PC gaming on the decline?


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its crazy how what seemed to be a hardcore genre (fps) has become the number 1 genre on consoles... these games are not pick up and play games for casuals. like i said, pc fps gamers are slowly jumping ship from what im seeing

Correction: The Developers are jumping ship from PC FPS gaming.

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Correction: The Developers are jumping ship from PC FPS gaming.

because of 1 game? i dont really keep up with pc fps's but is there any other instance where pc had had the short end of the stick? and even then, is it not on par with the console version? its not like your getting an inferior product

the next battlefield game is going to be awesome on the pc

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Though PC gaming isnt going anywhere yet it has been on a slow decline for a while and devs had lots to do with that as its not only amount of PC gamers that has been going down, but quality of PC games as well. Just think of the amount of crappy console ports with awful controls coming and boring gameplay...

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Pirating games on the PC is to easy.

Users don't need to buy any extra equipment (No Mod Chips no Optical Discs)

They have an amazing pirate material delivery system (Bittorrent)

The games themselves are distributed with the required Cracks/Serials to get the games working

Using the Cracks is as simple as replacing 1 file in the game directory

It's become so easy that the instructions can fit in to just a single text file.

Compare that to what is required on say the XBOX360?

Open your Console, Remove the optical drive, place it in your PC, Flash it with software you need to obtain and learn how to use properly, put the Optical Drive back, Boot the console up and abandon the use of Live in any way shape or form or you get a banned console. Burn every game you download to Disc which adds cost.

PS3: No piracy even exists for this yet.

If you are a developer which systems are you going to spend money investing in? Obviously the XBOX360 and the PS3. And once your games been out a while perhaps do a port to PC. All you have to do is take a swing by some of the big torrent sites which all clearly display download numbers.

I've done that. I checked at one. Just one of the most well known torrent sites, filtered by Seeders of Call of Duty 4, looked at the completed download statistics as reported by the site on each of the 3 torrents for this game. Each of the files are a completely different size due to being modified by whoever leaked them.

Combined these 3 torrents of Call of Duty 4 add up to 902,128 completed downloads. Some games don't even sell 1/4th that and this game with just 3 of the top torrents on 1 single Bittorrent site has almost been downloaded a million times. (PC Version only)

I'm not going to say that Piracy is killing gaming but from the developers perspective they can make more money and stop piracy almost completely by going Consoles first and foremost. I don't think DRM is going to fix this situation. The only real way to stop piracy in PC gaming is by making the online component (Multiplayer, Co-op etc) really really strong and make the authentication of clients to online servers really really strong so that people using 'cracked' copies cannot authenticate to play the game online which gives pirates incentive to purchase the game to play it online. The same way that pirates on the XBOX360 will purchase a game to play it on Live.

PC Gaming is in decline, the customers are there and they are playing more games now than they ever have they just aren't buying those games that they are playing. If you look at any developer who has released piracy numbers (based on pirate clients calling home to their servers) the ratios of purchased copies to pirated ones is astounding. God of War and UT3 come to mind these are piracy levels 8x higher than units shipped. Absolutely crazy.

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they are not games..... they are work

Only if you make them work, you do not have to find every drop or win every map, just play for fun and if you are good that other stuff will just happen.

And no, I'd say PC gaming is getting shorted by devs right now but thanks to Valve and to some lesser extent Games for Windows I think it's getting shored up and we should see a slight rebound after Windows 7 has been around for a bit. Considering how overall good the PC ports of Batman:AA, RE5 and Street Fighter have been and with AC2, MW2 and most of the major console titles coming to PC this winter I don't feel like I'm missing much since I sold my consoles.

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Activision is quite busy triyng to achieve this, no dedicated servers for mw2 (it even comes at a price bump), no LAN for blizzard games and even fracturing Starcraft 2 in 3 different games.

Hopefully Valve and other PC-based companies won't follow Actiblizzard.

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Pirating games on the PC is to easy.

Users don't need to buy any extra equipment (No Mod Chips no Optical Discs)

They have an amazing pirate material delivery system (Bittorrent)

The games themselves are distributed with the required Cracks/Serials to get the games working

Using the Cracks is as simple as replacing 1 file in the game directory

I don't buy the whole piracy excuse, it was easy as hell to pirate games for the PS1/2/Xbox. Every man and his dog knew someone who had a chipped console and yet the games still got made.

Ironically, It's the attempts at anti piracy that are driving customers to piracy in the first place! Look at how many pirated spore on principle, because they wanted a non gimped version that didn't lock them down to 3 installs and infest their PCs with crapware. Look at the backlash now over games that remove Lan support and dedicated server support on the grounds of piracy. The sad thing is tho, if no one buys the software based on that, thedevelopers will just see this as a reason to pull out of PC gaming entirely, when it's their own damn fault.

The PC gaming industry is basically doing what the music industry did to it's customers, with exactly the same results. If you treat your customers like dirt, they will treat you like dirt.

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Can someone prove the decline of PC Gaming over consoles? I have done a search (not a hardcore search) and have found nothing to indicate this.

Modern Warfare 2?

Sales figures?

When big game companies start neglecting something..so do consumers. Why follow and support something that the companies that make stuff for them don't support them.

EA neglected the Dreamcast and man, didn't that console die quick! (i <3 the DC btw)

The Move to Consoles

A noticeable change in PC gaming over the past few years has been the move away from PC exclusives. More and more games are now being developed first and foremost for the popular gaming consoles: the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii. The fundamental reason for this is a large discrepancy in sales figures - console versions of games routinely outsell the PC versions by many times the number of units. Ok, so what does this phenomenon have to do with piracy? Well as it happens, the majority of PC developers are laying at least part of the blame for their decision to move to focusing on console-based development squarely in the lap of piracy:

Cevat Yerli of Crytek, the makers of Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis Warhead has publicly stated:

We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that?s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won?t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future.

John Carmack, often called the 'father of PC gaming', and co-founder of id software, makers of the Doom and Quake series, recently stated:

It's hard to second guess exactly what the reasons are. You can say piracy. You can say user migration, but the ground truth is just that the sales numbers on the PC are not what they used to be and are not what they are on the consoles.

Cliffy B, lead creator at Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Tournament and Gears of Wars series, has been quite outspoken on this topic:

Here's the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC. Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.

Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games, makers of Supreme Commander, also chimes in with his assessment:

...people are going to stop making [games] on the PC because of my earlier point, what's happened on the PC with piracy. The economics are ugly right now on the PC. You're not going to see these gigantic, epic investments of dollars on the PC when it just doesn't work. The economics have to work. You're going to see those investments made on the console side and it's going to become a more console-centric investment. And then you're going to see them ported back over to the PC and that creates a different experience on the PC.

Robert Bowling, Community Manager at Infinity Ward, the makers of games such as Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4, provided a fairly blunt opinion on the issue. He made a blog post entitled 'They Wonder Why People Don?t Make PC Games Any More', the title of his post along with the contents clearly linking the move away from PC game development with piracy:

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn?t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).... the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding.

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I am a hardcore PC gamer and have been for as long as I can remember. And it hurts to say this, but PC gaming is on a steady decline. More and more developers are putting money into console titles and, sometimes, porting it to the PC. What really sucks is that this is only the beginning. Just wait until the next generation of consoles. Of course, that doesn't mean PC gaming is going to die out. There are companies like Crytek, Valve, and Blizzard (to name a few) that produce quality PC titles.

I can't wait for:

  • StarCraft II (RTS)

  • Diablo III (RPG)

  • Mass Effect 2 (RPG)
  • Dragon Age: Origins (RPG)

  • Star Wars: The Old Republic (MMO)
  • Star Trek Online (MMO)
  • Natural Selection 2 (FPS)

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I'm surprised that PC gaming is currently as low profile as it is.

Normally there is a cycle of dominance between PC and console gaming. Consoles have a fixed life cycle and generally all consoles that will make up a single generation release within a relatively short window, then their hardware is fixed until the next release period. Console games in the time following the release phase (perhaps for two years) are equal to and sometimes better than PC games in terms of graphics, sound, frame rates, etc. In the latter three years of the console cycle, PC gaming typically has a resurgence because their general purpose hardware overtakes the special purpose console hardware in terms of performance and install base (there's an 18 month to three year replacement cycle for PCs, so it normally takes a few years just for there to be a large enough install base of PC hardware that is on parity, for instance say that in year 0 the state of the art PC hardware (class X) is already equal to the brand new console hardware, it will still take until year 2 or longer for there to be a sufficient installed base of PC hardware at that level to make it worth developing large install base games (like MMOs) for class X hardware, even though class Y or class Z hardware is now available at the bleeding edge).

The 360 launched in November 2005, four years ago. Normally the run-of-the-mill PC would have already surpassed that level of hardware by two generations at least, and developers would be pushing out games that take advantage of at least a one-generation leap.

This cycle we have several issues related to PCs specifically:

1. The piracy issue: which resulted in a lot of publishers jumping ship from PC, even if the developers would have preferred to stay on with that platform,

2. The operating system issue: many people regarded Vista as a failure and didn't upgrade their operating system as they normally would have during the cycle, leading to,

3. Lack of installed base of cutting edge or one generation old hardware because people didn't upgrade their operating system or applications in the general sphere for the last four to five years, and then the minor issue,

4. Competition from Apple and various Linux operating systems that have further shrunk the potential install base for a given game, even on cutting-edge hardware.

Meanwhile we've had factors supportive of console gaming:

1. Migration of PC users to computers that don't offer a large library of games, meaning they will invest in a console,

2. Consoles regarded as "good enough" to fulfill the AV needs of users, because they are capable of producing more than adequate visual fidelity on LCD or Plasma panels, and support 5.1 surround sound natively (a feature that sometimes isn't included in PC hardware, often isn't supported in PC game software, and even if both of those were present, often users don't install a surround sound system in their PC space),

3. The hardware architecture of a console has become more similar to that of a modern PC, with core symmetric (six threads on 360; two thread symmetric and eight thread asymmetric in the case of PS3) multiprocessing, PC-like purpose-built video hardware (also asymmetric multiprocessing) with many pipelines, shaders, and common high level graphics programming languages,

4. The development environment for consoles has become more accessible to PC developers as well, with a near "compile twice" compatibility between 360 and PC and cross-platform engines (Insomniac's Nocturnal toolkit, Unreal 3, Crystal tools from Square, etc) for all three high-end platforms that encourage PC developers to dip their toes into the console user pool, and encourage console developers to release on PC as well (although these releases are the console-style games that are so hated by PC users).

One year from now will be the interesting point at which to take another measurement. 7 might well drive a new phase of PC hardware purchases, and if it does, then we could see the reinstatement of the old cycle. As the new consoles come closer to launch, we should see PC games making use of the new engines that will be powering the next generation of consoles as well (updates to Unreal 3 and others that are stepping releases to Unreal 4 and successors). These should reinforce factors leading to a resurgence of PC dominance for the late cycle period.

It may just be coincidence that the current hardware cycle has been prolonged both on the console and PC side.

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I don't buy the whole piracy excuse, it was easy as hell to pirate games for the PS1/2/Xbox. Every man and his dog knew someone who had a chipped console and yet the games still got made.

Ironically, It's the attempts at anti piracy that are driving customers to piracy in the first place! Look at how many pirated spore on principle, because they wanted a non gimped version that didn't lock them down to 3 installs and infest their PCs with crapware. Look at the backlash now over games that remove Lan support and dedicated server support on the grounds of piracy. The sad thing is tho, if no one buys the software based on that, thedevelopers will just see this as a reason to pull out of PC gaming entirely, when it's their own damn fault.

The PC gaming industry is basically doing what the music industry did to it's customers, with exactly the same results. If you treat your customers like dirt, they will treat you like dirt.

Dude very very good point.

Piracy is not at fault for any decline in PC games if any.

Remeber there are a lot of PC games that people love and still play all these years on.

Look at counter Strike and Battle Field.

I still go on and play the hell out of CS every now and again, I love my BF2 and BF 2142.

These are thing the console world can not compete with because the replay value of the game is floored.

Everyone on the console world are happy to play the current game, but as soon as a new one comes out they jump onto the next biggest thing and then sell the old game.

PC games dont work like that and people will play games for ages, look at Ever Quest, WoW, Starwars Galaxies.

These games have been going for ages and will continue to go because they offer a great replay value to its gamers.

I would say that the age group of people playing PC games is much older than the Xbox, PS3 and Wee, but the PC is not dead.

It will get a surge very soon!

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One year from now will be the interesting point at which to take another measurement. 7 might well drive a new phase of PC hardware purchases, and if it does, then we could see the reinstatement of the old cycle. As the new consoles come closer to launch, we should see PC games making use of the new engines that will be powering the next generation of consoles as well (updates to Unreal 3 and others that are stepping releases to Unreal 4 and successors). These should reinforce factors leading to a resurgence of PC dominance for the late cycle period.

It may just be coincidence that the current hardware cycle has been prolonged both on the console and PC side.

is directx 11 out yet? the vid of the new crysis engine was looking great

i think overall graphics dont need that much improvement... where there is scope of improvement is in psysics (full destruction and varying randomness) and animations (running uphill + downhill, standing on edges without looking as if half the body is floating in mid air)

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used to be a time when pc games had to be ported over to consoles. its the other way around now.

its been on the decline for a while now. M$ would rather have gamers on their console and XBL (cha-ching$$) than on a pc where there would be noway in hell they could tax for multiplayer for starters...

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its been on the decline for a while now. M$ would rather have gamers on their console and XBL (cha-ching$$) than on a pc where there would be noway in hell they could tax for multiplayer for starters...

:laugh:

Of course they would rather have gamers on their games console!

PC gaming is declining around me. Since I bought my xbox 360 for ?200 2 years ago, I havn't really bothered with gaming on my PC(the latest one I'm using integrated graphics), apart from a couple games. Same has happened with my friends.

Lots of people are now moving to having a laptop, with a games console.

I don't think PC gaming could ever die out though.

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there are certain kinds of games that ONLY work well on the PC, like strategy games for example. And imo the mouse and keyboard will always be the best controller. Also i think its easier as a new developer to emerge on the PC game market than on the console market

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I think it definitely is being neglected. I think its the publishers faults though. For me though, I play sports games on the console, and MMO's, FPS's on the PC.

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Activision is quite busy triyng to achieve this, no dedicated servers for mw2 (it even comes at a price bump), no LAN for blizzard games and even fracturing Starcraft 2 in 3 different games.

Hopefully Valve and other PC-based companies won't follow Actiblizzard.

Just read about this. At least Valve responded to the community with the L4D2 petition group. They fixed the problem. They are now > Activision Blizzard.

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reporting from South America: (yes there are gamers here too!!)

almost (90%) of my friends got tired (or lack the founds) of updating their PC's to keep up with the latest games using decent congif settings, so they are console gamers now.

And one curious thing!!! if you analyze COD 4 MW original executable name it was COD3.exe ...... but we all know COD 3 was a console exclusive :rolleyes: .......

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Guess it depends on which games you play. For me, I only own a PC and have plenty of new games to play, along with great old ones. My roommmate has the 360, which only gets played every now and then when a new game comes out, but the old games dont really get any replay. Both are great, but I still find my pc more useful.

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