What Is Really Killing The PC Industry, An Opinionated Statement
03.02.08 - 05:35pm
The PC industry is dying, this is certain. While many numerous important and well-paid individuals are quoting all sorts of studies and making very eloquent statements blaming piracy and a waning public interest, all their statements fail to point out one of the true reasons for this dying platform. Simply put, current PC games suck. To put this in more professional terms, the quality of video games and their subsequent maintenance has resulted in countless games being utter disappointments to the gaming community, resulting in a myriad of negative actions.
Yarr, There Be Pirates In These Waters
I won’t deny that piracy has had a major influence on the profits in the PC gaming industry. This is a certain fact however the reason why piracy exists at the level that it does isn’t an issue of the consumer but rather the producer. Like all products, individuals will shop around for the best option, and when the product in question is of such a shoddy quality as a vast majority of current games, piracy is often the only sound option to take. Let me give you a perfect example. Crysis, a fantastic PC benchmark and a title that has garnered much discussion over the last 6 months. For most individuals there is little reason to invest $50 for a 6 hour single-player and marginal multi-player game when they could pirate the game in relative safety and experience the same shoddy single-player gameplay and be better off not playing the multi-player.
Bugs? We Don’t Need No Stinking Bugs
I don’t know if this is a new coding model but recent games seem to release with more bugs than those found under a rotting log in the forest. I know some people enjoy finding ways to break applications(read:hackers) but when I pay $50 for a piece of software, I would expect it to operate flawlessly. Need an example? Look no further than the recent launch of Frontlines : Fuel of War. I have heard so many reports of the game not even installing that I wonder if they even stamped the DVDs with the proper image. If I wanted to debug software I would get a job as a beta tester or apply for beta testing programs, but paying $50 to beta test a companies software is just obscene and screams of bad quality control. The mantra “Release, Test, Patch” seems to be the current phrase whispered by gaming developers.
Whir Whir Whir
Requiring an optical drive for daily gameplay on a video game is obscene when the title already consumes many gigabytes on your hard drive. I understand with a console and their limited(256MB of RAM, hah!) resources you have to make do with some compromises, but on a PC there is no reason to require the DVD to play the game. While this trend seems to be less common than in the past, I know I myself have searched for “no cd” cracks simply so I can enjoy a video game without listening to the whir of my optical drive.
Delivery Is Key
Valve has a great thing going for them with Steam. While it is nice to have a hard copy of your games in your house, how often to you break out those Command and Conquer disks from the 90’s to play a game with your friends? Offering digital downloads at a reduced price, NOT IDENTICAL TO FULL PACKAGES, would be a great step towards pushing larger volumes. After all, when selling a digital download, you are simply copying bytes of data. There is no packaging, no shipping, just a bandwidth cost and a distributed software application like Steam. I can understand selling a boxed title for $50, but selling the same title for $50 is nuts, try $20 to $30 and I’m sure you’ll see more sales and an invigorated community. Couple user accounts with these digital accounts and you can help curb piracy also.
The Future
Just by improving upon some, if not all, of the issues mentioned above could only help the PC gaming industry. Moving away from volume and focusing more on quality should result in more blockbuster titles like Gears of War. Unique content versus sequels would also be a good route, Spore is a prime example of this. At the same time, a well released sequel could generate massive sales due to large established fan bases, hello Duke Nukem Forever. The consumer here is not the issue, the producer needs to step up their game or step off the court.
Glad you are putting my steam account to use. :-) good post.
Hey Chris,
Great article; it echoes more or less what my friends and I have been discussing as of late. I’m about to graduate college with a degree in video game design, so it’s rather scary thing to be witnessing, especially since I love PC gaming and am not a huge fan of consoles.
Reading your thoughts, I’ll have a few counter points for the sake of it:
On the issues of piracy, distribution costs and requiring optical drives, platforms like Steam, PlayOnline, Direct2Drive, etc. resolve these issues more or less, with the exception of the rates at which they’re charging consumers for digital distribution— it’s absolutely ridiculous that I should be charged the same $50 to download a game and burn it on my own media or store it on a backup drive as any schmoe who enters Walmart and picks up a physical copy. They really need to work on this. That said, I think digital distribution, especially with the dwindling interest by retailers on selling boxed copies, is going to be the future of PC gaming, and ultimately console gaming too.
On the issue of bugs, there is some truth to your argument that developers are shoving things out the door and just throwing patches out as the issues come. However, the lack of consumer interest also drives this problem; publishers are getting more and more uneasy about releasing PC titles, and when they miss their budgets or deadlines, publishers push them HARD to get it out the door. Simply put, the shit is rushed these days. That’s not to say console publishers don’t rush, either; most console publishers are also or have been PC publishers, but at least on consoles when a patch gets pushed the user can be more or less forced into installing it right when they load it up.
Most PC gaming bugs aren’t so much blatant flaws in the software itself left in by developer ignorance - I’m actually fairly proud of the PC QA sector - but rather the inherit cost of developing for a platform that has completely unpredictable configurations. Like any PC software, crap programs, hardware failrues and OS fuckery can and will crash your programs. No publisher can realistically test for every conceivable situation, or every possible hardware configuration. 360, PS3 and Wii have one target configuration for each system, and it’s easily tested against, not to mention there are no concerns with software conflicts. Sadly I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about this, unless we start developing games to run inside predictable virtual machines to ensure proper support, but then it’s unlikely we’d be able to tap the greatest aspect of PC gaming - the unparalleled graphcis and processing powering of high end machines.
It’s all a rather tricky situation, really, but I think we’ll see a recovery. Gaming has had it’s crashes before, and it’s always come back with a punch. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out.
On the first issue you and I actually agree. $20 downloads are great, $50 downloads just encourage piracy. In regards to bugs, in most cases it’s broad sweeping bugs that plague the industry. When a game won’t work with an entire operating system(Vista) then there are some major issues at hand. I can understand when user A with CPU B, VGA C, and OS XZY has the system crash due to a driver conflict, that can be an issue, but not such broad issues as has hit the industry as late.
I think that the Hardware Manufacturers have played no small part in killing PC gaming. Although it is good to see hardware developing quickly most people can’t afford to continually shell out for the latest graphics card and I think they usually either buy a console or only play the games their machine can run.
I think there has always been piracy around PC games, for as long as I remember. However it does offer some if it’s own advantages. If you can not afford a game and you cannot obtain a pirate copy, you will never play that game. As a result there are probably thousands of people playing games they may otherwise never have played. Or may have bought as a result of playing the pirated copy. As some demos are pretty short these days (1 hour trial of r-factor including trawling though the menus, blacksite demo probably the shortest i’ve played)
I agree that services like steam are the future, however I still find it a bit expensive/rather have the disc.
What we need is an amazing game to come out on PC that won’t get ported to a console. Crysis is OK but it relies heavily on it’s graphics which most people don’t think justifies the cost of hardware. I remember like Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were really good titles that didn’t make their way onto other platforms immediately. I think some studios these days are too quick to release their games on other platforms just to cash in.
I also agree with hardware issues and bugs. I know they can’t test on every type of system but there seem to be the bugs appear that effect loads of people. These should be avoided.
I think PC gaming will continue to exist but may not regain the market share it once had. Also loads of people seem to like macs these days, we may see some Windows/Mac exclusive games in the future.
Gaming on both the 360 and PC, it’s easy for me to see why the tide is turning towards consoles. The technical gap between these platforms has narrowed, and many PC gamers are moving away from the desk and onto the comfort of the living room couch -seated infront of a 50 inch Plasma/LCD and 7.1 surround sound system. To fight back, PC’s have to apply the concept of HTPC as a mainstream phenomenon.
But even then, with a console you get to pop the disk and within a few minutes you are gaming. The PC? try a half hour install, followed by a giant multi-megabyte patch (sometimes more than one) and still the game crashes, or some other background application decides not to play nice and locks up your machine. Likewise, there is no consistency between publishers in terms of their hardware requirements and the input devices they support. Then there’s copy protection. It actually punishes honesty.
While many of these negatives could also be seen as a positive (eg a game that scales based on your current hardware and the modding community) for average Joe blow, the negatives far outweigh the positives.
At the moment, the PC still offers a better platform for certain games. eg Oblivion on the 360 offers choppy frame rates and frequent load-times. The PC experience is superior in every way, assuming you have the hardware to scale it up. But I think the next generation of consoles will be powerful enough that the reason for spending so much more money on a gaming PC (for all the pain and suffering it provides the user) will be very hard to defend in any rational sense of the word.
Next generation consoles will no doubt have the internal guts to really give PCs a run for their money. Hell, this generation’s consoles for a little while had GPUs that rivaled PC GPUs. The biggest issue is PC hardware costs an arm and a leg while consoles hardware is subsidized by the manufacturer to an extent. Sure you drop $500 for that Xbox360, but Microsoft eats a few hundred dollars in costs that it expects to make up on game sales.
While it is a pain that PC hardware seems to cycle every 6-12 months(8800GTX is an oddity with 14 months on top and counting) I think we will see a plateau of sorts with the G92/RV670 cards that are available now. I imagine someone that drops the coin for an 8800GT will be able to game rather nicely for the next 18 months. The problem with PCs are the resolutions people play at, 720P is minuscule compared to the 1280×1024 to 1650×1080 that most gamers play at these days on PC. Sure, consoles can upscale to 1080P, but there’s a big difference.
I think PC gaming will slowly be relegated to the elite gaming enthuasiasts who are willing to drop thousands on hardware and a few casual gamers that play games like WoW which don’t really push hardware. If anything we need to see programmers work to provide 3D engines that scale well with power. Honestly the engine driving Crysis does scale very well, playing even on the low settings looks beautiful, people just get bruised egos from playing games on the low settings.
I agree that 720p gaming (and yes, 1080p upscaled is just cheating!) is a long way from the sort of resolutions you might choose to play at on a monitor. But there is a certain amount of elitism here that is not backed up by scientific fact. In the very old days of gaming it was quickly understood that when it came to quality of picture, colour was far more important (to the human eye) than the number of pixels used to make up the image. For example, 320*200 with 256 colours offered a better visual experience than 640*480 with 16 colours (yes I’ve been gaming that long). For example Game Artists would typically design their static art images using true colour resolutions and then use software tools to “quantise” the images down to the colour restrictions of the target display mode, so as to minimise the impact of the colour reduction.
Todays resolutions (even 720p) are quite incredible and actually offer a more than adequate “workspace” to produce amazing and lifelike visuals if the rest of the hardware and software is up to the task. It could even have been argued (in a purely technical sense) that the 360 and PS3 might have been better off supporting a native SD resolution so that their ability to support 60fps for all games became a reality. Before you scoff at such a lowly resolution, consider playing Oblivion on the 360 with silky smooth frame-rates; vast draw distances and full AA -none of which it comes close to offering now. Of course the fickle public would never have accepted that, the next gen consoles had to support Hi Def because that was what made them “next gen”. I would point back to the game “Strangers Wrath” on the original Xbox as an example of what can be done in SD by professional graphic animation artists. Most people, if they watched those pre-rendered cut-scenes, would swear they were watching a Hi Def video.
In my opinion the next “next gen” consoles will support native 1080p but unlike the last gen, they will have the horse-power to actually drive that resolution while supporting all the modern graphic features we’ve come to expect from a modern 3D engine. I would suggest that we simply don’t need a higher resolution than that (and my personal view is 720p would have been more than adequate but the point is the future for HD TV’s is 1080p). Any extra resources can then go into the actual performance (eg frame rates; texture quality; aa etc) and of course AI, which still has a long way to go and badly needs a bigger share of the system resource Pie. Because the 360 and PS3 are underpowered for running Hi Def (The 360 often can’t even make true 720p at adequate frame rates) + the fact that Hi Def is still an evolving standard that has not found it’s way to eveyones living rooms, then I don’t think the 360 or PS3 will ever be as popular as the PS2 was, but I do think the 720 and/or PS4 will be, and may even do better.
By the time these next consoles come to market, HDTV will have a much stronger footing, and it does appear Blu Ray will likely be on it’s way to replacing DVD. For the average consumer, a Games Console does not offer adequate justification for blowing a few grand on a 1080p TV. On the other hand, once people have purchased these TV’s (to actually watch Hi def TV/movies) purchasing a games console to use on that TV is an obvious and rational way to get more value out of your TV.
I don’t know, I’ve played a few games at 2560×1600 and compared to my 1680×1050 I found the additional screen-space to be incredibly useful. It really depends on what you are playing. I can play a first-person shooter at 1280×1024 and be content but sit me in front of a real-time simulator and 1680×1050 feels restricting. While I have never played Oblivion on the Xbox, Oblivion on the PC with the high-def texture-packs really brings that game to full glory and I could easily play at 720P and be content.
The biggest problem though is the massive jump from 720P to 1080P, it’s an enormous jump and no wonder why the consoles have trouble making the scaling jump. If consoles could push 1080P at 30FPS constant then I’d say focus on upping the textures but that’s a memory limitation and not a GPU limitation. From my personal experience, I can only tell the difference between 30FPS and 60+FPS in twitch shooters like CounterStrike:Source. I’ve played Halo 3 and CoD4 on the Xbox360 and frankly you don’t need 60FPS to prevent screen jumping as you aren’t twitching like with PC controls.
In two years or so when the PS4 and Xbox9087469087 launches I think we’ll see smooth 1080P with textures that come close to PC gaming. I’ve been brainstorming what I’d like to see in a future game console, should be interesting stuff. What we really need is the ability to customize the 3D engines in-game, sometimes it would be nice to cut the FPS to 30FPS and manually bump up the quality but I imagine that’d complicate coding and bring the realm of issues in coding for the PC to the consoles.
Yes, I conceed that while the resolution may not impact the ability to produce an amazing image, extra pixels does allow for more detail to fit into less, which for some types of games would be of great benefit.
Halo3 and COD4 are both examples of games that were brilliantly optimised for the limitations of the 360. They play well on that platform, no question, but I’ll bet the developers had to work very hard to find the best compromise between performance and quality. As I’m sure you are aware, Halo3 on the 360 is not true 720p. Oblivion, on the other hand, drove me nuts, and after playing it on the PC, I’d never play it on the 360 ever again.
Anyway, the future looks very bright for consoles, and pretty uncertain for PC’s (in terms of gaming). Personally, I love tweaking, and for this reason wish PC gaming all the best, but it’s just hard to see it growing under the cirumstances.