Hints on what PC game devs need to do to regain the market

[SineSwiper]

The number one reason why people don't want to play PC games over console games is because of the expense of upgrading. (Yes, there are different types of games on the PC than console, but more RPG/action games would be out on PC if they didn't have this problem.) Why do PC game developers insist on continuing to put out un-optimized and overly wasteful games?

Case in point: Shellie's been playing Lord of the Rings Online here lately. At the lowest setting, the graphics are moving at, maybe, 4 frames a second. That's pathetic. I played Doom 3 on this PC, mind you. I had to turn down some of the graphics, but it was definately playable with the graphics lowered.

I understand the need to tout these awesome graphics on top-of-the-line PCs, but if you can't cater to a majority of the people with lower speed computers, you're not going to get enough market share. There are easy ways to reduce graphics. It's all about polygon count, so reduce the polygons. Kill the textured maps. Whatever it takes to make sure that still runs on a low-end 1-2GHz processor with a stock AGP video card. There's still an incentive to buy a fresh PC to show the beautiful graphics, but you can still PLAY the damn game with the PC you have!

[Tessian]

PC Games have lost their edge...I used to be a HUGE PC Gamer, now almost all of my gaming is on the 360.

PC Games used to have: Much better graphics, controls, and online play /w updates.

Consoles caught up in every regard...and unfortunately PC's haven't and almost can't catch back up. If you buy a console it's guaranteed to run all games released for it and run them well. PC games it depends on your rig, and a costly upgrade in most cases if not, AND the difficulty involved for the average person to upgrade, let alone troubleshoot issues that arise.

I love PC games to death...but they don't have the hardware support of a console-- they have to rely on the gamer to supply an adequate system. I don't see how they can ever come back...Microsoft is trying with their "Games for Windows" or whatever, but it won't work

[SineSwiper]

I think PC gaming will come back with the advent of a media center PC, but PC devs need to WANT it to come back. Right now, they are merely developing on the assumption that their market is alright and nothing needs to be fixed. It's simply not true.

BTW, I think the #2 biggest problem with PCs is the ability to adopt to controllers easily, and making controllers more of a requirement for PC gaming. Keyboard and mouse just doesn't cut it for some games. On the flip side, the areas they dominate in, FPSs and MMOs, are BECAUSE of the keyboard/mouse combo. Controllers simply don't work well in those fields.

I think while it's becoming really grey in both markets, neither one is really trying to make those last steps to close the gap. For consoles, they need to start shipping with wireless keyboards and mice. They need to make it so that you can use your console as a media station. Surf the internet (easily, with an accepted browser), be able to play MP3s, watch movies, even use BitTorrent (that's a stretch).

The reality, though, is that game consoles really have no reason to exist. When it comes down to it, a console will never be able to replace a computer, but a computer could replace a console. However, consoles exist because PC developers have gotten lazy. It's a gap that a multi-million dollar industry is trying to fill.

A PC is a completely opened-end piece of hardware. Use that freedom to fill in the gaps that are left in the console market.

[Tessian]

A game console, now, is just a stripped down PC that everyone agrees to make games specifically for that model. So yes, it has less functionality, but until we start standardizing all PC hardware so that not only is it easier for the end user, but now PC game developers don't have to spend an extra 2 months making their game compatible with every piece of hardware on the market. PC's need to be as easy to develop for and maintain as a console.

I still think a keyboard/mouse beats out a console controller any day on any game. You just can't beat the freedom of movement of the mouse, not to mention the sheer number of keys on the keyboard.

[Don]

Consider the wide availabilty of computer and consoles, I think it's the opposite way, that PCs have no reason to exist for gaming. No matter what clever trick you do on a PC, you can do it better on a console because it is a computer dedicated to only gaming. Sure you can't (or at least shouldn't) use your console for writing email or browsing the web, but it's not like anyone's can't afford to get a PC for that.

There's also the fact that PC games are easier to pirate than console games. Console stuff have a bunch of proprietary stuff that will at least discourage the casual pirate. You actually need to mod your console and whatnot to pirate stuff, while for PC it's mostly just getting the image and burn it to a CD. This has been cited as one of the reason why PC games are losing to console, just because it's easier to make sure people have to buy your game instead of pirate it.

[Julius Seeker]

Action games on PC are generally inferior to console. The games that seem to thrive on PC are games like Theme Park, Sims, Sim City, and Railroad Tycoon. With the exception of World of Warcraft, console has everything else well in hand.

People have said First Person Shooters on PC are better, but I have seen no evidence of this. Quake and Doom are the two big series', and I personally find them painfully boring in comparison to even the most generic of console shooters. Not to mention, if you look at the sales history of console shooters, they are generally much better. Goldeneye and the two Halos alone may have sold more units than all PC shooters combined.

[Kupek]

The reality, though, is that game consoles really have no reason to exist. When it comes down to it, a console will never be able to replace a computer, but a computer could replace a console. However, consoles exist because PC developers have gotten lazy. It's a gap that a multi-million dollar industry is trying to fill.

I disagree. Your position, as I understand it, is that the console industry is an unnecessary side affect. I think it's necessary. Game development is inherently different when you have a dedicated, standardized, stationary target.

[Zeus]

The reality, though, is that game consoles really have no reason to exist. When it comes down to it, a console will never be able to replace a computer, but a computer could replace a console. However, consoles exist because PC developers have gotten lazy. It's a gap that a multi-million dollar industry is trying to fill.

I disagree. Your position, as I understand it, is that the console industry is an unnecessary side affect. I think it's necessary. Game development is inherently different when you have a dedicated, standardized, stationary target.

I'll have to agree with my fellow Semite on this one. There's an enormous difference between PC and console game. You have tons of people who are exclusively (or mostly) one or the other and lots of genres that don't translate too well. And it's a different style. PC gaming is much more intensive and requires more involvement and is generally much deeper whereas console gaming is much more pick-up-and-play and arcadey.

Generally speaking.

[SineSwiper]

I disagree. Your position, as I understand it, is that the console industry is an unnecessary side affect. I think it's necessary. Game development is inherently different when you have a dedicated, standardized, stationary target.

It's not like you're needing to develop for each and every card. That's what DirectX is for. You just call up your objects for audio/video, do what you need to do, and let the middleware handle the low-level stuff. Granted, you still need to optimize for low-end hardware like I was first talking about, but the amount of work required for that is fairly trivial. (How hard is it to lower the level of detail in the graphics?)

Sure, it's slightly harder, but it's not twice as hard. Hell, there's different levels of difficulty in development between different consoles, anyway. (I remember that many developers bitched about PS2/3's tools versus XBox.)

I'll have to agree with my fellow Semite on this one. There's an enormous difference between PC and console game. You have tons of people who are exclusively (or mostly) one or the other and lots of genres that don't translate too well. And it's a different style. PC gaming is much more intensive and requires more involvement and is generally much deeper whereas console gaming is much more pick-up-and-play and arcadey.

And how the hell does that have anything to do with the hardware? People don't develop many RPGs on PCs, because there aren't many RPGs on PC. It's an idiotic chicken/egg problem that's easily solved by just doing it. The same goes for action games and the like.

Again, if the PC gaming market would require more of the use of a controller, it could bridge the gap a lot better.

[Kupek]

It's not like you're needing to develop for each and every card. That's what DirectX is for. You just call up your objects for audio/video, do what you need to do, and let the middleware handle the low-level stuff. Granted, you still need to optimize for low-end hardware like I was first talking about, but the amount of work required for that is fairly trivial. (How hard is it to lower the level of detail in the graphics?)

This reasoning has nothing to do with the point I made. I was talking about hardware. You're talking about an API - a programming abstraction of the hardware. Developing for DirectX does not guarantee you anything about performance with the multitude of possible configurations. For consoles, there is only one configuration, and you can use that knowledge to optimize your code accordingly. And contrary to what you may think, optimization is difficult. I should know, I do it for a living.

When the existence of an entire industry seems wrong to you, stop to think which is more likely: your reasoning is faulty, or the emergence of a multi-billion dollar industry is a fluke.

[Zeus]

I'll have to agree with my fellow Semite on this one. There's an enormous difference between PC and console game. You have tons of people who are exclusively (or mostly) one or the other and lots of genres that don't translate too well. And it's a different style. PC gaming is much more intensive and requires more involvement and is generally much deeper whereas console gaming is much more pick-up-and-play and arcadey.

And how the hell does that have anything to do with the hardware? People don't develop many RPGs on PCs, because there aren't many RPGs on PC. It's an idiotic chicken/egg problem that's easily solved by just doing it. The same goes for action games and the like.

Again, if the PC gaming market would require more of the use of a controller, it could bridge the gap a lot better.

What I was saying is on top of the hardware differences you have very large differences in the types of games for each system as well due to the large differences in the customer base. That has as much more to do with the style of games than the hardware, especially nowadays where the systems are powerful enough to do anything and only the Wii is missing a decent amount of internal storage space (and the core 360, but I don't really count that).

Adding a controller to a PC is basically turning it into an unoptimized console that you play on a monitor instead of your TV (unless you're using your TV to display your computer....). The interface of keyboard-mouse is one of the major things that separates PC from console gaming. Much more flexibility allowing for much more complex gaming. Take that away and all you have is a bunch of hardware that doesn't work perfectly together going up against a console where the hardware was specifically designed (in most cases) to work very well together. That wouldn't be a good thing for PC gaming.

Another thing that was already mentioned is that PCs have lost one of their competitive advantages in horsepower. That gap is closing with every console generation. As well, we're getting to the point in graphics where it's not much of a difference on its own anymore, especially since most people don't have HD TVs or high-end computers. That's another blow against PC gaming 'cause for a long time, there was a huge gap there that was clearly visible.

Even if it's clearly visible, it doesn't matter much anymore. Sure Gears looks better than RE4, but does it really matter? Does RE4 look bad? You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who says RE4 is a bad looking game and it's what, 3 years old now?

[SineSwiper]

This reasoning has nothing to do with the point I made. I was talking about hardware. You're talking about an API - a programming abstraction of the hardware. Developing for DirectX does not guarantee you anything about performance with the multitude of possible configurations. For consoles, there is only one configuration, and you can use that knowledge to optimize your code accordingly. And contrary to what you may think, optimization is difficult. I should know, I do it for a living.

Maybe I phrased that wrong, I know optimization is difficult, but it must be done. Blizzard spends months optimizing games before they come out and THAT is partly why they get such high sales: because people with low-end PCs can actually play it.

However, while optimization is fairly hard, adding proper scales for graphics is fairly easy. The video is going to be the bulk of the time-cycles, so if you can lower the detail enough to get it running on even a stock video card, the sales will jump that much higher.

I know that DirectX doesn't have anything to do with performance, but so what? DirectX interacts with the video cards on the low-level, so there's no need to worry about video card performance. (As long as the high-level code isn't wasting cycles...) Unlike consoles, PC games are based on a wide scale of performance, so as long as you have a slider to play with, it should both look awesome on the high-end PCs, and still be able to be playable on the low-end PCs. It's that level of flexibility that the PC gaming industry needs to understand, and quick.

When the existence of an entire industry seems wrong to you, stop to think which is more likely: your reasoning is faulty, or the emergence of a multi-billion dollar industry is a fluke.

I'm not saying it's a "fluke". It's the response of lazy developers. It's competition that is winning because the other side is complacent. This type of competition spawns all the time. AMD wouldn't have had its success if Intel didn't try to abuse its monopoly. Linux wouldn't for the same reasons with Microsoft.

Yes, they are multi-billon dollar industries, but my reasoning is not faulty. AMD doesn't have a need to exist if Intel made better hardware (and now that Intel isn't being lazy any more, they are getting the upper hand). Linux doesn't have a need to exist if Microsoft software wasn't so fucking buggy, expensive, and catered to mindless idiots. Consoles don't have a need to exist if the PC gaming industry actually TRIED to catch up to them.

It's the type of competition that instead of motivated the other side to do better, fragmented the two sides to certain niches. It's the wrong way to go, because you can only hold a niche position for so long before the other side learns to work into it.

[SineSwiper]

(I thought I'd revive this thread here since this is exactly the thing I'm talking about.)

Another case in point, my failed experience with the PC version of BioShock. Here's my PC specs for my HDTV PC:

Dual Pentium 4 3GHz
1.5GB of RAM
Windows XP SP2
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 with 256MB of VRAM
Latest NVIDIA drivers (beta driver for BioShock)
DirectX 9c

Granted, it's not top-of-the-line, but it's no slouch either. However, BioShock crashes on this machine. This is probably due to the video card, because the minimum specs say:

Video Card: Pixel Shader 3.0 compliant video card with 128 Meg Ram and floating point frame buffer blending. (Nvidia 6600 or better / ATI 1300 or better)

Despite having more VRAM in the card, it's still below the requirements, according to the model. Now, if this video card review is any indication, the 5700 came out in Dec 2003 (as top-of-the-line of its day, mind you). So, my card is just under 4-years-old. In terms of what Joe Average has in his PC and what Dell or Compaq or HP or Gateway offer for their computers, this is actually better than what they have.

But, it's AGP, so I'm limited in my upgrade options. I could get a $167 A7600 GT card to try to keep ahead of the game, or a $52 6800 card just to fit the minimum requirements. But, the latter would really only do me for this game only (as a newer game will up the requirements). Suddenly, this game goes from being $50 to $100-300. For that kind of money, I could have just bought an Xbox 360 ($300-400) and the game ($50).

<big><b>PC Developers:</b> LOWER YOUR STANDARDS!!!</big>

These upgrade wars are killing us! We can't just drop $200 on a top-of-the-line video card every time you want us to play your game. You are the reason why only the hardcore gamers play on the PC anymore!

[Tessian]

Dude, you have a 4 year old card... How old is your Xbox 360? That's right... it's 1.5 years old.

To keep a gaming PC up to date you'll need to spend ~$200/year on parts. So yes, PC's cost more to upkeep than consoles... but I also don't remember my PC having a defective cooling system that can cause it to melt its soldering...

The appeal of PC gaming has always been that you can play more games and do more with a PC than a console. Consoles have been catching up over the years, but they still can't compete with a fully functional PC.

You're bitching because your PC's video card is by far the worst thing in your rig. I picked up a GeForce FX 5700 for $45 half a year ago to replace the one in my BeyondTV PC... it would suck ass for anything graphically these days. A year ago I spent $140 on a 7600 GS.

"Upgrade wars" my ass...

[Eric]

Just under 4 years old is shit dude.

Upgrade that card. Yes, 4 years ago it was nice, now the 5000 Nvidia series is shit. The rest of your system is perfectly fine but honestly your card is holding you back.

[SineSwiper]

Dude, you have a 4 year old card... How old is your Xbox 360? That's right... it's 1.5 years old.

And my PS2 at EOL is around 6-7 years old. Yet, I can still play the last games that come out for it. Even in the middle of its cycle, when the PC catches up to the quality of the console, it's 3-4 years old.

To keep a gaming PC up to date you'll need to spend ~$200/year on parts. So yes, PC's cost more to upkeep than consoles... but I also don't remember my PC having a defective cooling system that can cause it to melt its soldering...

But for as little as I play games on my PC, it's not lending any support to the PC gaming industry. So, I would have to pay $200/year in parts to only play maybe 1-2 games a year (and that's really being generous).

For that money, again, I could just buy an XBox 360 and have a (semi-)working system for 6-7 years with lots of games. Even with the overheating issues, I can at least take it back to MS and get a new one for free. Or I can constantly upgrade my PC to play the couple of games that I do buy for PC.

The appeal of PC gaming has always been that you can play more games and do more with a PC than a console. Consoles have been catching up over the years, but they still can't compete with a fully functional PC.

More games? Really? Name off 5 PC games that you've purchased this year.

[Tessian]

And my PS2 at EOL is around 6-7 years old. Yet, I can still play the last games that come out for it. Even in the middle of its cycle, when the PC catches up to the quality of the console, it's 3-4 years old.

You're comparing a PS2 to a PC? These days a PS2 lags FAR behind in all aspects that a PC can do. No internet, much poorer graphics, much less capable. Of course, if ALL you want is a system to play games on of course you'd go with a console instead.

But for as little as I play games on my PC, it's not lending any support to the PC gaming industry. So, I would have to pay $200/year in parts to only play maybe 1-2 games a year (and that's really being generous).

If you're only playing 1-2 games a YEAR on a PC then you ARE wasting your money... hell even if you bought an Xbox 360 that'd be considered wasting your money. My mom plays more games than 1-2 a year and she's large and by far no where near being called a gamer.

More games? Really? Name off 5 PC games that you've purchased this year.

That's not the fairest question since I bought an Xbox in January But... there was Overlord, Galactic Civilizations II (and expansion), C&C3, Supreme Commander that I can think off of the top of my head... and without the Xbox Bioshock would have been for PC, and I can't wait for World in Conflict to come out. Consoles have yet to do RTS's (and most TBS) well at all yet. C&C3 was on Xbox but it was a pile of shit. The 360 and PC's are pretty much on equal ground anymore... it's now a matter of what you want to get out of each piece of hardware. I was a hardcore PC gamer up until January when my gf convinced me to buy it and now I'm more 50/50 PC/Xbox. I won't be keeping my PC as up to date anymore (which was yearly upgrades) but I sure as hell will know better than to wait 4 years to upgrade.


If you only play 2 games a year then you're wasting your money almost no matter where you go. PC Gaming is obviously not for those who want to play a game or two a year, at least not when those games are top of the line technology wise.

[SineSwiper]

If you're only playing 1-2 games a YEAR on a PC then you ARE wasting your money... hell even if you bought an Xbox 360 that'd be considered wasting your money. My mom plays more games than 1-2 a year and she's large and by far no where near being called a gamer.

Come on, give me more credit than that. I meant 1-2 PC games a year. I play about 20 games a year on various systems. The problem is that almost none of the games I want to play are on the PC. The games I've played this year are: Digital Devil Saga, Xenosaga, hell, just look at my sig; it's mostly console games. The games I'm looking forward to playing: Metroid, Zelda, Mass Effect, The Force Unleashed, many RPGs, etc. Same deal there.

I was thinking a while back that there's no point to an Xbox when you have a computer, but now, I'm really thinking the opposite, since 1) the upgrades force you to spend a lot more and 2) the PC doesn't have shit for certain types of games (RPGs, arcade action games, pretty much anything that isn't a RTS or FPS).

I mean, I might still get a video card, but it's only going to be for a few games like Starcraft 2 or errr, shit, what the hell is coming out for PC?

[Tessian]

If you're only playing 1-2 PC games per year then yeah, you're wasting money. Not to say now that you dropping $450 on an Xbox Elite is saving money... but then again you seem to love bitching when your PC doesn't work... so you're better off with a console