cnet speculates that
the xbox 360 and ps3 will signal the death knell of pc gaming.
while the writer makes good points, i don't think that pc gaming will ever completely die. next-gen consoles will certainly put a dent in the pc gaming business, but not for a lengthy period of time. while the consoles will offer better performance/$ in the near-term, with technology cycles exhibiting increasing compression going forward, it will only be a matter of time before pcs match and exceed the performance/$ of next-gen consoles.
while the market of extreme gamers who have to play on the edge is not large, it will always be around, guaranteeing that there will be pc gaming going forward.
posted by janimal @ 10:15 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
PC gaming has been on a steady decline for a while now (down to 1.1 bil from 1.9 bil), but it is nowhere close to drying up and isn't likely to.
Lots of things to consider:
1) Cost on PCs is dropping, and they are becoming more readily available. As more people keep PCs around for their iTunes and iPods and taxes and the net, they will be encouraged to use them for other things.
2) PCs excel at diffent types of games. The chips in the next gen consoles are tweaked to deliver high polygon counts (to handle large quantities of floating point calculations), but they won't excel at things such as AI. So games like RTSs and sims and MMORPGs are going to stay native to the PC. Attempts to port these games are always lukewarm.
Also, don't forget casual non-gamer games. These are things like Texas Hold-em and online casino games. The market for these things much bigger than most people realize, and they are made so that even a slow PC can run them easily.
3) I think people should keep an eye out on direct internet sales in the PC game market. Valve started forging ahead with Half-Life 2 by creating Steam, the service where you can buy it directly via download. Valve leveraged its back catalogue and offered close-to-free versions of older games if you bought it straight from them. They also went head to head with Vivendi, a monster publisher, over it and held their ground. I'm sure many other PC developers noted this, and if it takes off it could give them a lot of flexibility.
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