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iD director joins the "we're losing faith in the PC" party
cloudeagle
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Another day, another big-name PC game developer griping about the state of the system. This week's griper is Steve Nix, director of business development at id Software.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=34367
How many companies does this make that have bitched about the state of PC gaming in the last month? Four? Five? With this many long-term PC supporters getting nervous, the market could be in for some trouble.
"I know that I have friends who are considered core gamers, who years ago were just keyboard and mouse guys - now, when a game ships on all platforms, they buy the console version, even though the PC version is sitting there and they have a PC that would run it perfectly well. It's just their preference," explained Nix.
Greg Stone, designer for Nerve Software, the developer working on the Xbox 360 version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, agreed with Nix: "For me, I'm exactly what he's describing – I'm a guy that used to play on PCs, and now I'm totally console.
"It's so much money to keep up with the bleeding edge of technology on the PC, and it really just is easier to take a console and say, well, this is good enough. I think that's the way it is for me, and for a lot of people at this point in time."
However, Nix was keen to point out that he's describing a limited trend - and that there's still plenty of space for the PC in the games market, even if FPS games are certainly no longer entirely a PC-centric genre.
"There are plenty of people who are diehard mouse and keyboard guys that may never go to console, and also right now, if you have the highest of high-end PCs, you're generally going to get a better visual experience," Nix said. "There's no console out there that's as powerful as a God machine right now, with a Quad-Core and a GeForce 8800 - it's very hard for any console to compete with that."
"So you still have PC players, and some players are just console guys, but have players moved over? Absolutely. We love PC gaming, and we continue to support PC gaming - but you can't ignore the market realities and the size of the console market these days."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=34367
How many companies does this make that have bitched about the state of PC gaming in the last month? Four? Five? With this many long-term PC supporters getting nervous, the market could be in for some trouble.
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Lots of people do have PCs, but not many play games on them, let alone have PCs that can RUN the games coming out nowadays. Hell, my Vista computer can barely run Half Life 2.
Q6600 is what $220? 8800GT? $220?
You can build a "God" machine with less than $850.
Plus most console games cost $20 more than PC games. In the long run, you've spent about equal.
Think that's bad? My Vista PC can barely run The Sims Deluxe Edition from 1998.
It also doesn't help that the so-called top of the line computers at Best Buy can't even run fricking Orange Box. No wonder people don't buy PC games, they just spent 1000 bucks on a brand new computer that literally can't play a four year old game. I'd be fucking pissed off too.
I think what Nix said is practically self-defeating when he mentions that you get a "better visual experience" when you have the so-called "God machine." Give me a break. I know that some people are graphics whores, but damn. I think more people are willing to take a hit in graphics in favor of consistent and reliable functionality especially for a lesser cost on average.
Meh whatever. I stopped playing the PC as my primary source of gaming back when PCI-E cards became the norm.
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I think this is part of the problem. The only way PC gaming is going to stop the decline is if it becomes easier for Joe Casual to play the games. This is going to require two things: 1) manufacturers make halfway-decent low-end computers, and 2) developers lower their standards and make games that run on a wider range of machines.
It's looking like number two will be a tall order, since developers naturally want their games to look as good as possible. Artistically speaking, I can't really blame them. But doing so is effectively closing the door on the casuals entirely.
Indeed. Call me when Valve write up and say they had completely the wrong idea for a business model then we'll talk.
As it is, do we really need a new thread every time a dev says that they like consoles with the tacked on hyperbole of the death of an industry? It's getting tiring. And at least in id softwares case this doesn't suddenly make them console exclusive in terms of development.
Maybe we should just have one singular "state of the PC as a games platform" thread and dump whatever news items seem relevant in there.
I suggested this to the mods but there conclusion was that a "The state of the PC gaming industry" thread wasn't necessary.
I stopped playing when my 6 month old Geforce 3 was "outdated." The last game I played on Windows was Planescape:Torment and The Longest Journey, both of which were a little old at the time, since I could be sure they would run on my computer.
The consistency of experience is why I'm a console gamer. I can pop in a disk and the graphics and gameplay are the same as the reviewer, my friends, and so on. I can rent games. I can borrow them. I can sell them on Amazon without worrying about a license if I'm sick of them.
I'm on a Mac, and I wouldn't even know where to get started with a Windows machine in order to simply play games with it. I don't think you can "simply" play games in Windows, at least not modern games. Can you? If I wanted to play The Orange Box games, and I didn't have a Windows computer... it sounds a LOT easier to me to play the sub-optimal console version, even if I had to buy a console for $400, compared to buying a new Windows computer and the game.
It seems like the only games left for Windows gaming are games that are mouse-based. You can't even buy USB controllers anymore, it seems. If a game doesn't map well to a mouse, companies don't even bother making it for PC.
"However, Nix was keen to point out that he's describing a limited trend - and that there's still plenty of space for the PC in the games market, even if FPS games are certainly no longer entirely a PC-centric genre."
Basically all he is saying is some people have switched and that consoles have a huge demographic, so companies are becoming more aware of that.
Seriously guys, don't reply to this thread again. Why do you all enjoy circle jerks so much? They kind of hurt our collective brains . . .
STOP!
This, but for different reasons. I tried to play Thief: Deadly Shadows on my PC yesterday. There was some issue with the keyboard where my guy would keep going forward. Also, every time I tried to change a secondary key binding, the game would crash.
I could have tried to look up a solution online, fiddled with stuff to get past the bugs, not tried to rebind any controls, but I said screw it and rented the XBOX version instead. This isn't the exception whenever I dip back into PC gaming.
After years of doing primarily PCs, a few years ago, I just got sick of having to fuss with my games and my computer to get them to work right. It's a waste of my time when I can just pop a game into a console and be playing the same game but more stable and with less issues. The barrier to entry is way too high for me, and I know a decent amount about computers. For the average consumer, it's not worth it.
The real breakout games on the PC that are the exception to the declining sales tend to have really long development cycles, work well on lower-end machines, and are about as stable and self-updating as a console game. This is the exception in the Pc industry, however.
UT2k3 is nothing new, and id hasnt done too hot either.
That said, Valve knows what the hell they are doing. Quality games, and not too steep hardware requirements.
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If you can play a game on 360 architecture, what makes a PC which is comparable spec-wise's graphics so terrible that it's not worth playing? PC gaming just increases more constantly if you absolutely must be on the cutting edge, but you can just as easily upgrade parts when it is actually necessary to upgrade them.
Not really, since he's the company's director of business development and, as such, influences iD's future development decisions. But, if you want to be specific, then fine.
The conventional (and usually correct) wisdom is that a console game looks better than a game on a PC of equivalent specs. This is because the platform is fixed and developers can gradually learn and exploit its every nuance and feature.
This is also why console games graphics' improve over time on a platform, for free, with no upgrades. From a pure graphics standpoint, consoles are more efficient.
The latest PC is always more capable than the latest consoles, but the latest consoles are almost always a better value in terms of $/graphics.
Edit: not that graphics matter, of course. Just responding to Khavall's point.
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"However, Nix was keen to point out that he's describing a limited trend - and that there's still plenty of space for the PC in the games market, even if FPS games are certainly no longer entirely a PC-centric genre." Also there. Plus what he really means is that id will do multiplatform from now on (which they are doing with a simultaneous release with Rage).
Sure, but hey, there's an advantage to the PC thing: You can upgrade a year later, instead of 5 years later, when it'll now be superior to the console thing, especially if the consoles are still $500 And you don't need to buy a completely new system, just one or two parts.
Also, even though consoles now are full multimedia shindigs, I use my PC for everything plus gaming, so I have no problem hurling the extra $200 for a good Graphics Card on top of a PC that I need to be pretty damn powerful anyways to run all the shit I have to on a daily basis.
If you look at PCs as only an alternative gaming console they come off a little worse, but if you look at PCs as everything they are and add in that you never have to build or buy an entirely new PC after the first, since you can just keep upgrading the parts that need to be upgraded, then they come off a lot better.
And yes, when you factor in everything else you can do on a PC, the value equation shifts. I'm talking about pure gaming value, though, since it's what we care about here.
Anyway, this argument is pretty tired. I think we've covered it.
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here's my contribution to that thread uhm.. more stuff
Select quotes in
"People have been saying for years that the PC market is declining; yet we've seen massive growth and success in our niched PC segment instead." Paradox Interactive producer Johan Andersson
"He offered up stats on the US and worldwide PC games market, saying the former (not including casual games) in 2007 generated $2.76bn revenue, a year-on-year rise of 12 per cent, accounted for 30 per cent of gaming revenues in the territory" PC Gaming Alliance president Randy Stude
"Maybe in five years you won't need a console because you'll have one PC which delivers content all over your house." Blizzard VP of buisness Ben Basset
"In the U.S. alone, 33 million consumer PCs are sold every year—more than all consoles combined—and 67% of them are used to play games on a regular basis. And that's also more than all consoles combined. So the PC's a really dominant gaming device and gaming's a really dominant influence." Wild Tangent CEO Alex St. John
"It's ridiculous and foolish to say that PC gaming [is in decline]. I've seen some of the dumbest quotes out there about the business [falling apart]. It's just not true. The simple truth is the online business is picking up in a huge way. If you're able to add in – and NPD is beginning to track this stuff – the digital sales and regular sales and subscription money and all that stuff, the PC gaming industry is at its strongest point in its history period." Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley
"If you took Steam, Peggle, PopCap, WoW and mixed it with NPD numbers, the world looks a lot different. All of a sudden, it looks like PC's probably the biggest one, and year over year, the fastest-growing." Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi
"With the PC market becoming a larger part of our business, we're naturally focusing our attention on digital distribution." Capcom America executive VP Mark Beaumont
"The online part of PC gaming is absolutely in growth, not decline. The challenge for PC developers is to figure out why the things that work, work. There’s no reason why developers should abandon these PC models and think the PC doesn’t have a future – these kinds of games /work/ and the trick is to make them work consoles too." Splash Damage owner and lead designer Paul Wedgwood
I have to agree to an extent. Yes they are getting dollar signs in their eyes, but I think its more about the fact that because everyone has basically the same setup for hardware with the console, where there are just so many parts to a computer.
Because of that more and more developers are seeing that their games stand a fighting chances because the playing field is for the most part level.
Yes. They're going multiplatform because they're losing faith in the PC as the sole, or initial, development platform.
I see no contradiction in this.
It is capitalizing on a huge market. How is that losing faith in PCs? They are still a PC-centric developer. Plus most of their titles were ported to consoles eventually, always given out to a 3rd party to do. Yet now with idtech 5, JohnC is touting that you can use the same assets across all platforms, allowing simultaneous release. Now instead of waiting X months after the PC version came out, it is out at the same time. I really don't see how they are losing faith. Infact I think they are being more aggresive towards PC gaming now forming two teams with almost 50 people. id has never been this huge, Quake2 had 12 people (something around there) on the team, Quake3 had a tiny bit more, due to dev times going up. First team is handling Rage, second team handling the Quake stuff (which in addition to Quake Live, a new Quake arena is coming).
What's scary is that I've already read most of those.
In short, there are two related but separate problems. One is unique to the PC, the other is not. I doubt highly that PC gaming is going anywhere the industry at large isn't going, for better or worse.
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But if a company's games are released multiplatform simultaneously, can they be truly called PC-centric? With a spread like that, there technically is no center. PC is supported certainly, but it's not the emphasis.
And, as you said, iD is doing most of its multiplatform work in-house. Would that not account for iD's growth? You need more people to get the PS3 and 360 version running, after all.
Essentially, the guy is saying that iD can no longer count on the PC being its key means of support.
Man, I was tossing around this exact idea in my head recently. I figured everyone would call me crazy if I said it here.
But yeah, I remember my three years of WoW, and I couldn't play a single game for any prolonged amount of time. I had hardly bought any new games because I was just so hooked on WoW, and I consider myself to be a pretty loose spender when it comes to PC games.