PC gaming stifled by consoles

[Halororor]

No, but think about it. How far has gaming technology come in the last 20 years? How much further can they push it? Games already look so realistic that they look like cartoons (Crysis is a prime example). At some point hardwarer development is going to have to start slowing down and PCs become standardized.

[antonkr]

It was tried to already standardize the PC. MS however didnt understand that PC players unlike most Xbox users aren't complete idiots and aren't going to pay 10 dollars a month for a service which they do not need.

[Halororor]

But you're missing the point. I'm not saying you'd need to pay anything to use. Stop thinking about it narrowmindedly. Who even said it had to be Microsoft? I mean, look at the Sandy Bridges CPU. That's already a step in that direction. Imagine an Alienware PC, in a time where games don't have the need to upgrade their graphics any longer. Where all games can pretty much be run on one type of PC. THat's coming, some time or another. You can only push the boundaries of graphics so far, and then it's bound to be perfect. They can't keep improving graphics in gaming indefinitely.

 

And also, please stop saying retarded stuff like this:

 

PC players unlike most Xbox users aren't complete idiots

 

It makes you sound elitist and somewhat deluded.

[antonkr]

But you're missing the point. I'm not saying you'd need to pay anything to use. Stop thinking about it narrowmindedly. Who even said it had to be Microsoft? I mean, look at the Sandy Bridges CPU. That's already a step in that direction. Imagine an Alienware PC, in a time where games don't have the need to upgrade their graphics any longer. Where all games can pretty much be run on one type of PC. THat's coming, some time or another. You can only push the boundaries of graphics so far, and then it's bound to be perfect. They can't keep improving graphics in gaming indefinitely.

 

And also, please stop saying retarded stuff like this:

 

PC players unlike most Xbox users aren't complete idiots

 

It makes you sound elitist and somewhat deluded.

Well if theres only one PC that can play every game.... wouldn't that simply make it a console?

You cannot standardize PC gaming as long as people build their own computers.

People want to be independent on a PC. They don't want to be tied with a certain company like you have to be on a PS3 or an XBox. On PS3 you are always under command of sony. On PC, you are in command of it. Although no one can go and just litteraly take away your PS3 but they can make it unplayable for whatever reason they deem neccessery. What about the time PS3 went down. ONE SINGLE COMPANY'S SERVERS. and bam, no multiplayer for EVERY SINGLE PS3 user.

 

No one company can take over entire PC market. Steam is the closest so far, and unlike XBox or Sony they don't go down a week or treat their users like crap. My account on Steam was once hacked due to my own stupidity. I recovered it in less than week.

 

Bill Gates once said "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Now look at a modern computer. At the time no one thought more is necessary. But nowdays everything is going forward and it will forever

Edited May 21, 2011 by antonkr

[ub3rman123]

I think that the variability between computers is what makes the PC market so good. If you want to upgrade your computer, you don't need to go out and buy the new XBox 720 (Have they even done any hardware upgrade since 2005?). Instead you just go on eBay, figure out what part you need, and buy it for as little as 20 dollars. In addition, you can customize what parts you need. If you don't plan on installing speakers, no need for a sound card. Plan on only using Excel for the rest of your natural life? Fine, save some money on what parts you need. But if you want to game, you can get exactly the hardware you need. In the console gaming market, your options are to either buy the entire package or not at all. With a PC you can opt instead for a lower power video card or a higher power one with what your budget allows.

 

The catch is that video games also have different requirements for hardware. The best thing to do is to know what your PC is capable of and don't buy games it can't run unless you plan to upgrade for it.

[Vagrant0]

The PC standardization thing was killed after all those anti-trust measures were taken against Microsoft in the 90's. Linux being on the scene and popular among many PC users pretty much stops anyone from being able to standardize anything with the PC. The only thing that they can do is just stop making PC games... Which will only open the market for other developers.

[lordinquisitor]

Standardization means monoploy basically which has thankfully being ruled illegal. As for steam I view it as a neceessary evil, dont like how its being used more and more but still use it as I like fallout new vegas. Which is part of the problem, once you need evil it feeds off that need and gains more control that ever.

 

Consoles used to be great before the online stuff screwed up and you cant thrust their security it seems. What I dont like about console is when companies abandon the PC market and just devolop games for consoles games that will never be seen on PC. Like Red dead and La Noire are amongst others.

 

consoles are out of date and are made to be as cheap to make as possible while still creating a lot of profit. the PS series and the money making slim versions are a prime example of that. Xbox suffers from cheap production and lack of testing resulting in solder probles giving the infamous ring of death.

 

I have a pc and no consoles, brother has gone through 2 ps3 and 3 xboxs in that time. The consoles cant be upgraded but Pc can be really powered up. Itrs a pity that so few games are trully made for Pc market withscaling graphics based upon power of PC. be nice to really see an game use the full power of a quad sli system.

[JimboUK]

No, but think about it. How far has gaming technology come in the last 20 years? How much further can they push it? Games already look so realistic that they look like cartoons (Crysis is a prime example). At some point hardwarer development is going to have to start slowing down and PCs become standardized.

 

The free market and competition will ensure that doesn't happen, AMD and Nvidia will continue to try and out do each other with their GPUs as will AMD and Intel with CPUs. If anything happened to any of those companies then someone else will get a chance. Anyway we are a very long way away from photorealistic graphics, yes Crysis looked good but it didn't look real. It's not just graphics that can use the extra power, believable AI would need a lot more processing power, at the moment it is still pretty bad. Physics have come a long way but are still limited by the available power, Mafia 2 had a good go at realistic clothing physics but they still didn't look right and caused all sorts of performace issues. No one has even tried to render individual hair strands in a game for obvious reasons, yet until they do hair will never look right.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Consoles aren't stifling PC gaming, copy protection is. DRM has destroyed the PC game resale market, so game stores carry few PC games. People buy fewer PC games, even from online stores, because they know they can't trade them in when they're done playing. Consoles do not have that problem; they have simply risen in popularity to fill a gap created by the systematic attack on PC gaming. If PC copy protection systems were dialed back to where they were in the late 90s and early 00s, the gaming market would stabilize again. The same thing would likely happen if console makers introduced DRM that prevented the resale of console games (which has been discussed, most notably by Sony)- though obviously that is something gamers should loudly resist.

 

The expense of building a gaming PC is not and never has been a cause of decline in the market for PC games. Gaming PCs have always been expensive; if anything they are less expensive now than they were ten years ago. Upper-tier graphics hardware in particular has fallen in price despite inflation- I clearly remember a time when you'd pay $200 to $300 for the same capability that you'd pay $150 for today. Bleeding edge equipment remains very expensive, but nothing ever really requires bleeding edge hardware. The tower I'm building now will wind up with a 2.8gHz quad core processor, 8 gigs of RAM, a 1 gig graphics board, and enough hard drive space to hold every game I've ever owned... and my build cost is not likely to be much over $1000. Again, not bleeding edge, but certainly capable of running anything released this year or next... and when I do need to upgrade, the graphics card will likely be the only thing that needs to be upgraded. The system itself will likely be viable without any further upgrades, barring any sudden leap forward in technology, for the next half a decade or more.

 

Yes, consoles are cheaper. They're more user-friendly. But they're also less versatile, not at all customizable or upgradeable, and tend to lag far behind PCs in performance. You can't mod games on consoles, at least not without violating the terms of service agreement. There will always be a market for gaming PCs and for PC games to run on them... the market is just in a slump right now thanks to the industry's ongoing mania for DRM.