Double Blind

I read the article on Ubisoft implementing a requirement in its software to have a constant internet feed in order to retain the saved game status. The primary goal behind this is to circumvent piracy.

I completely agree with the analysis of the author, but even if Ubisoft is successful with their endeavours, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for the game developers. The reason is because PC gaming, at least in the traditional “box” format (not web-based), is dead. Console markets will continue to dominate this for the foreseeable future.

I wrote an article back in December 31, 2004 stating why PC gaming is dead. Specifically, I nailed the following prediction made over five years ago:

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.

Right now, a high-end workstation has a processor such as a quad core Xeon. Looking at Dell’s website, you can purchase such a workstation with a CPU upgrade that costs upwards of $5,000. Compare this to a more consumer desktop system, with a CPU that, at most, will cost around $500.

An X-Box 360 at Future Shop, costs about $200. A respectable notebook these days will cost you around $550 for a 15.6″ display, or around $700 for a 17″ display. In five years, I will suspect that the latter part of my prediction will ring true as it is clear there is price convergence between gaming consoles and notebooks.

Even if Ubisoft is successful, they will likely not make money on the PC side – World of Warcraft (owned by Vivendi) is really the only profit-maker in the industry. For some strange reason, it has turned into a winner-take-all marketplace, and the contest is over for the traditional non-subscription software route (they lost). The power of the internet has fragmented the PC game market into respective and much more smaller niches. However, because such games are not platform-reliant, it is unlikely that the PC gaming market will ever retain any of its past glories – of which the glory years were the 1990′s.

I stopped playing games on my PC around 2001 – the last game I ended up playing was Counter-Strike, but quit that when cheating got to be too rampant and it became a skill of who was the best hacker instead of having the fastest reaction time.

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