What happened to PC Gaming?

How do you buy your games?

  • Buy from local store. (box n disc version)

    Votes: 9 39.1%
  • Buy from places such as Steam (downloaded version)

    Votes: 14 60.9%

  • Total voters
    23

CrazyMike

New Member
Ok, here is one for you. As i was sitting at work (working hard as always) i began to wonder, what happened to PC gaming?

Was it simply that game developers did not have a market for PC Gaming? If so, why is that? As I take a look on YouTube, various PC websites, even local stores such as Best Buy and Future Shop, i see that "gaming" computers are a big industry. They are everywhere you look. You always see these monster of computers advertising how fast, how clear of picture, how cool they look, and for what? To browse the internet to check your Facebook status? You don't have to be a PC Gamer to notice that PC games are slowly dieing. Especially PC exclusive games, such as Crysis once use to be. If there isn't a market for PC Gaming, why are there so many PC gaming computers out there?

I began to think of any possible reasons why developers would take a look at "there is no money in PC Gaming" idea. The only conclusion that i could come up with is that it's PC gamers fault. Of coarse there isn't any money in PC gaming when the developers can sell a game on the consoles for $60 when places like Steam offers the same game for $40-$50. Which one would you choose if you were in their shoes? Why are PC gamers going for Steam? Because it's easier and cheaper? But why do these same PC gamers complain on how crappy the game is, and how there aren't anymore PC exclusives? Perfect example would be Crysis 2 right. When it first came out, PC gamers complained about how it was only DX9 and not DX11. PC gamers complained on how Crytek was going to console and how badly they were wrecking the Crysis game. Why do you think they went to console? To make money right? That is the reason why these developers make games, to make money. Just the same reason why you go to work everyday (or some of you don't, but pretty sure you get my point).

I just take a look and see that PC gamers are the reason why PC games are becoming obsolete. Steam is cashing in on the laziness and cheapness of PC gamers, and developers are shying away from them.

Now i am a PC gamer, I actually just got into it about 6-7 years ago. I love playing games on the PC, seeing how clear, fast, glitch free games run. I love jumping on Crysis Warhead and being trapped in my game as you don't hear people on the other end compaining on who has host, lag, or cheaters (from what i have seen, if you want to play modded, you go into a modded room). So i am not harping on PC gamers because i love console. I harp on them because it's the only reason i can think of why PC gaming is dieing.


It's your turn. Let's hear why you think PC gaming is switching to console and becoming "cheaply" developed.
 

Turbo10

Active Member
Honestly i can't be arsed to goto Game or PC World etc to look for games that I want that probably won't even be there. I would rather order off the internet from Amazon or ebay, or wait for a steam sale and get it from there and just wait for a bit rather than a wasted journey to my nearest Game
 

Gooberman

Active Member
Stores like Walmart have an entire gaming section Rows for xbox, PS3, and Wii games and accessories and you go to look for PC games and they have a small little shelf at the other end of the electronics section :(
 

claptonman

New Member
No, its not the gamers fault, its the developers fault. There has been threads about this before. The developers want to make a ton of money. That's it. Black ops on the PC is still terrible, they haven't fixed anything, and they're not even addressing the issues, they just keep releasing maps.
 

Turbo10

Active Member
No, its not the gamers fault, its the developers fault. There has been threads about this before. The developers want to make a ton of money. That's it. Black ops on the PC is still terrible, they haven't fixed anything, and they're not even addressing the issues, they just keep releasing maps.

Black ops IS terrible :p
 

CrazyMike

New Member
No, its not the gamers fault, its the developers fault. There has been threads about this before. The developers want to make a ton of money. That's it. Black ops on the PC is still terrible, they haven't fixed anything, and they're not even addressing the issues, they just keep releasing maps.

I'm not sure about the whole "Developers want to make a ton of money" thing. Yes of coarse they want to make money, but the way i see it, they are forking over a ton of money in research and developement to put out a game. I personally love the next edge game. One that tops any other game. In order for a developer to do this, they have to come up with ideas that no other has come up with, or tweak the ideas that already exsist. This costs a lot of money at that. Once they have that idea, they have to put it into play. Have lots of hardware just to work on the game so that it comes out at a decent time (to please the eager gamer). I can just think of how much it would cost to upgrade their equipment just to keep up with advancing time. The cost of employing sometimes hundreds of empoyees just developing one game, usually takes about a year or two to develope. Not to mention the distribution and actual production of the game.

I see where your coming from, but i also see a big cost factor in it as well. Yes the developers are in it to make money, are they actually profiting lots? Does anyone know approx how much it takes to develope a game such as lets say MW3 and compare it to how much it brings in? I know it'll bring in multi millions, but it has to take a few million to make a game, no?
 

CrazyMike

New Member
Stores like Walmart have an entire gaming section Rows for xbox, PS3, and Wii games and accessories and you go to look for PC games and they have a small little shelf at the other end of the electronics section :(

See that's the problem though. You go into Walmart and you see tons of console games and little PC, why? Because the market is there for the console not the PC. And why is this? Because people like paying least as possible. If this is true, then why everywhere i see is complaints about games? "always the same game, nothing new" "this game looks like crap" and the big one like you said "there are no selection". When people want to pay the least as possible, what type of product to do you get? pieces of junk. You see this in automobiles, laptops, tablets, in eveything. When people don't want to pay decent price for what you get, you get crap.

Am i seeing this wrong?
 

claptonman

New Member
Yes, but with black ops, its a special case. When it came out, people with i7s and GTX 570 had massive stuttering, even with fresh installs and everything. It works better on XP than it does on win7 because of XP having Dx9. The xbox is limiting how good a game runs. Aastii says it the best:

And will look worse as it plays them

PC gaming is clearly not dead. It is so not dead that it not only beats consoles in time spent playing games by the users, but in money made, unit sales, everything. What you are doing is saying "more people bought CoD on 360 than did on PC". Well that is true, for two reasons.

Firstly, most of the CoD fanboys reside on consoles. After CoD4, relatively few people on PC bought CoD

Secondly, most PC gamers aren't FPS players, and that is where the explaination for the extra time played and the extra sales comes from, your PC exclusives.

There have been more units sold of the Sims games and expansions than the top 5 games of the Xbox 360 and the PS3 combined. Same goes with units of WoW and its expansions.

Even with expansions taken out, each game, so JUST the sims and JUST vanilla WoW, total sales are more than the top 6 selling Xbox games combined.

the only Xbox game that has sold more units than Starcraft is BLOPs.

Every day, more people play just WoW and LoL, just two games, than go online on the Xbox.

The only time a console beats the PC is the Wii, because there are so many casual gamers and families, and because Nintendo bundle so many games. However, these are sales which overshadow the PC, I can not prove this point, but how long do you really think a Wii gamer will spend playing games compared to a PC gamer?

My mum has a Wii, she goes on it maybe an hour a week total. That is to go on Wii fit, do the daily stuff, then go off. I can imagine that is a similar routine for the majority of other people on the Wii, or they will go on maybe once or twice a week for an hour.

Compare that to a PC gamer. I am what you would probably consider a hardcore PC gamer, I spend probably 30+ hours a week gaming, 90% of that time online. Take me out of the equation and just consider other gamers, I can tell you for a fact that over half of the people I play with come on and play daily. These aren't friends or clan members, these are just random people that I notice on every day, and they are playing for hours a day. I do not play WoW, I rarely play LoL, so I am not seeing the two most played games, but I am seeing the third most played PC game, CoD4, and people are on it every day.

It is another myth that PC gaming is less popular than console gaming, and that PC gaming is dieing.

How many console exclusives are there really to show that "devs don't make PC games"? Halo 3, reach and ODST, GoW 2, God of War, MGS. These make up so little play time by people. The bigger titles, CoD, MoH,GTA, every one of them is on PC.

Also, consider sales of console exclusives, they are low. There are some exceptions to this rule, for instance Halo and Gran Turismo, but compare this to PC exclusives, or games released on both platforms, and the console exclusive account for so few sales.

As for piracy, my window cleaner told me how to play pirate games on my 360. That is how difficult it is to play pirated games on the 360. Once again, another myth.

DX10 was a bit of a joke, however DX10.1 wasn't. What it did was make DX much more efficient, as well as more certain features, to be included, certain features that the 360 can not use. For instance, MSAA. This allows for much prettier games, without a huge drop in performance.

What you have just said, though, is true, and there is a reason. Compare PC games that feature both, and you can see a difference, however, console games, no, and it is down to economics. It takes far too long and costs far too much to make the same game twice, hence porting, and when you port a game, you are restricted by the now hugely outdated consoles you are originally coding for.

So, what we are seeing is quad and hex core CPUs not being touched, because the 360 only features a tri-core CPU. We aren't seeing tesselation being used fully, because the 360 doesn't support it because it doesn't have DX11 support. We aren't seeing much more detailed textures, because the 360 simply isn't powerful enough.

So, saying a game is DX10, is really just a marketing scheme, because you are right, the difference, isn't. Compare though DX10 to DX11, you are seeing noticable difference. Compare, then, DX11 to the ancient DX9 of the 360, and they are two different beasts.

Thanks to console gaming, and thanks to the majority of companies trying to make more money by being able to release games on both consoles and PC, we are seeing hardware from 2011 being held back by hardware and software from 2004. It isn't that the 360 is magic and able to keep up and look amazing, it is that the potential that the PC has isn't being shown because of the pathetic performance the consoles have in comparison.

bigfella covered the DX10/11 games point



For £450 I built a system for a client last week that is able to play every single game currently out on high settings. You don't NEED to spend massive amounts.
 

wolfeking

banned
Stores like Walmart have an entire gaming section Rows for xbox, PS3, and Wii games and accessories and you go to look for PC games and they have a small little shelf at the other end of the electronics section :(
you must be lucky. your walmart has a shelf of PC games. Our local store has the end of the Xbox/PS3/PSP isle set aside for PC games, and most of them are them useless search games, and sometimes a cheap title of instore like COD3 or Call of Juarez.

as for the poll, couldnt answer. There should be a both option. I get some games online when it beats the instore price by a mile. Otherwise, Il visit a BEstbuy or something to get a game.
 

NyxCharon

Active Member
Just because games aren't as available in stores doesn't mean PC gaming is dying. It's no different then the CD market. Everything is slowly going digital. Itunes, amazon, etc. Steam and other companies are the same for PC. I mean, you can't look at the WoW userbase or Eve, or any other massive game like that and say PC is dead. Usually, digital sales are cheaper, and for good reason. It saves resources and time that could used elsewhere.
The only reason xbox/ps3/wii haven't gone this route is the lack of space. A lot of people don't have the space to download all there games to HDD. And upgrading to more space isn't as cheap compared to a computer. So, it hasn't caught on much in this userbase.

So, I wouldn't say it's dead at all.
 
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CrazyMike

New Member
Maybe my question wasn't so clear, more vague than anything. The question i was curious about was "What happened to PC gaming?". In the sense of i am not saying it is dieing, more prone to console use. PC exclusives are becoming more rare, and game developers are more prone to (want to use this word lightly) "downgrade" to equal what is console.

LOL, let's see if that gets more to what i was asking. I didn't mean to say that PC gaming was dieing, more taking a turn down a different road.

It is this sentance that bit me in the arse ---- "You don't have to be a PC Gamer to notice that PC games are slowly dieing" - wrong choice of words i appaulogize.
 

cracker2

Member
I never bought a game through downloading.But I think I see why someone would.The store bought ones probably have a tough DRM & give false read bad sectors when someone trys to copy the game.But when you download it you wouldn't have to worry about it or it wouldn't be as hard cause its already in the HD.Im not talking about pirating or anything like that.
Like say you want a copy of your game incase the original gets scratched and quits working.Quite a few times,I had to go and buy another of the same game cause it got to many scratches and wouldn't read.

Edit:I think they are not making pc onley games is because maybe to many would complain about it not being for their game console.And they could be moving more pc games out and into consoles because they think it would heavily slow down or stop video game piracy.Which I don't see how it really would
 
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Just another wrinkle to this

With a smartphone, you can download and play many good games for free (although there some quality issues here). I can only expect this particular market to keep growing.
 

Motorcharge

Well-Known Member
Other than Best Buy, I don't recall ever seeing a large amount of PC games in any store. Even Best Buy's selection is pretty much the same as it always was.

I think a lot of the problem with judging it based on stores like gamestop and such is that they also sell used games as well as carry games for 3 different consoles as well as however many handhelds are out so it looks like a hell of a lot more.

Personally I prefer to buy from Steam since they're generally much cheaper. Though I do HATE Steam.
 

StrangleHold

Moderator
Staff member
Because 95% of computers are OEM, not custom built. 90% of those use onboard video and cant play games worth a crap. So the amount of OEM+custom built ones that can play games vs. how many gaming consoles. They go where the money is.
 

Stretch1414

New Member
Because 95% of computers are OEM, not custom built. 90% of those use onboard video and cant play games worth a crap. So the amount of OEM+custom built ones that can play games vs. how many gaming consoles. They go where the money is.

That's a very true statement Stranglehold. But that's for two reasons. One, people don't know that it is much cheaper to build one. Two, people are too lazy to build one themselves or have a friend do it. Actually I just thought of third one, people want things now, they don't want to have to wait for a part to come in or to build it.
 

Thanatos

Active Member
I would download all the games, but my internet is capped off at 5 gigs, most games are bigger than that, right?
 
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