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Dhruin
Stranger In A Strange Land
Joined: 20 May 2002
Posts: 1825
Location: Sydney, Australia |
| Windows Vista and PC Gaming @ 1Up |
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1Up has an <a href="http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3142401" target="_blank">article</a> on 'Windows Vista', based on their time at the recent Microsoft Meltdown event. It looks at this next version of Windows itself, as well as features aimed squarely at gamers. Here's an interesting clip on the market:<blockquote><em>One thing that has made the PC game market look dead as a doornail has been NPD's grossly inaccurate numbers -- numbers that every half-assed pundit likes to quote. While console game sales continue to grow, PC game sales have appeared flatline, no growth, stuck at around $2.3 Billion per year. Yeah, guys -- AT RETAIL. NPD doesn't take into account online sales, a huge revenue stream! Online kicks in another $2 billion worldwide (projected) by year's end. By end of 2009, projections for online sales alone will be $6.9 billion. "And that's a conservative estimate," added Rich Wickham, Microsoft's Director of Business Development and Strategy.
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<br>According to the Microsoft message: Windows games is becoming a big priority. A study done among thousands of users determined that 35% of people use the PC for Web surfing, 18% use it for games and everything else is an also-ran. The next biggest thing, email, is only 9.2%. This gave Microsoft the boot in the proverbial ass to get back to its PC gaming roots.</em></blockquote> |
Sun Jul 31, 2005 2:05 am |
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TheMadGamer
High Emperor
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 487
Location: Southern California |
Boy this bit of news really sucks for the 'sky is falling PC gaming is dead' crowd. Too bad for them.
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The Poster Previously Known As NeptiOfPovar |
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Sun Jul 31, 2005 2:06 am |
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humorguy
Guest
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The fact is a PC game today cannot beat the sales worldwide in 2004 that a Commodore 64 game did in just US sales in 1988! Every year for the last 7 years PC budget (ie reduced price) sales have increased taking a bigger percentage of pc gaming sales. This is proof as far as I am concerned that PC gaming is dying out.
By the time we get to X-Box 4 and Playstation 5 there will be no more meaningful PC gaming market (in my opinion). Already we see a fair percentage of PC games coming out on console first where it will "make the money". Fewer and fewer conversions get the "PC re-write" to take advantage of the PC technology. As each new console gets released so those conversions will happen less and less until no conversions are done anymore and PC only titles won't be able to keep the market alive on they're own.
I say this as someone who has never owned a console, going from Commodore VIC20 to Atari ST then on to PC, where I have stayed (Although I will admit to a PS1 emulator and a half-dozen PS1 games that I play on my PC (Syphon Filter, Parasite Eve, etc).
It's the main reason I have kept 2 of my older PC's set up and kept at least 60-70% of all the PC games I have bought (luckily I have a nice loft!). This will allow me to continue to play PC games both old and new 'til the end of (my) time! (Enjoying "Gothic" again, as we speak!)
Sorry. But PC gaming has 3-4 years left. The shrinking retail space it gets (vs console games), the increase in budget title sales, the speed in which full price games get reduced in price, the signs are all there, I am afraid. |
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Mon Aug 01, 2005 1:58 pm |
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yeesh
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 113
Location: Unofficially representing Queens |
Actually, the 'sky is falling PC gaming is dead' crowd are for the most part PC gamers who'd like nothing better from the games market than a resurgence of PC gaming. I'm replaying Jagged Alliance 2 as we speak, and you're sure as bleep not going to find that kind of gameplay on a console system. But all the spin in the world can't change what we unscientifically see with our own eyes: less shelf space, less games, lamer games, and more cheapo Europeanization of our favorite genres (espeically for those of us who like tactical RPGs).
I'd love to understand where the author got that "Online kicks in another $2 billion worldwide (projected)" quote, because if he's saying that online sales somehow account for almost as much as offline (he says $2.3bn), then he's clearly lying, or there's a typo or something. Of the best-selling PC games, what besides HL2 was even available for digital purchasing? Certainly not $2bn worth of anything.
Perhaps he's talking about since the beginning of time, since he doesn't specifically mention annually in conjunction with the "projected" online figure, and perhaps he's including MMOG fees since the NeverWinter Nights days on AOL, and maybe fees from online gambling (which is known as "gaming"). Got me. But he puts it in the article in such a way to imply that online PC game sales are growing at a massive rate and providing huge revenue to PC game developers, and I think we're all aware that this is untrue. Right? Just because someone spends $500 on EQ or Lineage over the course of years does not in any way help the health of the PC gaming industry. There's no way for PC game devs to get a piece of that money, unless they want to compete in the disasterously overcrowded MMOG market. That kind of spending online is not the same as new game sales.
I still don't see where the $2 billion figure comes from. Shrapnel, Matrix, Spiderweb, WildTangent, these companies are not selling anywhere near the number of games you'd need to see to start talking about billions of dollars. Whatever online revenue he's talking about is not the kind of sales figures that are going to entice anyone into developing the sort of quality PC games we're jonesing for.
And finally, what is the difference between a game you buy for the XBox 360 and a game you buy for Windows (Vista or otherwise)? Lots of differences I'll bet, but the only one Microsoft sees is that when you buy a game for the XBox, MS gets a cut of the sale; and when you buy a game for the PC, MS gets nothing. So while I don't think Microsoft is going to any trouble to sabotage PC gaming, it seems a little naive to believe that they're going to go out of their way to try and make PC gaming more attractive than gaming on their own console.
But just as I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong should a stable Western-style Democracy spring up in Iraq tomorrow and the "terrorist threat", instead of being exacerbated by our actions, start to diminish rapidly (because I assure you, I have no desire to be blown up), so too would I be thrilled to see more shelf space dedicated to quality PC titles, and more developers rushing back into PC development (because I assure you, I have no desire to see PC gaming wither). Unfortunately, what I'd like to see happen has no impact on the reality of these situations, and neither does spin that runs contrary to what our own eyes are showing us. |
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Mon Aug 01, 2005 6:02 pm |
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yeesh
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 113
Location: Unofficially representing Queens |
Addenda
1. Why can't I see this newsbit on the news page? I only noticed it because of the link in the "Latest News Comments".
2. I should mention that I'm not playing the original JA2, but the total conversion Urban Chaos, available for free from http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/ . It includes new mercs, new guns, and an entirely new game map, complete with 3800 placed enemies. Any fan of JA2 needs to check it out. There's something else you can't get from consoles, dedicated people lovingly and painstakingly modding even games that weren't designed to be modded. |
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Mon Aug 01, 2005 6:23 pm |
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Dhruin
Stranger In A Strange Land
Joined: 20 May 2002
Posts: 1825
Location: Sydney, Australia |
This is no longer on the front page because it was originally posted last Friday and has dropped off with all the new stuff. 
That online figure of $2B is not at all unreasonable because it takes into account MMOG revenues. Blizzard has made around $500 million alone from sales and subs of WoW, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that the whole online market might be worth $2B. As an aside, other "online" sales from Spiderweb to GoGamer simply aren't counted so the figures aren't very accurate to start with.
Are sales to Blizzard good for the entire industry? Probably not, but that has nothing to do with whether there is another $2B in PC sales to be counted. Just out of interest, WoW has more subs than the entire Xbox Live system, so there's some life in the PC market yet even if it is in restricted to certain genres.
On Microsoft pushing Xbox games over the PC, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Sure MS makes $5? per Xbox game sold and they will want to promote that market...but they make $50-$150 per average PC sold with Windows, Office etc. According to their own research, games are the second biggest reason people use a PC at home. I could migrate the internet, email, office apps etc to Linux right now but gaming is a different matter. So, while they continue to lose huge amounts of money on the Xbox (yes, I know they made 1x quarterly profit - now add up every other quarter and the forthcoming loss on the 360), their PC business makes them one of the richest companies in the world.
Finally -- and not quite on topic -- as a fan of western-style RPGs, the last console generation brought almost nothing. I stand to be corrected but as far as I can recall, the only (non JRPG) RPGs I missed out on across every console platform, were Jade Empire and Fable. Fable is coming to PC soon and I will still bet JE will come. What do consoles have to offer me as a fan of this genre?
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Editor @ RPGDot |
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Mon Aug 01, 2005 11:03 pm |
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Roqua
High Emperor
Joined: 02 Sep 2003
Posts: 897
Location: rump |
Dhruin, you forget how awesome and totaly tubular consoles are dude. Consoles are ripping, thats what you are missing dude.
Also, other two internet services I use alot are direct2drive (download whole games) and yahoo's games on demand (rent full games for 30 dayts or 3 days). And I'm sure the figure is even higher when you count in everyone who buys subscribtions to gamespy dpownload service thing just to beta test games.
And other games that is a multi-billion market is the gambling games. They have a client and graphics (online casinos) and have independant apps like Ultimate Bet. My father plays about 3 tournaments a night that will have anywhere from 200 to 1000 players dropping huge sums of monies to $10 a tournament (with 1st place payouts of 1k+). A $10 tournament will have a house fee of 1 or 2 dollars. That is a huge cash stream seeing that tournaments start every half hour or even 15 minutes or so.
My mother also uses a pc to play along with some gameshows. As soon as they start charging and having internet contestants my mother will be on board hook, line, and sinker and spend all her money opn that crap instead of the megabucks and masscash and scratch tickets.
And when wireless is more common and you can play the pc version of halo 6 on your couch in the living room on your big hdtv (while your pc is 3 roo,s away), why would anyone buy consoles anymore?
There is way to much cash going into pc, and all forms of online gaming. The real numbers would probably make us all crap ourselves. Consoles aren't the future. Consoles will be history. Its just a rediculous system. Its like having differnt formats of movie dvd players that have no value-added at all for their customers by being seperate and selective. As soon as x-box is the biggest and piracy is handled better I think they will offer v-games that will play on either the x-box or pc. Then go in with nintendo and PS to make crossplatform games that pay each company a straight vig for each game sale. The market will be standardized, and since almost everyone will have a wireless set up anyway why even buy a console instead of just a controller or two?
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Vegitarian is the Indian word for lousey hunter. |
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Wed Aug 03, 2005 6:37 pm |
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niteshade
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 09 Jul 2005
Posts: 100
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If you absolutely refuse to give any RPG game a chance that wasn't designed in America or Europe, then most certainly console RPGs are not for you. You would potentially be missing out on some good games though. Alot of serious, turn based, old school, traditional RPGs are made for the console these days. By no stretch of the imagination are they all good, or even mostly good, but there are enough good ones to be worth notice.
Perhaps more important though is that their quality control tends to be miles above PC games. It's almost unheard of for their games to be buggy or released before they are ready. PC games could learn alot from consoles....if the console RPGS were run the way PC one were I suspect they wouldn't be doing quite so well either. |
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Thu Aug 04, 2005 10:55 am |
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Hindukönig
Guards Lieutenant
Joined: 27 Feb 2004
Posts: 170
Location: Halle (Saale) / Nuremberg [Germany] |
quote:
Originally posted by niteshade
PC games could learn alot from consoles.....
Ahahaha ... you're somehow ignoring the elementary differences between a console and a PC. |
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Thu Aug 04, 2005 11:03 am |
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niteshade
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 09 Jul 2005
Posts: 100
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Well I realize my statement was somewhat of an oversimplification, but none the less I consider it to be basicaly true. Perhaps you would care to explain why you disagree rather then simply saying I am wrong. It's true that PC games can be patched and modified after release, and console games cannot. But that does not justify PC games being pushed out incomplete. |
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Thu Aug 04, 2005 11:29 am |
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Roqua
High Emperor
Joined: 02 Sep 2003
Posts: 897
Location: rump |
What I think happens: PC games (or rpgs) are pushed out incomplete because the devs go to a publisher with a game presentation that will have no chance of being a Doom like blockbuster. The publisher has a limited budget they are willing to spend that imposes impossible milestones for the dev. This budget is low to make sure the min unit sales will push their investment of the game into the black. Milestones are missed, a buggy game gets pushed out the door, the devs lose credibility, and people will forgive the publisher (like Atari) when another heaviliy financed bug free game is pushed out the door.
Different devs have different amounts of clout with publishers. Bioware and Trokia will not be able to negotiate terms and agreements on an even platform with Atari, so Bioware is set up for success and Trokia is set up for failure right from the beginning. Bioware can go to a different pub, Troika has to take whats given to them, no matter how crappy the deal is or even if they know the milestones are only possible if Jesus joined their team and had the holy spirit make everything super duper. But their choice is either no game or a buggy game, they hope and pray and take the crappy deal. And then their most experienced devs have to devote all their time to being business men instead of devloping games.
Consoles have no chance of patching after release and I am really not sure about this but I read from a forum post somewhere that if a console dev stays in devlopment too long part of their take is cut down, or profit per sale of a unit. But I have no idea if that is true. And I don't care because consoles stink and are stupid, and console rpgs are even worse. I'll take a bug infested rpg by Troika any day of the week over a craptastic console rpg, or even a Bio title.
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Vegitarian is the Indian word for lousey hunter. |
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Thu Aug 04, 2005 12:48 pm |
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niteshade
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 09 Jul 2005
Posts: 100
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It's ironic that you attack consoles so harshly because alot of the things I've seen you complain are missing in PC RPGs are heavily present in many console ones. Have you ever actually played any? |
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Thu Aug 04, 2005 2:48 pm |
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Roqua
High Emperor
Joined: 02 Sep 2003
Posts: 897
Location: rump |
I played every rpg released on the x-box and gamecube (besides the card based magic the gatherer type ones). Tales of Symphonia, FF Cristal Cronicles, Bard's Tale, F: BoS, the BG: Dark Alliances (my wife likes the two player games like that) Jade Empire, Fable, X-Men legends, nightshade, metal dungeon, etc, etc. All crap. I did rent a ps2 and tried a couple pf ps2 rpgs like the Wizardry title and the .hacks. I can review all the games now besides wizardry. My review fopr the average of all games= 1 out of 10. Crappy. The aren't rpgs.
I like rpgs so of course the games will get bad revioews when I judge them as rpgs. Jade Empire and Fable are pretty good action games. The BG: DA's, FBoS and Bard's Tale are pretty good hack em up action games. Etc. I would rank them much higher on a 1 to 10 scale when you take the rpg out of the title, freeing the game of any required criteria.
I like rpgs. And I like my rpgs to be rpgs. Console rpgs are not rpgs, and I've been playing them since Dragoin Warrior and FF 1 and even wiz 1 on the nes, as well as the ultima that was made for the nes. I played all of them for the snes. They just aren't my thing, as I like rpgs and they aren't what I comsioder being anything close to an rpg.
There have been some great console only titles such as final fantasy tactics. That is a great tbs, but is not an rpg. Japanese flavored rpgs usually donot have character creation, or any character devlopmet choices besides equipment. They are linear, have preset characters, going through preset plots, with no impact on the environment and no chance to roleplay. All that equals not a roleplaying game.
And I am growing more and more disinclined to consoles and their audiences as I have checked an xbox360 news bits and find that their target audience is angry graphic whores who could care less about gameplay and do not value the things I do. But to be fair that could describe the pc market. But the console market doesn't have an indie scene trying to fill in the gap with good gam,es for people like me. Grimore, a new avernum engine, AoD, and other indie devlopments that I want and will get with a pc. All you can get with a console is a lot of glitter and gloss in my opnion.
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Vegitarian is the Indian word for lousey hunter. |
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Thu Aug 04, 2005 6:51 pm |
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TheMadGamer
High Emperor
Joined: 03 May 2002
Posts: 487
Location: Southern California |
Well I've seen many of these same arguments before. And I've seen them before before. And I've also seen them even before before before.
The PC market may shrink, or it may change in some way, but it isn't going to altogether vanish anytime soon in my opinion.
I don't really know what some of you are talking about when you say that you don't see many games on the shelf. Are you looking in stores other than stores like EB? Because EB has shifted most of its retail shelf space to videogames. But go to a Fry's Electronnics or Best Buy and there are still lots of games on the shelf.
One thing about PC gaming dying out that would really raise my eyebrow would be the addition of a Keyboard, Mouse, & Hard Drive as standard controller components with a videogame console. To date, Xbox is the only console in the U.S. that I know of that comes with a standard mass storage component and none of them come standard with a keyboard/mouse controllers.
Another thing to keep an eye on is the forecoming physics hardware boards that will soon be available. Back in the days of Doom the game-world rending was done via software. By the time the first Tomb-Raider game came out you could play that game in either software render mode or hardware render mode. Nowadays you need a 3d card to play games there is no longer a software render mode. We are going to see the exact same thing with the physics technology. When you play Half Life 2 the physics of the game are processed with the software technology I'm sure most of you know is called Havoc. Soon hardware will replace the software. And I think it will be interesting to see how the entire gaming market reacts to this new element of gaming. I think PC games will once again differentiate themselves from their console cousins and foster increased PC gaming sales in the near term for sure.
But then again, the sky could actually fall I guess. Of course, the sky was supposed to have fallen on the PC gaming market back when the Nintendo Entertainment System was released back in the mid-80s....
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The Poster Previously Known As NeptiOfPovar |
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Mon Aug 08, 2005 4:05 pm |
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