Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
[Added Poll] The Future of Gaming (PC, Console, or ?)
TheLizardbones
Member CommonPosts: 10,910
The PC market is starting to tank, badly. Well, "badly" is a relative term. It's a 7.8% decline, but they are still shipping about 320 million units worldwide. This is driven by consumers not needing to replace their PCs as often.
So what kind of impact should we expect on the PC Gaming scene? It seems that PC Gaming is the sector of the PC market that isn't shrinking. People still aggressively upgrade their gaming PCs on a regular schedule, but what will that mean for development and prices? Will prices drop? What about new developments in PC hardware; will new innovations for gaming stall because the market is captive?
Or will gaming shift from full blown PCs to something like tablets as the processors and gpus get good enough?
Let's not forget consoles. Or let's do. Will there be any room in the market once tablets are easier to build and have as much power as a comparably priced console would? Heck, they are building consoles out of mobile hardware now, though the term "console" is being a big generous.
Will PC gaming become the driving force behind gaming, or will all paths merge into mobile devices that double as our gaming machines? Will we keep dedicated gaming devices around forever? What do you think?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Comments
Im already starting to secure my PC collection (DRM FREE GAMESaround 40 i realy like and play in future) and my 3 rig's with spareparts and plenty of extrenal HDD
XP rig from 2006 with intel duocore 8600e-evga 8800gt optimal condition-first win7 gen1 with dx11 intel icore7 920 ati radeon 5870 rig optimal condition and last but not last win7 gen3 icore7-amd7970 optimal condition.
Can't immagine how i could play games without my mouse/keyboard.
I'm not sure if I expect this, but I voted merge. 10 inch tablet with a game controller, plus good games, and I'd be set. For me that would be infinitely superior to a TV based console in a clunky box.
The issue for me and tablet gaming is the touch screen. It works fine for some games (puzzles, etc) but I find it clunky for 3D.
On the other side, I'm not sure if I'd prefer this over conventional PC. I like mouse + keyboard gaming.
Sorry, I've rambled.
Planned Obsolecence is failing. The CPUs have reached their limit, both in absolute Mhz as well in horizontal scaling - multi-cores, as the overhead grows too big at a high numbers of cores.
If a game company wants a big amount of customers, it cannot make bleeding edge games. WoW taught them that big-time, so also this piece in the Planned Obsolecence puzzle is vanishing.
What there is left, is a market where the PCs last longer. Much, much longer, and of course that will hurt sales. But it does not necessarily mean, that the amount of PC owners and -gamers grows smaller.
Which I don't know if is the case. But at least that statistic is much more interesting than sales.
Another thing is, does it really matter?
The next XBox is going to have a PC architecture, (and it runs on DirectX). This will make it easy for developers to make games, that run both on PC and XBox. Many laptops run Windows and thus DirectX. Together, that is a huge market for Windows+DirectX, and isn't that what is the most important to PC gamers? Or at least their platform? DirectX is the key here.
Of course there is the risk, that everything gets consolified worse than it is now, if the amount of dedicated PC players lowers. But Im not sure that is where development will go. After all, it is the players, not their machines, that will drive the market, and if there is a demand for more complicated games, then the supply will follow. Complicated games will usually require mouse+keyboard.