coffee

Console gaming is much, much less expensive and has a longer life.....PC gaming it great but it's NEVER a matter of installing the game and playing! It's all the damn settings to correct, downloading drivers....The first PC game I've played in years is Doom3. It was awesome, but getting it to run smoothly was a total waste of time and energy. It reminded me of why I moved away from PC games.

Plus you got to admit.....XBOX Live is the FUCKING SHIT! I love it! Made alot of cool friends. We actually chill at bars from time to time.

Dan Average

I have a suspicion the only reason the PC numbers are as high as they are is because they're including people who play a game of Snood or Bejeweled two or three times a week as "gamers." Which is technically correct but not a very useful basis of comparison, since these people aren't necessarily pumping a whole lot of money into the PC games industry, whereas an active console gamer has to buy his games unless he just steals them or grabs his friends' castoffs. Once you remove the "non-gamer" PC gamers from the list I imagine the figure is a lot smaller and console gamers probably surpassed it ages ago.

Josh H

I'd even go as far as to say that if you take those Bejeweled "gamers" out, console gamers have always been higher than PC gamers since the NES era.

Static Cling

If you haven't played PC games in years, I don't know if you're the authority on how PC games NEVER work right out of the box.

fumanstan

That's probably true... i dont even see how they can manage to come up with a figure for the number of households that have "PC gamers" in them, considering people buy PC's for a lot of different functions.

Of course, considering how many people play The Sims...

Get Me Coffee

If you correctly read my post, you would have seen that I've played Doom3, which I might add didn't work out of the box.

Josh H

Doom 3 has higher specs than most releases and one game in years isn't enough to base your statement on.

But I'm just playing devil's advocate as I agree with you and it is common knowledge that you have to tweak settings, download patches, etc. with the bulk of PC games.

Trigger

Out of the last 30 PC games I've bought, I've had technical issues with exactly one of them. I've only patched two or three of them and only because of the multiplayer.