No. But I think you’re in denial if you think the current core gaming experience is going to survive on the desktop. What I’m seeing is a market that’s no longer able to support the kind of development that a dwindling audience is demanding.
Do you think I didn’t consider, long and hard last spring when I needed a new game system, that an x360 was $1000 less than a new desktop; that all my friends were getting 360’s?
From what you’ve written here I’m guessing that you’d already made up your mind to some degree. In fact I’d guess that your friends purchases may have hardened your decision.
No offense, but most of the arguments I’m seeing come across to me more as more justification than debate. And that’s fine, but having spent the last few years working on PC casual and Wii console titles I’ve started to see the issue a little differently.
When it was a battle between a console with 1MB of VRam that couldn’t render perspective and a video card with 32MB of VRam that could I think there was a real choice. Today, not so much.
Here’s what I don’t get about the core market for the PC:
The kind of graphical differences we’re talking about now between the two are now vanishingly small, certainly nothing an average consumer can recognize without having them pointed out. And yet, for some reason, AAA PC titles are still pushing the limits of the hardware to eek out the obscure bit of power.
I’m guessing a big part of that is that the video card manufacturers still wish it was seven years ago, when games were a driving force behind their sales, and they could engage in soft collusion with the developers to make sure that games were driving hardware upgrades and vice versa.
But the industry hit a level where I think it’s a better idea to stop developing for the cutting edge, and start exploiting some of the untapped power that’s in any machine that’s five years old or younger. And I think that is the growth sector of the market. Otherwise we’re basically saying that PC gaming is about the graphics and nothing else, and I think that’s short-sighted.
What Microsoft is doing with their “Games for Windows” initiative is only highlighting the antiquated notion that limiting the audience for your title is a good thing somehow. Clearly the “cutting edge” audience has started to vanish. Hell, it’s even worse than that, because if you look at the sales numbers I’m not even sure the core audience is going to be around for the consoles for much longer. Maybe a better phrase would be “Core gaming is d0med.”
My girlfriend wants puzzles and brain teasers. She’s not going to go out and buy an xbox360, she goes to Barnes and Nobles and gets a $3 book. I want a flight sim and a 4X, I don’t get an xbox360, I get a $1500 desktop. Maybe you’re cash, time or patience strapped or have three kids and for whatever reason your lifestyle trumped your taste in games. And now that you’ve switched to console you can’t bear to be told that maybe we’re still quite happy enjoying our overpriced antiquated PC’s. But speaking for myself, I’m still having lots of fun. I’m glad you consollers are too.
And that’s the rub: I can put out that $3 book and make a tidy profit selling to a 10-20K audience. But the part of PC audience that’s buying a “gaming rig” always been at least an order of magnitude smaller than the console audience. There’s also more finicky, harder to market to, and much less reliable.
Yes, you’re having fun, but it’s high level fun that I can only read about. But I will play the games that run on my $700 laptop.
