Why PC gaming is dead
Did anybody notice that Wired’s 2004 Best Games you haven’t played doesn’t even include a single game playable on the computer?
Other than bleeding-edge technology first person shooters and MMORPGs, it appears the industry is destined to end up on consoles. One wonders whether you’ll see Duke Nuke Forever released on PC. I’ve been waiting for that game to be released since freaking 1998!
On a more serious note, whatever the next version of “X-Box Live” is should be sufficient to kill off the PC gaming industry entirely. My guess is around 2007. Any industry executive with half a brain already has this figured out – consoles can now be packed with enough cheap hardware to render PC gaming obsolete.
There are laws of unintended consequences. Since games were the only real reason why there was such demand for high-end hardware, it seems likely in the future that new technologies will be not be exclusively devoted to increasing the number-crunching capacity of processors. Since the consumer sees no discrenable difference between a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 vs. a 3.6 GHz chip, it seems very likely that newer high-end chips will be prohibitively expensive (thousands of dollars) as they will only be used for CPU-intense applications. The good news, however, is that laptops (or the equivalents thereof) 10 years from now should be just as expensive as X-Boxes plus the price of a display unit.
Yes, I know what I am saying: Moore’s law has no chance over the next decade. I have no doubt that we can technologically pack double the performance on a chip every 18 months, but I have serious doubts whether we can do it at the same cost.
I have been noticing the general decline of PC game shelf space in the UK during 2004 – its been dramatic. So much so that its hard to find PC games in some shops now. This annoys me intently as I really don’t want’t an XBox or PS2 – I have a PC that will run games better than any console. But I am obviously in a minority. Maybee its time for me to grow up after all. (er no.)
At the local Electronics Boutique (where one typically buys electronic games of all types), their PC gaming section has been reduced to one row worth (let’s say a meter wide) of stuff, while there’s a substantial portion of shelf space (about 4 meters) that have PC games released over the past 5 years that people hardly touch. I wouldn’t doubt it if we saw them clear out the entire "old" selection and replace it with console games. We’ll see.
The economics of PC games just don’t warrant companies releasing quality like Baldur’s Gate since even if you charge the end-customer $70 per copy, you’re not going to get a sufficient return on investment since projects these days are so complex. Would gamers be willing to pay $250 for a single game? Probably not. This is why everybody in the PC space has been going towards MMORPG’s, where you can get $120-180/year in subscription fees from customers. The money just isn’t there for real innovation anymore, which is quite tragic.
The economics of making console games isn’t much better, but you’ve got a much higher installed base of users, and development is cheaper. The previous bottleneck was the technological capability of the consoles themselves, but this is no longer a concern. X-Box Live "2" coupled with HDTV would be the end of it.