I vote for more accessible broadband and wifi. It is the linchpin of PC gaming. Gone are the good ole days of “but I have to always be online! DRM sucks!”
Honorable mention goes to the i7. It paved the way for cheaper and easier video card upgrades vs. time to replace this whole tower.
It’ll be interesting to see if this holds. The Japan and US offices have not always gotten along nor seen eye to eye in the past. In the past when Nintendo went for more violent content, they changed course the following year. But back to the subject at hand I like some of the ideas presented and to build on what @Ejosotoc posted combined with the console churn, and laptop accessability I present the following theory:
While console churn increased the cost of owning a console (over 19 years osu accessory costs), the PC market did the opposite. As we hit Moore’s Laws outer edge clock speed increases disappeared the jump in hardware (mobo, memory, cou) has slowed tremendously. This means upgrading your PC became more of a video card upgrade vs. a whole computer upgrade. This has allowed the consumer to feel more confident about their PC purchases not being outdated in a year like in the days of yesteryear. Remember the joke where you buy a computer and the next day it’s worthless and outdated? I haven’t heard that one in a loooong time.
Time will tell. My offer to eat my hat, pants, and underwear if the Switch is anywhere close to the Wii in sales, still stands.
Anyway, off topic for this topic – Switch ain’t x86. If it apes Android (or runs Android internally) that’s be a good strategy for sure as it aligns with mobile better.
Will you be doing it with a blender? Planning ahead helps.
Early access, steam sales, survival games and the combo of those
I don’t expect Wii numbers but I do expect about double the Wii U is its floor. You have to remember this is a portable and a home console all in one. The range of consumers that it’s targeting is much broader and it has a game that’s as close to “perfect” as you can get leading the launch lineup. They also have a solid lineup through the end of 2017 including a Mario game that evokes Super Mario 64 which people have been clamoring for a long time now.
I think it actually helps them that so many people skipped Wii U also. People are ready to come back to Nintendo, while kids never left, and the phone games have brought people around again too.
Anyway, yeah, off-topic so we can stop there. I still say the number one reason the PC is more viable today is that the PS4 and Xbox One are just PCs in disguise. That’s really the biggest driver. It’s “easy” to port games all over now.
If Steam made PC gaming enjoyable, Origin, Uplay, and Microsoft Store are doing the opposite. I’m gaming more and more on consoles to avoid that garbage.
I don’t mind Origin and Uplay, though I’m not thrilled about having three “stores” on my machine to launch games, they’ve worked fine.
Heh. I have Arc, Epic Games Launcher, Glyph, GOG Galaxy as well as Uplay and Origin.
I only have Steam, and it took me until 2011 until I did even that, kicking and screaming all the way. Still hate it, but use it all the time. GOG for everything else, but no Galaxy yet.
As to the OP: It’s always been very strong for me. I never lost faith.
I like the turn this thread took. It started off being about the health of PC gaming and the reasons, and then became about the death of mobile consoles. I had no idea. The only one I’ve ever owned is a PS Vita and I hardly ever use it. It’s got a LOT of dust collecting on it. But still, I had no clue that their sales were dropping like a rock until this thread.
The good news is you don’t need those companies, with 95%+ of PC content being independent or on Steam.
I’m perfectly fine avoiding EA/Ubi, and I don’t really have a big issue with MSFT Store (but only used it for one game)
The Vita in the US is almost exclusively a JRPG machine these days, and even Falcom is dropping Vita support now in favor of PS4/PC.
Home gaming has always waxed and waned between dedicated consoles and general-purpose computers as long as I’ve been alive. It began with the Atari and that whole crowd, but then shifted to computers after the crash. Then back to consoles with Nintendo, only to shift back to PCs with DOOM and later, inexpensive 3D graphics. But then it went back to the consoles with Playstations 1-3. And now we’re back.
Why? Novelty. Always novelty.
Once a popular idea catches on, a thousand copycats (or more) get made. As the market gets bigger, larger titles pursue it; larger titles can take fewer risks, so the experience gets blander and blander, pushing out any further novel ideas, until the whole experience gets completely dull. So those who want to make something interesting switch to the less-popular format, and as those titles get more and more compelling, people switch.
Think about it; with the Atari, the novelty was simply in having full-color games in your home, but its limits – and the desire to copy many coin-op games, themselves limited to a handful of designs – made things get boring. So then RPGs like Ultima IV and Starflight came about. But then Nintendo and Sega came around with more dedicated graphics hardware – no PC could pull off Sonic. And then DOOM came about, and did something 3D with a 2D box that no console can do, plus the whole Shareware revolution that led to it and followed it. Seventeen gajillion FPSes later, consoles came back with JRPG’s and 3D platformers. After nine hundred zillion of those…
…and on until today. Do I really need to play Far Call of Battlefield 7: Infinite Company after playing the previous 6 and all of their clones? Meanwhile, some idiot just released this really weird thing on Steam that’s nothing like any of that crap I played before.
So yes, Steam and Kickstarter are the mechanism, just as shareware and cheap floppies were before, but it’s novelty that demands your presence in front of the screen, neglecting your health, family and career so that you can dive into some designer’s weird world and interact with it.
Oh, and … Hi, Jeff! Long time, no ramble.
That’s a good point, and I’d take it a step further to say that it’s the Indies that made Steam successful. The big games were always going to be on every store, but Steam appealed to Indies, and Indies appeal to buyers, and Indies are where Novelty rears its head.
Novelty, again, is the reason. Steam is the beneficiary of having been in the right place at the right time for the sea change. But Steam’s success is an effect, not a cause. If Steam didn’t already exist, someone else would’ve had to invent it.
I just don’t understand this. I have the icon to the game I wish to play on the desktop, I double click it and then game runs, if the service it is on is not loaded it loads first then the game runs. It really isn’t harder than that.
I tend to have steam up 100% of the time and the others loads as I play their games, it certainly isn’t difficult or an issue any more. I have an Xbox 1 which I hardly play, FH3 was going to be the game but it came on PC. I am sure FM7 will do the same. The cost of digital on the Xbox is steep compared to PC and I find the xbox fiddly and pain in the arse. Steam link allows PC gaming on the couch. I also now play using a gaming laptop which can hdmi straight to my TV and works perfectly. Add wireless Xbox controllers and it is both a console and a PC to play on.
Yeah, Origin and uPlay are terrible, but I fail to see how they are more terrible than playing the game on console.
Shots fired. :)
For me personally I would say a combination of Steam and relatively long stability in PC gaming requirements. That has changed and for now I am out of the new games but that should change shortly.
I think one of the things that sent people to consoles was the difficulty in getting a PC game to run properly and the frustration of needing a new PC every 3-5 years.
I can actually say I’ve looked at a game and thought, darn I wish there was a Steam version. I can say with 100% certainty I have never looked at any game and thought boy if only there was a Uplay, Origin, or whatever the hell Microsoft calls a store these days. I might buy a game with those things attached, but I don’t want them, and I never, never browse their store fronts.