Why is PC gaming "dead"?

[Iron Mal]

The way I see it, PC gaming isn't dead, it's just impotent and has a hip problem.

In short, PC gaming isn't gone or going it's just well past it's 'Golden age', you've lost out to the console gamers, they're the olympic athletes of the gaming world now while your PC's (as good as they are) are just the older guys who sit on the benches and grumble about how things were 'back in the day'.

Just like console gamers will when the next generation of consoles go motion controls only and the PC gets all the "proper" games.

That's not nessercarily true, consoles will still have 'proper games' (whatever that means) and motion control has actually proven itself to be popular and viable (look at the popularity of the Wii, look at how many people bought a Kinect, think about how many people will probably get a Move).

Consoles still have their major advantage over PC's in that they offer an equally entertaining experience in a package that is much simpler to use and set up (even for people with no technical skill or understanding, if you can plug a TV in, you can plug an Xbox in), simply put, to the majority of people out there, consoles are much more appealing and approachable by default (it just requires plugging in, a PC needs to be set up and installed, this process itself isn't too hard but to people who are new to gaming the extra steps and required technical knowledge is a huge turn off).

So, sadly, the PC won't be making a return to glory any time soon unless it somehow obtains some great advantage that makes it massively more attractive than consoles (no, mods and graphics don't count, most people, as in the people who make up sales and success, don't care about those).

You may just have to suck it up, take a seat and just enjoy you're niche place in gaming culture.

 

[RaikuFA]

-Community is much, MUCH better. I'd rather deal with whiny 10 year olds than elitist assholes who look down on everyone who doesn't PC game.

Now I'm not saying you're one of these people so don't get excited or anything, but a lot of people barge in on PC gaming discussions, spout a lot of unsubstantiated (or outright false) crap, call everyone who disagrees when them 'PC elitists' and then cry that PC gamers are mean. Some PC gamers ARE mean but then again some are just bored with the constant trickle of self-important, know nothing fuckwits who feel the need to piss on their shoes. I'm sure there are console gamers who are sick to shit with PC gamers barging in on their discussion and acting like total cocks as well. Gaming has always had a noticable percentage of fuckheads.

-I hate modding. Too damn expensive. Too complicated.

Expensive? Mods are expensive? I've been in and out of game modding communities for 15 odd years and playing modded games for just a wee bit longer. Over that time I've probably had over 1Tb of mods (I love my mods) and never once has anyone asked for a cent... As for complicated, if you think game mods are complicated now you should have seen it in the days before dev supported mod tools existed.

im not either but ive dealt with a lot of pc gamers who acted like what my previous post said.

 

[Delusibeta]

-snip-

One word: Shovelware.

More words: I fear that consoles going motion-controls only will result in an industry crash. My argument is thus: as the Wii has demonstrated, it is easy to get lots of shovelware produced for motion control based systems. With the Kinect and Move, that stuff is getting ported. In the next generation of consoles, there will be no refuge from the shovelware, since they had gone motion control only. Hence, shovelware increases, market decreases when people realise that they're buying crap.

Bottom line: Consoles having no non-shovelware games at all, PCs having all of the "proper" games (from indies admittedly, but still).

 

[Atmos Duality]

Lets see...my speculation:

Spoiler: World of Warcraft and the Time Game

The biggest PC "Game" out there is...World of Warcraft.
Best to get this touchy subject out of the way first.

A terrifying grind-engine that uses psychology to hook its players, and community ties to trap them in a cycle of pointless endless busy-work. Tack on a monthly fee, and that translates into reliable monthly mega-profits.
World of Warcraft is s a profit engine, it's huge, and if you're making a serious commercial game for PC, you have to contend with the possibility of WoW sucking up your market base.

WoW is such a massive time-sink that it competes with other PC games that aren't even in its supertype or genre (fantasy genre, or MMO).

My evidence is quite personal in nature, but it represents a microcosm of an event I've found time and time again in other gaming groups (and among other gamers I've talked to): WoW kills other games just because it requires a huge time investment.

So, I play in a weekly gaming group, and we touch on everything from tabletops to LAN-games, console-games, and card games.
(Until most of them quit WoW), World of Warcraft had the power to completely take half of this group out of any other game we were playing. Why? Raid nights. Grinding. It had nothing to do with their personal interest in what else was happening; I was running a tabletop earlier this year and had asked them only to play in my game if they wanted to play in my game; not to grind for loots or go raiding.
Even in light of this simple request, WoW won out. Why? Because if they didn't keep up, they would eventually be left behind.

It eventually turned into this: they played it when they weren't in character, and when they were supposed to come back into character I had to wait for THEM to finish grinding.
We had to pause a movie one time for 30 minutes just to wait for them to stop playing, and that's where I just stopped trying.

Repeat this event with any other game we were playing or any other movie we were watching.
Same result.

That's interference at the local level, and it's not an isolated incident. At my university, several departments had to ban the game (and other MMOs, along with Facebook) because it was noticeably dragging their network performance down. (they can still play on the dorm/global network, just not specific department networks)

On its release, I also noted how rapidly many niche gaming communities died (or rather, they "migrated").
This is an example of how such a rapid success can be a bad thing, and don't think for a minute that publishers and developers didn't take notice of this. There have been numerous attempts to clone on WoW's success and profit margins, of which all have failed because they cannot beat the time game; they cannot beat WoW Player-Monopoly.

No other genre does this so overtly and no other game has been so successful at holding onto its playerbase AND turning a profit from them. WoW has been padding the profits numbers of PC gaming for years now; yet I consider it to be one of the absolute worst things to ever happen to gaming in general.

Summary: If one game can have that much influence at the local level, there is a strong possibility that it's also a commercial deterrent for new PC games just due to the nature of limited time. Most of today's popular console games are shorter and "disposable" in comparison.

Spoiler: Piracy

This one is more direct.
While most (if not all) systems suffer from software piracy, none have such easy access or notoriety (thus making the concept available to those who might have otherwise been ignorant) as pirated PC gaming.

The industry's move to a more console-centric market is spurred strongly by a few factors:
1) The release and subsequent improvement of CD-Burners in the late 90s to around 2004. Enabling affordable mass storage on the most common distributed format used at that time.
2) Increasing the average home internet-bandwidth.
3) The invention of better peer-to-peer networking and tunneling software. Vlans can be used to emulate required network connections or create new non-proprietary "standard" networks.
Peer-to-peer/Distributive downloading networks ("torrents") enable the propagation of large files even on limited bandwidth.

All of these are PC-centric improvements on existing tech or directly related to the PC market.
Online console games didn't drive the broadband revolution; PC gaming and Internet browsing did. Xbox Live simply took advantage of a golden opportunity that was the byproduct PC gaming's success.

To your average investor or publisher, piracy is now a strong deterrent from the PC market (presented here as a matter of perception from the investor; if piracy really was a direct industry/game killer, Blizzard would have gone out of business after releasing Diablo 2).

The obvious alternative are consoles, which by nature, have far more limitations imposed on them than PCs (that makes it harder to pirate, or less appealing to potential customers), and are more cost-effective to market because of this. Consistency of that sort is appealing to the big publisher oligopolies (and their investors) of today.

Summary: No matter how easy it may be, the distribution and public awareness of piracy on PC is vastly greater than that of consoles at this time.

Spoiler: Multiplatform Mediocrity

The PC games we commonly see on the shelves today are either MMO box sets, or ports of successful console titles.

Even in Digital distribution, many of Steam's greatest hits are multi-platform releases (Most of the Valve titles, all EA/Bioware titles, CoD...all of these are their best sellers and you can play the vast majority of them on Xbox 360 or PS3, which doesn't say much about PC gaming when it can be directly compared to a console in terms of sales potential).

Most of which are multiplatform releases that were CLEARLY made to be played on an Xbox 360 or PS3. In the past, we saw the rare PC game get ported to consoles. Today, it's almost exclusively the other way around.

The only instances I can find where PC Gaming dominates is in genres where a mouse and keyboard is all but required (RTS, most MMORPGs), yet the industry has shifted focus on only making console-friendly shooters and action games in those respective genre; it's a marketing cycle that feeds itself!
All of those cover-based 3rd person shooters is a direct result of this. The game slows itself down so the player only has to focus on a very small subset of controls at any given time.

Spoiler: Aside: Quick-Time-Events

Quick-Time-Events are a result of this, by (at best) focusing on showboating moves that would require intricate controls and design time, we can now turn into a standard reflex action!
By eliminating the necessity of context (which is how most QTEs are used today, not all, but most), we can insert action sequences anywhere into a game, and sometimes without warning.
I very rarely see QTEs in PC games today, even the ports (the hacking mini-games in Mass Effect change depending on the version you're playing, for example. Console players get stuck with QTEs, PC players get to play a variant of Frogger).
In short, I doubt we would have seen QTEs take off as they have if console-gaming had not become dominant.

Summary: Releasing the same product on multiple platforms only guarantees the market strength of the platform it was originally developed for. PC Gaming is thriving primarily on the "table scraps" of the console market today, rather than on games made primarily for PC gaming itself.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, because this means that at any time, players (and later, the market) could potentially "switch" over to PC gaming, and the tables might turn within a few years. That is anything but a sign of weakness for either market; it just means that they are slowly blending together (with the distinction becoming more obvious as time goes on and PC processing becomes better).

No matter the result, this is a big part of the misconception that PC gaming is "Dying" today.

There are more technical details I could elaborate on ("not all PCs are created equal"), but this post is quite large enough (if you read the spoilers).

I'm certain someone is going to jump down my throat with both feet on a few of these points, but please keep in mind that these are only observations and my opinion based on said observations.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

im not either but ive dealt with a lot of pc gamers who acted like what my previous post said.

What, this?

its mainly pc gamings attitude towards new people. asking which OS the best? youre the devil incarnate in a pc gamers eyes. it turns off a lot of newer pc gamers. thus making them stay to console

Odd. I've never seen someone abused or ripped on for asking that question (at least, not unless they started acting like a dick). Most PC gamers I've seen answering that will answer either Win XP or Win 7 and then go on to heap abuse on other Windows OSes and bemoan the lack of proper game support for Linux.

 

[CaptainKoala]

Steam is bigger than ever. People think its dying because you hear about the console more. But just because it isn't a mainstream as console doesn't mean anything.

 

[Kurokami]

Someone get the picture!

Yessir!

I think the picture could stand some updating.

I mean, people hated Spore, what with the DRM and all that...

It had nothing to do with DRM and to be fair Sims players seemed to enjoy it.

Edit: Perhaps I should have put 'in my case it had nothing to do with DRM', can't really speak for others.

 

[Delusibeta]

-sniporama-

Good post: but...

a) WoW is, by definition, competing against console games as well. Likewise, I'd argue that Call of Duty is having a similar effect to userbases of console (and PC) games.

b) Although I wouldn't argue that, out of the gaming systems, PC piracy is well known to exist, it's fairly insignificant compared to music piracy (for example). And even then, I don't think you give enough credit to the handheld pirating scene.

c) Fair point, however the same argument can also be applied on consoles directly.

 

[Iron Mal]

-snip-

One word: Shovelware.

More words: I fear that consoles going motion-controls only will result in an industry crash. My argument is thus: as the Wii has demonstrated, it is easy to get lots of shovelware produced for motion control based systems. With the Kinect and Move, that stuff is getting ported. In the next generation of consoles, there will be no refuge from the shovelware, since they had gone motion control only. Hence, shovelware increases, market decreases when people realise that they're buying crap.

Bottom line: Consoles having no non-shovelware games at all, PCs having all of the "proper" games (from indies admittedly, but still).

Granted, shovelware can be a problem but we've had crap third party games on every console in every 'generation' (even the PC isn't immune to this, and the indy market isn't much better either to be honest, how many indy versions of DOOM, tetris and tower defense must there be out there?).

And I think you may be exaggerating the shovelware issue somewhat, it will never get to the point where every game on consoles will be crap cash-ins (and the PC has never been immune to this for the reasons previously stated).

We have no indication that consoles will go 'motion only' (we spent ages refining the controllers to be the way they are so I can't see it being worthwhile for us to ditch them completely).

Your 'fears' sound like a PC elitists raving in response to the fact that, yes, your time in the spotlight is mostly over (you still haven't defined what you mean exactly by 'proper games', that's a very vague term).

 

[Kurokami]

The way I see it, PC gaming isn't dead, it's just impotent and has a hip problem.

In short, PC gaming isn't gone or going it's just well past it's 'Golden age', you've lost out to the console gamers, they're the olympic athletes of the gaming world now while your PC's (as good as they are) are just the older guys who sit on the benches and grumble about how things were 'back in the day'.

Just like console gamers will when the next generation of consoles go motion controls only and the PC gets all the "proper" games.

Ironic you should name console gamers as athletes, ironic if you look at Korea anyhow.

Also, this isn't an insult or criticism, but: I liked that when elaborating on your comment you started with "in short". =]

 

[The Funslinger]

the people who say that are trolls. Trolls can make any comment about anything. Reality is secondary to them.

For instance, trolls say console games are dumbed down. Trolls say PCs are no good for anything besides RTS games. Both sides had disproved this before the "argument" was even made. To be honest, in terms of online, PC gaming is doing far better than consoles. More console games have had servers taken down (original xbox games) but PC versions can be left up (although many are unmaintained, and get destroyed with modded games by the irritating masses.) Also, in things like L4D, on computer: Custom Campaigns, biatch.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

We have no indication that consoles will go 'motion only' (we spent ages refining the controllers to be the way they are so I can't see it being worthwhile for us to ditch them completely).

From where I'm sitting the problem with Motion Controls isn't shovelware or do odd things to the console market per se... the problem is that they represent a drive to go 'family friendly' by all the console manufacturers because Nintendo had their little market coup with that exact focus. There's nothing essentially wrong with that but there is the potential there to start undoing all the shit we've spent the past 10-15+ years fighting against and fighting for. Does gaming really need to be wedged firmly back into the general public's mind as a 'thing for kids' and consoles sold as both something to keep the kids quiet and as an exercise aid?

 

[Delusibeta]

-snip-

One word: Shovelware.

More words: I fear that consoles going motion-controls only will result in an industry crash. My argument is thus: as the Wii has demonstrated, it is easy to get lots of shovelware produced for motion control based systems. With the Kinect and Move, that stuff is getting ported. In the next generation of consoles, there will be no refuge from the shovelware, since they had gone motion control only. Hence, shovelware increases, market decreases when people realise that they're buying crap.

Bottom line: Consoles having no non-shovelware games at all, PCs having all of the "proper" games (from indies admittedly, but still).

Granted, shovelware can be a problem but we've had crap third party games on every console in every 'generation' (even the PC isn't immune to this, and the indy market isn't much better either to be honest, how many indy versions of DOOM, tetris and tower defense must there be out there?).

And I think you may be exaggerating the shovelware issue somewhat, it will never get to the point where every game on consoles will be crap cash-ins (and the PC has never been immune to this for the reasons previously stated).

We have no indication that consoles will go 'motion only' (we spent ages refining the controllers to be the way they are so I can't see it being worthwhile for us to ditch them completely).

Your 'fears' sound like a PC elitists raving in response to the fact that, yes, your time in the spotlight is mostly over (you still haven't defined what you mean exactly by 'proper games', that's a very vague term).

Essentially, "Proper" games = Not Shovelware. The reason why I used quotation marks was because it's a very vague term.

The problem with your argument is that, essentually, it has happened [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983], and I think it's going to happen again, and I think motion controls will be the catalyst for it. I realise that the PC games market will be affected should there be another market crash, but it won't stop bedroom coders.

Also, I'm pretty damn sure that Sony and Microsoft will have another go at the Wii market regardless of the success or otherwise of their current motion controllers, and I'm pretty sure Nintendo won't ignore the segment of the userbase which knows only motion controls (most of the people introduced to gaming by the Wii).

 

[Aur0ra145]

It has to do with marketing and the changing ideas of people. Now people don't want to work for anything, they just want to throw a disk in a box and it give them hours of fun. Consoles make this easy for people.

Though, @ "is PC gaming dead."

Look at this. The stats for unlocking Hastings for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam. This event started on the same day for all three platforms.

http://www.battlefieldbadcompany2.com/vietnam/battleforhastings

Xbox: 28.2 Million
PS3: 21.3 Million
PC: 53.9 Million

This is based off of point acquired by team benefiting actions (healing, resupply, spotting, assists, etc.)

The PC has more than the Xbox and PS3 COMBINED!

What does this say about console gamers? Does it say that they are selfish children who only care about themselves? Why yes, the stats can very easily be read that way. Is that really what it is about? Who knows.

I for one am a PC gamer. I console gamed for a bit, but it's not for me. It seems to mindless, lacks teamwork and doesn't make you feel accomplished when you win.

In Truth, computers are NOT that hard to build. To run current games of decent settings you will be out less than $1,000 dollars (assuming you have nothing, not even a monitor and keyboard.)

I really can't grasp why people ***** about how hard it is to get into PC gaming.

 

[Nouw]

PC Gaming isn't dead. Fuck I play on the PC more than my beloved Xbox 360, PSP and NDS!

News like Space Marine on the PC instead of being a console exclusive helps that fact. *Hi Fives Relic.

 

[omicron1]

It has to do with marketing and the changing ideas of people. Now people don't want to work for anything, they just want to throw a disk in a box and it give them hours of fun. Consoles make this easy for people.

Though, @ "is PC gaming dead."

Look at this. The stats for unlocking Hastings for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam. This event started on the same day for all three platforms.

http://www.battlefieldbadcompany2.com/vietnam/battleforhastings

Xbox: 28.2 Million
PS3: 21.3 Million
PC: 53.9 Million

This is based off of point acquired by team benefiting actions (healing, resupply, spotting, assists, etc.)

The PC has more than the Xbox and PS3 COMBINED!

What does this say about console gamers? Does it say that they are selfish children who only care about themselves? Why yes, the stats can very easily be read that way. Is that really what it is about? Who knows.

I for one am a PC gamer. I console gamed for a bit, but it's not for me. It seems to mindless, lacks teamwork and doesn't make you feel accomplished when you win.

In Truth, computers are NOT that hard to build. To run current games of decent settings you will be out less than $1,000 dollars (assuming you have nothing, not even a monitor and keyboard.)

I really can't grasp why people ***** about how hard it is to get into PC gaming.

About Vietnam: Also telling is that it's not really an option to pirate Vietnam (digital download expansion pack, lots of registration and online verification involved). These are all registered, unpirated copies!
Edit: Thought this was copies sold. Still impressive, but not nearly as impressive as I'd thought.