Non-PC Geeks

Computer gaming has come a long way over the last 3 decades. We’ve seen the evolution from dedicated game consoles such as the original Atari 2600, to the 8 bit computer craze of the 1980’s and then back to consoles. This pendulum has swung back and forth over and over, and each time some group of “experts” declares that PC gaming is dead and consoles will be the way forward. And each time a few short years later we see PC’s once again regain the crown. This latest round of console releases once again has people stating that PC gaming is about to die. Are they right? Well, maybe. What is different this time around is the economics of the game industry.

Back in the “glory days” of PC gaming in the 80’s and 90’s, most games were written by a handful of people (in some cases just one!) As a result, it was possible to put out a large number of games, and the market was so hungry for games on PCs, and expectations were relatively low by the customers. Fast forward to today - gamers today demand and expect cutting edge graphics, ultra-realism, deep story-lines - basically Hollywood level production. That sort of production takes a lot of time, a lot of highly talented (and therefor expensive) people, and a whole lot of money! Therefor, to break even, the game publisher needs to sell a whole lot more copies.

So, let’s examine the game publisher’s position today. They have to put out this fantastic, expensive cutting edge game, and it has to sell well to cover costs and turn a profit so they can afford to work on the next game. They have two markets to build their game for: Console or PC.

The PC market

A hodge podge of machines, no two completely alike. No two have the same video card, same OS, same RAM, same motherboard. This causes the game manufacturer an incredible amount of headache in terms of testing and support. It’s just impossible for a developer to test every possible combination of hardware. Add to that the various crazy applications and configurations that people install on their machines - different AntiVirus, firewall, utilities, hacks, etc. It’s basically a nightmare. However, there’s an awful lot of PC’s out there, the development tools are free, and there’s no royalties to be paid to Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo. Likewise, the control systems on PC’s open a lot of options. Say what you will, but a mouse and a keyboard open a lot of options for control in a game, and PC gamers can add gamepads, joysticks, throttle controls, you name it!

The open architecture nature of the PC which makes it difficult to support is also what empowers it. While a console’s capabilities are fixed in stone the moment the first unit rolls off the assembly line, PCs constantly evolve. New processors are released every few months, new video cards, ram gets cheaper. The problem is that the percentage of PCs that get these new high-end capabilities is always small compared to the number of PCs out there. So, while there are millions of PCs out there in the wild, only a small percentage have the highest capabilities. Most PC that are used for casual gaming are on the order of 3 years old. Casual gamers typically also don’t buy state of the art high end machines due to their cost, so that 3 year old PC probably was at best a mid-range machine at that time and is using parts that were considered high end 4-5 years ago. That would be a sub-2Ghz P4 or AthlonXP, at best 1GB of RAM, and something like a DirectX 8 graphics card. Pretty pathetic by today’s standards.

Does the game producer blow off a large portion of the market and only cater to the small percentage of us with high end machines? No, they instead spend extra time and money to make their games scale according to the hardware they run on. Sure, they set some set of minimum requirement cutoff, but they try to include as many of us as possible (to varying degrees of success.) The reality though is that only those who have the highest end machines get the full experience of the games, and the highest end is a constantly moving target, requiring expensive upgrades constantly. When a new video card costs $500, and a new top end CPU almost as much or more, we’re not talking about a cheap investment. To be a PC gamer means you have to spend a lot of money, patience and fortitude. It’s rare when you just pop in a DVD and can play.

Finally, piracy is rampant in the PC gaming community. When we’re talking about a market that is already a small percentage of the whole, throwing piracy in the mix makes it that much harder to stomach producing for the PC market. It’s relatively easy to pirate games (as all other software) on a PC because we’re talking about games that work on a general purpose open computer with an open operating system that can run any software which makes hacking possible. This means adding the additional cost of anti-piracy schemes to your game to try to keep copying to a minimum.

Consoles

Writing a game for sale to consoles would seem to be a lot easier. The closed hardware architecture and controlled software environment means you know exactly what you have to work with. A game you write for a Nintendo Wii will run on each and every Nintendo Wii - from the first off the assembly line to the last. While developing for console environments can be somewhat more difficult because of their custom hardware, the console manufacturers tend to provide a great deal of support (granted at the ludicrous prices of a development kit and test hardware.)

Console gamers like to claim how powerful their nice shiny new console is. In reality though, consoles are at best 6 months ahead of high end PCs on the day when they are released. The graphics chips found in the new XBox 360 and PS3 are made by ATI/AMD and NVidia, and are only slight variations from the parts put into the newest PC video cards. And keep in mind, those capabilities are fixed in stone and can’t be upgraded until the next generation of console comes out (usually around 4 years down the line.) Consoles typically have substantially less RAM than PCs, but then, they don’t waste that memory with an over-bloated do-everything general purpose operating system.

The control schemes for games on consoles is somewhat more limited, but limited means known. Likewise, the gamepad controllers tend to be very good for most game types and players have gotten very used to these over the years. Sports games, driving games, puzzle games… All are very playable with standard gamepad controllers.

Piracy is almost a non-issue, or at least is a more limited problem on consoles as their closed architecture makes it more complicated to copy games, and often requires some hardware hacking prowess.

Even if a publisher chooses to port their game to all three console platforms, they still only are dealing with three hardware variations, rather than the millions of configurations found in the PC world. So, if a publisher needs to expand their market, they can write for all three consoles and still avoid the PC market altogether.

Console publishers do have a few issues though. Because the hardware is closed, if you want to release a game for a console, you have to get the holy blessing from the console maker (and pay a hefty license fee!) But in return you also get some help in advertising. In addition, while the game prices are still around $40-60 per game, the cost of the console itself is usually heavily subsidized by the manufacturer which means that for the price of a high end PC video card, you can get an entire console system, a second control pad, and probably a game or two.

Finally, unlike PCs which typically are used on smaller screens, with crummy sound systems in a room by itself or a corner, consoles are enjoyed from the comfort of the livingroom, on a big TV with a surround sound stereo system. (Ok, maybe not all of consoles are used this way, but most people buying this newest generation are buying them to use that way.)

So where does that leave us?

Well, that’s a good question. I will admit that the PC gaming market has been going through a downturn over the last 2 years. I think part of that is the costs and complexity of creating new games for the PC, part of it is the expectation of Vista, and part of it certainly is because of the introduction of the new Consoles. Right now, Console games look at least as good as what is found on the PC, and HDTV support found in the new consoles has helped them substantially in that regard. Does that mean that PC gaming is dead?

NO! Like every generation before this, the consoles get a lot of focus in their first year or so. After that, their closed fixed hardware architecture betrays them as PC’s get more powerful, and new PC games come out to take advantage of the new hardware. If you look at what happened with every console, the first wave of titles look only marginally better than what was found on the previous generation console, and over the lifespan of the hardware the games get better and better as the programmers figure out how to push the hardware. When I got my Playstation 2, I thought the graphics on it were amazing, certainly better than what I had on my PC at the time. Fast forward two years and it was no contest. While the developers got better at programming the PS2 and certainly produced better looking games, my PC had gotten substantially faster with a new CPU, new RAM, and a new video card that was 2 entire generations newer than anything found in a console at that time. My PC at the time looked and played so much better than my PS2, that I honestly haven’t really played anything on my PS2 since.

Yes, the PC gaming market is harder to be in, both for a producer and a player. It also is a much more interesting market because of it’s expandability, and it’s flexibility. The types of games found on PCs is much broader than those on consoles (show me a console capable of playing something on the order of MS Flight Simulator and I’ll show you a bridge I have for sale…) Yes, PC gaming costs more, but you can upgrade at your discretion, not when the console maker decides to come out with a new unit (which usually also means you’re tossing out your controllers, memory cards, and games to get ones compatible with the new console…)

Me, personally, I own both (although I have yet to upgrade to a new generation console because I haven’t seen a game yet that I just had to have.) I prefer consoles for some games, PCs for others.

Consoles for:

* Sports games (hockey, football, baseball)
* Racing games (Gran Tourismo, Need for Speed)
* Adventure games

PCs for:

* Real Time Strategy and turn based strategy games (Civ4, Rome Total War, etc.)
* Simulators (Flight Sim for instance)
* Business Simulators (The Sims, Railroad Tycoon, etc.)
* First Person Shooters

(I know I’m going to catch flak for that last one… I’m sorry, but I’ve tried playing FPS games on Consoles and the control schemes just do NOT work for me. Give me a keyboard and mouse control on a console and we’ll talk. Try to tell me that gamepads are great controllers for FPS games - go ahead… Set me up a game where I can use a mouse + keyboard and you use a gamepad and I’ll wipe the floor with you every time!)

So, what would I like to see happen?

In my ideal world of gaming, there would be a gaming option that would take the best of both worlds. It would be a dedicated gaming system, with fixed initial hardware at release, but it would also be upgradeable (in a more limited fashion than PCs) over time. For instance, when you first buy it maybe it has a built in Video solution and a 400 Mhz processor and 1GB of RAM. Then, over time, the manufacturer releases a “Booster Graphics” upgrade module, and a “Turbo Processor” option that adds in a 800 Mhz processor or something like that.

The games would be disc based, playable on insertion (no installing required), and would be labeled as to what upgrades are required to play. Because the console producer controls the hardware upgrades, there wouldn’t be any of the issues with supporting lots of different configurations. The system would have a stripped down gaming oriented OS (maybe with some media capabilities added in.)

It would allow for standard USB keyboard and mouse as well as gamepad controls (no silly proprietary interfaces!), and every game would support each of these (or the OS would provide a standard way for the gamer to select how they want to control the game.) It would use standard memory storage devices like SD memory rather than proprietary interfaces.

My Fear

My biggest fear is that as Consoles continue to gain momentum and market share, PC gaming will continue to die off. We’re already seeing the trend move towards the console, where new releases are developed first (or primarily) for the console and then ported (sometimes rather poorly) to the PC. While this is easy for the developers, it makes for a substandard experience on the PC, further eroding their position as a powerful, flexible gaming device.

My hope is that this is just another of the cycles in the market and the PC market will once again improve. Microsoft has realized that the PC gaming market has been suffering and they’ve come out with their “Games for Windows” initiative to try to combat this. Will it work? Who knows. Vista has some gaming improvements added in, and DirectX-10 should allow PC’s to do some really amazing things graphically. The push towards Physics processing likewise will allow PCs to do more (be it either on a PhysX processor or through the GPUs.)

Likewise, there are some amazing new games coming down the pipe for the PC market that aren’t slated (AFAIK) for the Consoles - Spore, Supreme Commander (great game, watch for my review soon), Crysis, and others. PC gaming is far from dead, it’s just in a slowdown. I full-well expect that 2 years from now the new consoles will once again look like dated relics graphically, and PC gaming will once again take off.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

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