PC Gamers, educate me

[Vigormortis]

That is b/c pretty much everyone has a PC(or laptop) and social media account so you expand the audience to soccer moms, kids, elderly etc. and their Bejeweled/Farmville/Candy Crush browser crap which obviously increases the numbers tremendously. However I thought we talked about quality games here not shovelware. If you look at people who are willing to buy a new AAA releases you see the sales figures are higher on consoles.

What the hell do Facebook games have to do with what I said? I pointed out that Steam alone has more active users than Live and PSN have registered users. Factoring in Facebook and other users only widens that sizable gap, it doesn't diminish it.

See above. Candy Crush is the best selling game of all time and cost nothing to make, nor does it initially cost anything to buy. It simply taps into that reptilian part of the brain that rewards addictive behavior and made King billions of profit in microtransactions. Even Call of Doodle doesn't get anything near that level of garbage. The 'gaming' landscape is diverse and encapsulates anything from F2P, shovelware, browser games, MMOs etc. all of which PC/phone/tablet is 'King' but for the sake of argument we talked about 'core' games here; the ones enthusiasts talk about on websites like this one. Again, the games that wouldn't be feasible without consoles.

I'll be honest. I laugh a little every time I see the words "core gamer". It's such an falsely elitist and exclusionary phrase.

And you really need to drop the "triple-A games wouldn't exist without consoles!" claim. It's a claim so woefully ignorant to the state of the industry I can't believe people still make it.

Fair enough but it are always the same tired examples to 'prove' how AAA-games are failing. What about Batman, Human Revolution, Dark Souls, Witcher 3, Last of Us, MGS5 etc. all really awesome games that wouldn't exist without consoles?

Again this claim that these games wouldn't exist without consoles. You're basing your entire argument on an assumption. You've nothing to show that backs up this claim. Not a thing. Yet you keep using it as the crux of your argument. It's just...baffling.

I'd argue that, if consoles didn't exist, PCs would be the primary (if only) source of gaming entertainment. As a result, the number of PC players would encapsulate those who would have normally used consoles instead.

Not at all. If Sony Japan(a console manufacturer) didn't fund Demon's Souls than Dark would have never existed either and that is even ignoring the fact that PCs have no single company to market the game that would be necessary to receive a budget in the first place. It's a console game marketed as a console game.

Again, an assumption. If Sony Japan hadn't funded the game, who's to say another company wouldn't have?

But let's say you're right on Dark Souls. Being able to point to one game doesn't back up your claim that triple-A development wouldn't exist without consoles. All it proves is that Dark Souls wouldn't have been made had Sony not funded it.

The only exception on your list is The Witcher but all the other games are either decades old, strategy games, FPSs, MMO's and variations of the same game. All of which PC indeed excels at. Though again modern AAA FPS-games wouldn't be feasible without consoles.

I'm genuinely starting to wonder what it is that you believe constitutes a game being triple-A. If games like World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 don't, then I'm truly baffled. But regardless, I'll still address your points here.

"Decades old". No, they aren't. Even the oldest among them, Quake, had an installment in the series in 2007.

"The Witcher is an exception". No, it isn't. The Witcher series has always been PC-centric. CD Projekt Red is a PC developer. The third installment was ported to the consoles, it wasn't developed with them as its core platforms. And if your argument is "Witcher 3 wouldn't be what it was without consoles!", it wouldn't have been what it was without the PC platform either.

"Modern FPS games wouldn't be feasible without consoles". Seriously? Please tell me you're just having a laugh now. I'm not even gonna bother refuting this one. It speaks for itself.

I don't 'hate' PCs just got ripped off in 1993 by someone from the mustard race with long hair, a Pepsi and a Daikatana T-shirt. (poor joke I know. )

You realize that reinforces the idea that you hate PCs, right? That you'd hold a grudge for 22 years.

Also the PC sales figures in your link include browser games and in-game purchases of World of Nerdcraft so that deviates quite far from the sales of 'core' games we were talking about here. And even when you include that garbage the game sales on consoles still outperforms PC.

Since apparently popularity, quality, profitability, notoriety, or fame aren't indicators of what constitutes a "core game", care to share with the rest of us what does?

Also:
"game sales on consoles still outperform PC"

PCs = 37% of the gaming industry's global revenue

Consoles = 27% of the gaming industry's global revenue

If the consoles are outperforming the PC platforms, then it seems I've been doing math wrong for years.

[sub]On a side note, I find it fascinating that they lumped VR devices in with the console/entertainment-screen category. Without PCs and PC-centric companies, VR as we know it today simply wouldn't be where it is. And that's not an assumption, that's a fact. It was PC-centric companies and engineers who started work on these devices. Console makers had no interest whatsoever until they saw the profit potential in what the PC guys were doing.[/sub]

 

[someonehairy-ish]

Eh, I've got over a hundred games in my steam library and I paid sub-£10 for the vast, vast majority of them. Wait for sales, is all I can say.

 

[asdfen]

do a search for sites that sell PC games in your local area. You do not have to go through steam only. Also to get a DVD drive for a pc if you want it costs around 50 usd or less. PC games are usualy 50% cheaper than console games. If you game a lot you save a lot of cash. Its cheaper faster more convinient in every way.

 

[Joccaren]

Lol this has got to be a joke. The Nintendo of the past(nes/snes/gameboy) sure they were pushing innovation but modern Nintendo with its overreliance on antiquated IPs(or rather, just Mario) that comes out once every blue moon on a flopped console left high and dry by Nintendo itself(while trying to monetize every item some schmuck on Youtube tries to make about one of their games); yeah, they are just a shadow of their former self.

The IP thing isn't a sign of lack of innovation. Mario, between games, has at times innovated more than entire AAA publisher libraries. Its also released a number of similar games within the IP.
Innovation isn't about just slapping a new name on something, its about actually doing something different. The WiiU, whilst not necessarily well received, did this. And some early games on the system showed the potential of it, however Nintendo was in a market dominated by the PS and Xbox, and thus most games created multiplatform wouldn't utilise such functionality, as it'd be wasted dev time on the majority of their supported systems.

Even this generation I've still seen Nintendo do more new with their games and consoles than I have the other companies, by and large. Sony and Microsoft are slowly getting there... But slowly is the word. Making it a bit easier for Indies to publish to their platforms was a good first step, but first party they're still just doing the same tired shit year after year. They rarely, if ever, do anything different. Even Kinect and such have had similar technology in use for years, and honestly are probably less utilised than the WiiUs controller screen.

I can play every Halo, and the 'innovation', if you can call it that [Honestly, it was more homogenisation than innovation, but W/E], ended at 2. I can play Zelda, and I do, and almost every fucking game I play is quite different. Ocarina of time, arguably the first 'modern' open world game, Majoras Mask, with its 3 day time control system, Phantom Hourglass with its complete revamp of how the game plays and the perspective its played from to take advantage of the 3DS controls, Link between Worlds, harkening back to the older days of Zelda in world design and art, and trying a way of having you start with all your equipment [More or less] and letting you do your dungeons in any order, rather than doing them sequentially to unlock more equipment.
Hell, even Splatoon is a fairly innovative take on the team based FPS genre. Its done more new for the genre than most AAA FPS games have for years.
I look at AAA games and, whilst they may all have different names, they are all essentially the same game, with a different skin and story. Occasionally something new pops up, but that's rare, rather than with don't-give-a-fuck Nintendo where every game is something different from the last.
Yeah, there are reasons for keeping things near the same. That's not called innovation though. I stand by my statement, Nintendo has been more Innovative than Microsoft or Sony for decades, even this generation.