Well, pc gaming has been going from bad to worse for years.
What pisses me off is that people just dont learn, arguably crytek and ID are PC gods, yet they BOTH made console ports with inferior graphics, no graphical options and consolish fov and aiming sensivity.
WTF? On the other hand eidos made menus and interfaces just for the pc.
People need to learn how to make pc versiosn not shitty ports.
I think his pointing finger is actually perfectly pointed at the reasons why PC gaming is suffering and console gaming is flourishing.
Consoles are cheaper and work. PC gaming is perceived to cost more and frequently is buggy as all hell.
The graphical improvements you can potentially get on a PC game aren't significant enough for most people to care about. Especially when you are comparing ubber graphics on a 17" or 21" monitor vs still really good graphics on a 40"+ TV connected to your stereo and blasting away your living room.
Better PC graphics are the visual argument that audio snobs have between record cd and mp3. Most people don't care for quality beyond the 90% good enough point.
Release day driver issues have been a bugaboo for PC gamers since the advent of the 3D accelerator. It's just one of the unfortunate realities of our preferred platform, but it's also one of its greatest strengths, because driver issues can be fixed, and performance can be continually tweaked and optimized. I imagine one of the challenges developing for PC is that the graphics hardware and drivers are constantly evolving. It's not a stagnant piece of hardware on an individual configuration that is marketed for people just to press play. The PC requires extra work, it requires research, effort and know how, both for developers and gamers alike. Services like Steam have improved ease of use with automatic game patches and automatic driver updates if you opt for them, but it's still a far cry from just slapping a toy on a shelf, plugging an HDMI cable in and switching to the proper input. PC's require effort, and sometimes a little extra patience, but I'll say for any gamer that has it the rewards are in a better overall experience.
As much as I dislike id's stance, as well as id's apparent inability to innovate anything past a games technical engine, I don't blame them for the direction they are taking as much as I do lazy gamers. It's as much the gamers fault, they speak with their wallets. We are dealing with a spoiled generation that wants everything to be just perfect right this second. It is a generation that has no patience to research, tweak, or help solve a single problem. That's why they settle for the lowest common denominator, they are too lazy to expect anything better.
As much as I dislike id's stance, as well as id's apparent inability to innovate anything past a games technical engine, I don't blame them for the direction they are taking as much as I do lazy gamers. It's as much the gamers fault, they speak with their wallets. We are dealing with a spoiled generation that wants everything to be just perfect right this second. It is a generation that has no patience to research, tweak, or help solve a single problem. That's why they settle for the lowest common denominator, they are too lazy to expect anything better.
Holy bullshit. There are two core game buying audience at least in North America. Parents that buy for kids that just want the game to work and 30 somethings with jobs and families that just don't want to have to deal with it.
It's not about laziness it's about priorities. Pissing around with drivers and tweaks and losing save games due to poor programming and various other issues are why people are snapping up consoles.
I have a hell of a lot better things to do when I get home then to deal with a computer game that's being finicky because of this that or the other.
The PC game market has gotten to the poor state it's in because pc hardware/software can't get their shit together and come to a set of standards that works, can reliably be developed for and exist in a stable state for more then 6 months to a year.
It's great for hobbyists and there is no denying you can edge out more in a PC game. But I don't need/want to deal with that anymore. It was fun 10 years ago when consoles were very by today's standards primitive. It's just a sad state to still have to deal with that now.
Rage played fine on my old drivers, issues with the auto balancer and quite frankly low-res textures(even at highest settings by tweaking the cfg) were an issue for many. Only issues technical wise was frame rate slowing to slide show in enclosed areas (never happened in wide open areas would of thought that would of been the other way round). 99.9% of games on my PC play fine, I have both the 360 and PS3 I have no bias and tbh I feel this game was released broken.
It's not about laziness it's about priorities. Pissing around with drivers and tweaks and losing save games due to poor programming and various other issues are why people are snapping up consoles.
I have a hell of a lot better things to do when I get home then to deal with a computer game that's being finicky because of this that or the other.
You can't be that upset about a lost game save and claim to have your priorities straight.
No surprise there's a bunch of PC elitists flaming away on this thread - as someone who plays both the idea that gameplay on one platform over the other is more 'casual' outside of the hardcore strategy market or hardcore flight sims is laughable. If you're playing Hearts of Iron 3 or DCS Blackshark (both excellent games and highly recommended if you really are a hardcore gamer), then by all means suggest console games are more simple. If you're not, then you're deluding yourselves.
Which means it comes down to interface, graphical prowess and ease of accessing the content - and for many games and genres the console has the edge on 2/3.
The other big issue is _paying_ audience size, and because a large proportion of the PC market pirates, it's simply not worth the focus of devs it once was. And while I'll never call anyone that pirates a game a gamer (as pirates effectively raise game prices for the rest of us I prefer to refer to them as bottom-feeding scum), the large number of pirates on PC (and the widespread culture of piracy) has seriously hurt the PC gaming market.
It's a shame that most 'designed for PC' games these days really _are_ hardcore games (although PC got the very tasty Witcher 2, which is deffo a mass-market game, and Hard Reset, which is an accomplished arcade shooter), and that you're not getting more big-budget PC-only games, but the money will _always_ follow the market, and a large proportion of the PC market shot themselves in the foot by not paying the devs for their work.
Making a lame ass comment then pretending to troll = lame or cowardly. I'm not sure which both both equally suck. You can choose which one you are though.
It has happened to me I didn't wig out but to say I wasn't pissed off would be a lie. It's not even unreasonable to understand why someone would be pissed off to put 10+hrs into a game then end up with a corrupted save game or even better a software patch wipe out their save games.
kryyst, come on man, you know I love trollin for console gamers! It's so much fun, it's kinda like when you pretend to throw an object for a dog and they go like a bat out of hell to the other end of the yard. Console gamers are so easy.....
"We should be focusing on building things efficiently on the PC and deploying on the console" He says they didn't realize that until recently because when they started Rage development console and PC hardware specs were in line with each other.
How they lacked the foresight to see that console hardware has a longer life cycle than PC hardware is beyond me.
Still, I like Carmack. Cool guy, and I don't think he is forsaking PC gamers. He's simply absolutely refusing to take off his engineering pants and put on a pair of broad reality pants.
The PC game market has gotten to the poor state it's in because pc hardware/software can't get their shit together and come to a set of standards that works, can reliably be developed for and exist in a stable state for more then 6 months to a year.
Truth. GPU makers and game companies are both on the hook:
OpenGL and DirectX are standards. How it became acceptable that API commands aren't rendered correctly is beyond me. I'm guessing it's the pace of competition the market; not enough time is dedicated to getting drivers right before the hardware is released.
Likewise, Rage shouldn't have been released if it wasn't going to work. id should have anticipated the problems; they surely did internal testing. Haste was probably the problem, again. If PC game makers didn't worry about printing physical copies, they could push back the date until it works. Moving to digital distribution as the priority seems like a useful adaptation.
If the PC-centered companies don't adapt soon, the PC as we know it is dead. Everything will be in the cloud, and we'll have a few flavors of dumb terminals.
I have a ton of friends who are "console only" and occasionally we always get into a friendly conversation about PC vs console.
When crap like this happens it definitely opens my eyes (more) to their side of the argument. While I still only game on the PC (when I do actually have the time lol) I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about grabbing an 360 just to avoid things such as this.
Typically I don't play/purchase games until they have been out for at least 4-6 months, so normally I don't run into these problems - however as someone who use to be a hardcore PC gamer it still sucks to see this stuff tainting PC gaming.
I'm a fan of great gameplay, and I haven't required the eye candy in a while. If the game renders well on a console, I personally just don't need the extra graphical prowess a PC can bring to the table.
What I think the console does to "dumb down" gaming has nothing to do with the graphics and nothing to do with the user base. It is entirely based upon the UI, and I have yet to experience a game that has a UI that makes as much sense to me and can be as easily controlled by a game pad instead of a keyboard and mouse. That's the key difference. That's the reason that Oblivion wasn't as fun to me as Morrowind. The UI and control schema is what makes otherwise enjoyable gameplay become frustrating to me.
Although I haven't had as much time to play much of anything lately, my key example is Halo. On the console, I was consistently in the bottom third of any group of players. As soon as it was released for PC and I was able to WASD+Mouse my way through the game, suddenly I jumped to the top third.
FWIW, I FPS on console - Halo, Bad Company, etc. The learning curve was 2 weeks, I got over it and got way better. I have a hard time believing the argument that left clicking a mouse to fire makes more sense than pulling a trigger on a gamepad. I mean, it's different to you... Of course you weren't the ace at WASD when you first started playing there, either. There's no dumbing down there, just a lack of patience. :/
Further, I'm entirely the opposite - I perform much better on console FPSs than I do keyboards because it removes the twitch-factor I no longer have time to practice in PC FPS enviornments.
I'd actually gotten to the point that I'd turned that off, but yes, that would qualify as a 'dumbing down' in the sense that you're unable to track an opponent as well as you would with a 4000dpi mouse.
Do you happen to have the actual report? Not that I don't believe the article, I'd just like to read the actual source.
I believe this is it. If its not the exact report the article refers to, it is from the same firm and it shows PC gaming actually growing faster than any console on the market.
Why is it a common misconception that PC gaming is in trouble? It is not.
Some facts or not lets look at it on the surface.
We've had more then one major announcement of a PC game developer that has changed their release model from PC > Console port to Console > PC port.
We've had major developers say that they feel the PC model isn't as good as the console model because of volume.
Console games outsell PC games.
PC gamers constantly complaining about how the PC game market is dying.
Regardless some of the facts. The perception is the pc game market is suffering. It use to be the bastion to Shooters, RTS and RPG's. Of those three areas RTS's are still the only genre that hasn't made a successful transition to the console.
FWIW, I FPS on console - Halo, Bad Company, etc. The learning curve was 2 weeks, I got over it and got way better. I have a hard time believing the argument that left clicking a mouse to fire makes more sense than pulling a trigger on a gamepad. I mean, it's different to you... Of course you weren't the ace at WASD when you first started playing there, either. There's no dumbing down there, just a lack of patience. :/
That's mostly true - but it would take longer than a few weeks for a fogey like me to develop the muscle memory with a gamepad that I have developed on a keyboard/mouse over half my life span.
Seriously, this is how you are going to present the argument? Some facts don't matter?
So the facts presented noting that the PC is the platform is continuing to grow while the console share is shrinking, means nothing because you are going to choose to ignore some of the factual data you are provided with for your gut feeling of what others must be thinking, or perhaps a few things your read from disgruntled PC gamers that were blowing off steam at that moment in time? Come on man, you are better than that.
My point is this. Every-time something negative is said about the PC as a platform, and yes, the RAGE launch was RAGE worthy for allot of paying customers, we all understand that frustration. That said every-time something like this happens it blown out of proportion and becomes a debate on why the PC is a dead platform and how consoles are going to be the only thing in the not too distant future, and all of it is gibberish because truth be known the PC is the worlds healthiest gaming platform. PC has the largest install base, it has the most content, it generates the most revenue, it has the best distribution platforms, its the most profitable, its growing, and yet, somehow consoles are killing it?
RAGE had a bad launch. Allot of PC games have bad launches, its the nature of the platform, this is nothing new. It's the way its been for years, for better or worse, when you have such a huge install base of different hardware and software configurations the launch period is a beta of sorts. PC gamers put up with it because the final experience is better.
The real discussion here is on how the relative lure of console development has diverted the attention a traditionally PC first developer to the point where they did a shoddy job on the platform that made them what they are. Think the people at QuakeCon identify themselves as console gamers? Nope, id will figure out who has been feeding them all this time and make it right on the next PC release or they will be no more, and regardless of what happens to id, PC gaming will be just fine.
Your chart shows that pc gaming is rising - good, it's good for everyone. But you are ignoring the fact that console games are still outselling PC games and have been for years. Lets also ignore the fact that that chart is only comparing consoles and not including handheld's which is the fastest growing market yet potentially threatening console and pc gaming.
Also the predicted chart that goes out to 2014 is ignoring the impending hardware refresh that is guaranteed to bump console sales again. I would also suspect that that chart doesn't take into account the previously played sales market which is a huge demographic to console sales as well.
Also it seems to highlight PC digital transactions as a revenue source but I see no reference to digital transactions for the console side. So really exactly what figures are your stats trying to prove? That the PC market is doing well according to PC centric magazine?
You can't possibly call an fifteen billion dollar a year market unhealthy? Also, consider they are pairing those numbers against every single console on the market, not just one to one comparison. It's multiple platforms making a case against one. In an unfair comparison the PC still holds its own just fine.
We can debate all day about what the numbers mean relative to this or that, or if there is some kind of grand conspiracy by me to mislead you with false statistics (for which you have yet to counter with a numerical arugement of your own). Add it all together anyway you want I still think its fair enough to say the PC is not going anywhere as a gaming platform anytime soon. PC games do not present an unhealthy buisness model for developers even if id made it appear that way by botching the RAGE release.
Can we at least agree that the sales numbers are important but don't tell the whole story? When we talk about the PC market changing/dying, nobody means tomorrow. We're talking 5, 10, 20 years down the road. Recent sales figures have no bearing on that. The continuing impact of mobile devices and cloud computing on PC gaming is not yet known, for instance. I'm just saying I'd like PC gaming to get its longtime issues fixed so that it can be a better competitor when things get rough.
We've been told that PC gaming is dying since the days of the snes. I'm not about to believe the rumors of its demise are anything more than a great exaggeration just yet.
Comments
What pisses me off is that people just dont learn, arguably crytek and ID are PC gods, yet they BOTH made console ports with inferior graphics, no graphical options and consolish fov and aiming sensivity.
WTF? On the other hand eidos made menus and interfaces just for the pc.
People need to learn how to make pc versiosn not shitty ports.
Then they will get money.
Consoles are cheaper and work. PC gaming is perceived to cost more and frequently is buggy as all hell.
The graphical improvements you can potentially get on a PC game aren't significant enough for most people to care about. Especially when you are comparing ubber graphics on a 17" or 21" monitor vs still really good graphics on a 40"+ TV connected to your stereo and blasting away your living room.
Better PC graphics are the visual argument that audio snobs have between record cd and mp3. Most people don't care for quality beyond the 90% good enough point.
As much as I dislike id's stance, as well as id's apparent inability to innovate anything past a games technical engine, I don't blame them for the direction they are taking as much as I do lazy gamers. It's as much the gamers fault, they speak with their wallets. We are dealing with a spoiled generation that wants everything to be just perfect right this second. It is a generation that has no patience to research, tweak, or help solve a single problem. That's why they settle for the lowest common denominator, they are too lazy to expect anything better.
Holy bullshit. There are two core game buying audience at least in North America. Parents that buy for kids that just want the game to work and 30 somethings with jobs and families that just don't want to have to deal with it.
It's not about laziness it's about priorities. Pissing around with drivers and tweaks and losing save games due to poor programming and various other issues are why people are snapping up consoles.
I have a hell of a lot better things to do when I get home then to deal with a computer game that's being finicky because of this that or the other.
The PC game market has gotten to the poor state it's in because pc hardware/software can't get their shit together and come to a set of standards that works, can reliably be developed for and exist in a stable state for more then 6 months to a year.
It's great for hobbyists and there is no denying you can edge out more in a PC game. But I don't need/want to deal with that anymore. It was fun 10 years ago when consoles were very by today's standards primitive. It's just a sad state to still have to deal with that now.
You can't be that upset about a lost game save and claim to have your priorities straight.
Console gamers make it....
Which means it comes down to interface, graphical prowess and ease of accessing the content - and for many games and genres the console has the edge on 2/3.
The other big issue is _paying_ audience size, and because a large proportion of the PC market pirates, it's simply not worth the focus of devs it once was. And while I'll never call anyone that pirates a game a gamer (as pirates effectively raise game prices for the rest of us I prefer to refer to them as bottom-feeding scum), the large number of pirates on PC (and the widespread culture of piracy) has seriously hurt the PC gaming market.
It's a shame that most 'designed for PC' games these days really _are_ hardcore games (although PC got the very tasty Witcher 2, which is deffo a mass-market game, and Hard Reset, which is an accomplished arcade shooter), and that you're not getting more big-budget PC-only games, but the money will _always_ follow the market, and a large proportion of the PC market shot themselves in the foot by not paying the devs for their work.
Making a lame ass comment then pretending to troll = lame or cowardly. I'm not sure which both both equally suck. You can choose which one you are though.
It has happened to me I didn't wig out but to say I wasn't pissed off would be a lie. It's not even unreasonable to understand why someone would be pissed off to put 10+hrs into a game then end up with a corrupted save game or even better a software patch wipe out their save games.
"We should be focusing on building things efficiently on the PC and deploying on the console" He says they didn't realize that until recently because when they started Rage development console and PC hardware specs were in line with each other.
How they lacked the foresight to see that console hardware has a longer life cycle than PC hardware is beyond me.
Still, I like Carmack. Cool guy, and I don't think he is forsaking PC gamers. He's simply absolutely refusing to take off his engineering pants and put on a pair of broad reality pants.
Truth. GPU makers and game companies are both on the hook:
OpenGL and DirectX are standards. How it became acceptable that API commands aren't rendered correctly is beyond me. I'm guessing it's the pace of competition the market; not enough time is dedicated to getting drivers right before the hardware is released.
Likewise, Rage shouldn't have been released if it wasn't going to work. id should have anticipated the problems; they surely did internal testing. Haste was probably the problem, again. If PC game makers didn't worry about printing physical copies, they could push back the date until it works. Moving to digital distribution as the priority seems like a useful adaptation.
If the PC-centered companies don't adapt soon, the PC as we know it is dead. Everything will be in the cloud, and we'll have a few flavors of dumb terminals.
When crap like this happens it definitely opens my eyes (more) to their side of the argument. While I still only game on the PC (when I do actually have the time lol) I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about grabbing an 360 just to avoid things such as this.
Typically I don't play/purchase games until they have been out for at least 4-6 months, so normally I don't run into these problems - however as someone who use to be a hardcore PC gamer it still sucks to see this stuff tainting PC gaming.
What I think the console does to "dumb down" gaming has nothing to do with the graphics and nothing to do with the user base. It is entirely based upon the UI, and I have yet to experience a game that has a UI that makes as much sense to me and can be as easily controlled by a game pad instead of a keyboard and mouse. That's the key difference. That's the reason that Oblivion wasn't as fun to me as Morrowind. The UI and control schema is what makes otherwise enjoyable gameplay become frustrating to me.
Although I haven't had as much time to play much of anything lately, my key example is Halo. On the console, I was consistently in the bottom third of any group of players. As soon as it was released for PC and I was able to WASD+Mouse my way through the game, suddenly I jumped to the top third.
FWIW, I FPS on console - Halo, Bad Company, etc. The learning curve was 2 weeks, I got over it and got way better. I have a hard time believing the argument that left clicking a mouse to fire makes more sense than pulling a trigger on a gamepad. I mean, it's different to you... Of course you weren't the ace at WASD when you first started playing there, either. There's no dumbing down there, just a lack of patience. :/
Further, I'm entirely the opposite - I perform much better on console FPSs than I do keyboards because it removes the twitch-factor I no longer have time to practice in PC FPS enviornments.
SO TAKE THAT YOU BIG PC JERK. TBH
Do you happen to have the actual report? Not that I don't believe the article, I'd just like to read the actual source.
I believe this is it. If its not the exact report the article refers to, it is from the same firm and it shows PC gaming actually growing faster than any console on the market.
Some facts or not lets look at it on the surface.
We've had more then one major announcement of a PC game developer that has changed their release model from PC > Console port to Console > PC port.
We've had major developers say that they feel the PC model isn't as good as the console model because of volume.
Console games outsell PC games.
PC gamers constantly complaining about how the PC game market is dying.
Regardless some of the facts. The perception is the pc game market is suffering. It use to be the bastion to Shooters, RTS and RPG's. Of those three areas RTS's are still the only genre that hasn't made a successful transition to the console.
That's mostly true - but it would take longer than a few weeks for a fogey like me to develop the muscle memory with a gamepad that I have developed on a keyboard/mouse over half my life span.
Seriously, this is how you are going to present the argument? Some facts don't matter?
So the facts presented noting that the PC is the platform is continuing to grow while the console share is shrinking, means nothing because you are going to choose to ignore some of the factual data you are provided with for your gut feeling of what others must be thinking, or perhaps a few things your read from disgruntled PC gamers that were blowing off steam at that moment in time? Come on man, you are better than that.
My point is this. Every-time something negative is said about the PC as a platform, and yes, the RAGE launch was RAGE worthy for allot of paying customers, we all understand that frustration. That said every-time something like this happens it blown out of proportion and becomes a debate on why the PC is a dead platform and how consoles are going to be the only thing in the not too distant future, and all of it is gibberish because truth be known the PC is the worlds healthiest gaming platform. PC has the largest install base, it has the most content, it generates the most revenue, it has the best distribution platforms, its the most profitable, its growing, and yet, somehow consoles are killing it?
RAGE had a bad launch. Allot of PC games have bad launches, its the nature of the platform, this is nothing new. It's the way its been for years, for better or worse, when you have such a huge install base of different hardware and software configurations the launch period is a beta of sorts. PC gamers put up with it because the final experience is better.
The real discussion here is on how the relative lure of console development has diverted the attention a traditionally PC first developer to the point where they did a shoddy job on the platform that made them what they are. Think the people at QuakeCon identify themselves as console gamers? Nope, id will figure out who has been feeding them all this time and make it right on the next PC release or they will be no more, and regardless of what happens to id, PC gaming will be just fine.
Also the predicted chart that goes out to 2014 is ignoring the impending hardware refresh that is guaranteed to bump console sales again. I would also suspect that that chart doesn't take into account the previously played sales market which is a huge demographic to console sales as well.
Also it seems to highlight PC digital transactions as a revenue source but I see no reference to digital transactions for the console side. So really exactly what figures are your stats trying to prove? That the PC market is doing well according to PC centric magazine?
We can debate all day about what the numbers mean relative to this or that, or if there is some kind of grand conspiracy by me to mislead you with false statistics (for which you have yet to counter with a numerical arugement of your own). Add it all together anyway you want I still think its fair enough to say the PC is not going anywhere as a gaming platform anytime soon. PC games do not present an unhealthy buisness model for developers even if id made it appear that way by botching the RAGE release.
Stay liquid my friends.
Yes, I have two 6970's in crossfireX, I am not biased at all
I am the 1%