Console / PC future gaming and media

[Ferral]

This is something that I have been thinking about for a while with people saying that PC gaming is dying off.

As it stands with consoles you just put the disc in and away it goes, PC's on the other hand is a different story. They are all different unless you get a mass produced pre built one. Now what gets me thinking is the current state of play and where will it end up?

On the 360 now you can download movies and stream from a source to the xbox and onto the TV, flip side of the coin though is that you can easily do the same thing directly with a PC. Not forgetting TV tuner cards etc also makes the PC ideal for media and being the central hub for everything. Not forgetting bigger hard discs in PC's giving more space for everything media related.

If (and that is the big word here) PC's became a little more generic so games where not so different on systems then where would that go with the consoles. A PC with a bluetooth adapter could mean keyboard and mouse just sitting on your lap, same goes for a game controller.

I have hooked my PC upto my Plasma a few times now and must admit it looks awesome on my 42" screen. Only downside is all my wired peripherals. However, if I got everything wireless for my PC I'm not sure I would have the need for a console as it would simply be just start a game up and away you go like on a console.

Something has to give, I feel we are definately moving in the right direction with home media centres but where is it all going to end. Console prices are coming down and a half decent upgrade on a PC is much more expensive than actually buying a console.

Only other thing is the way games are being developed, you take away the exclusive titles on the consoles and the PC gets them you don't really need the console once again. We are now seeing games like Devil May Cry on the PC as well as a few other console only titles crossing over now so they are multi platform franchises.

Do you think we will end up with one format for everything or do you think we will caryy on going the way we are now?

[kalniel]

PC gaming is so far from dying. Casual and subscription based revenue is through the roof.

The only thing that's close to dying are the big, single player, AAA games that can only be sold on the PC.

There are two things stopping them from being sucessful - increased cost and descreased revenue.

Increased cost comes about from the ever increasing variety of hardware and softwares out there, and especially supporting the game post-release. Solution? Mandate a fixed level of hardware compatability for all PCs. Ever going to happen? Not a chance - MS are the only players who have the capability to do that cross vendor, but every time they so much as attempt it Intel (and most of the general public) scream blue murder and force them to back down.

Decreased revenue is caused by a smaller market share (less people have machines capable of playing AAA games) and increased piracy.

Unless both the compatability and piracy problems are nailed then exclusive AAA gaming on the PC might as well be dead. We will instead get ports from consoles (where the majority of the development cost can be recovered with console sales), casual games and subscription/micro-payment based games. Oh and that happens to suit MS just fine, so I don't think they'll try too hard to change it.

[directhex]

my dad has been unable to play HL2:Ep1. i spent a couple of hours poking it, and eventually found a workaround. my sister has been unable to play viva pinata, and a day of messing around only doubled the time between crashes to 5 minutes.

the 360 versions of both would have been fine.

there's my complaint about pc gaming.

[CaseyV9]

If you had asked me this time last year if I would seriously consider buying a console I would have just laughed.
I could see consoles and even mobile phones are moving closer to a PC. Consoles just seemed inferiour.

I have already said about the dilema with the lack of upgrade options for my PC.
If only I knew of Hexus then.

So, you have people saying that PC's are way more powerfull and could piddle all over Consoles.
The thing that got me if what these consoles can do even now.

Take the XBox 360. If I'm not mistaken, That came out in Sep 2005.
I think at around that time for PC, something like a GeForce 7800 was good.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but can GeForce 7800 play todays games at around 1080p?

For me, my PC is great. It's where a lot of of different technologies come together and allow me to choose what I want and don't want and has a pretty big scope for uses.

Soon, I'll be looking at attempting to build my first PC. But it will be a media PC.
And a year later, that PC will probably still be able to use the latest media such as High def, Blue Ray and similiar stuff.

But will it still play the latest games looking really at high settings? Probably not. Which will have me looking at throwing away hardware that works fine. A waste.
Companies like Nvidia are making sure their products become obsolete faster each time.
If you have the money to spend on it then fine, it's definetly the best platform for gaming.

I opted to pay £250 for on a console. Right now you are seeing more and more PC games being released on consoles aswell now. Fallout 3 will be released at the same time and games like GTA IV way before. And GTA IV may not even be released for PC, what happened to Bully?

I'll always have a PC.
But when the next generation of consoles come out and are are more closer to PC, It'll be something that people into PC gaming will find harder to ignore.

For me, PC means a flexible platform that I can upgrade and repair myself to my needs. But I'm don't think that gaming on PC is something I can really afford.

A console seems to be a one off payment that'll be playing games in high res for years.
It feels like developers for consoles are always finding new ways to get more out of the hardware and finding new ways to push more out of it.

Unlike PC which feels as though the developers are just trying to force feed me the new and improved hardware and making me throw away components that work perfectly.

[looney]

I hope you guys are wrong dont want pc gaming to die

but have to agree on some of the points made about consoles

[chuckskull]

Consoles have been going tit for tat with PC's in the power and games stakes since the Playstation came out.

You can do a lot of things a PC can do on various consoles, but at the moment, most are still a novelty rather than a well matured features. It's like saying no-one will ever buy a DSLR again because phones have cameras on now. There will always be that market for professionals and enthusiasts.

There are some things consoles just cant beat PC's on, storage for example, just because of the size limits.

In the future I can see the PS4 and XBOX over 9000, becoming media hubs a lot more, and encroaching on the realm of the HTPC quite heavily. Being able to play more media type, connect to more things and so on.

A PC is going to be the best thing for doing PC stuff for a long while yet. I think a lot of it is, people don't want a keyboard and mouse with their console they want a controller than turns the console on remotely and shakes when you get shot. This limited interface limits what the entire system can do, regardless of processing grunt.

[TAKTAK]

you can have active feedback in PC games if you really want..... HERE and its better than what the consoles currently have cos its inherently cooler

[Jaffo]

PC gaming won't die out, it'll just continue to evolve in ways to make it more profitable (such as casual gaming, more 'The Sims' etc ). There are so many more PCs in the world than consoles, it'd be daft of the games developers to ignore such a large market.

The current gen of consoles are essentially PCs now anyway with a standardised hardware configuration, complete with bugs and downloadable patches. This will also help PC gaming in the long run as it will be easier to develop and release games on all platforms simultaneously. For example, the new id engine (Rage is it?) is cross platform and is essentially just recompiled for each machine.

Only problem is that more complex PC games genres such as flight sims may decline further due to their unsuitability for consoles.

[Betty_Swallocks]

I will almost always go for a PC version of a game over a console for one simple reason.
Most of the games I play are a hundred times better played with a mouse and keyboard rather than a controller.

For the ones that do work well with a controller I have a PS2 adaptor.

The only games I actually play on consoles are ones that I just can't get on the PC (Ratchet & Clank, GT4, Burnout etc) and in fact I still haven't bought either a 360 or a PS3 because there are no games that I want to play sufficiently badly to pay out for either one.

GT5 may change that, but TBH Grid is coming out for the PC so I may just hold back on that one too.

Give me a console controller that I can use effectively for FPS and RTS games and I might reconsider, but I just can't play either of those genres with the controllers we have now.

[Hicks12]

The reason i prefer pc gaming to console gaming is the price, sure the pc might cost more to build in the short term but with consoles your paying loads for games like £40-£50 a game that will normally last me a few weeks and be boring(normally). Now pc's, cost way less as the games tend to vary from £10-£30(only cod4 as far as i know), now for £15 i got hellgate london which is a great game and im still playing it after about 4 months, also playing the witcher which also was £15 ingame, amazing game and was fun to play which is very hard todo for a rpg.Halo 3 probably kept me most entertained on the 360(sold mine now) but that lasted a month then it was boring as something "else" had been released and very little played now.

The beauty of pc gaming is that you can pick up classics that you have kept and still find people playing, i still find a about 10 full servers on alien vs predator 2 which was made in 2000, cant say that for most console games .

The annoying thing i see with pc gaming is that since hardware changes so often(*nvidia*) developers cant use the previous or new to the full potential, for instance crysis, if the developers had time i bet you could play it all maxed without much lag (like 45fps or soemthign) on an 8800GT. The 360 uses the equivilant of a 7800 and so does the ps3, 360 uses 3 3.6ghz cores(was that really true?) so the hardware is WAY behind pc's at this time but with the developers all working on a certain hardware design its easy for them to make games that are great graphically etc.

I could see pc gaming getting so popular if amd/nvidia/intel stopped giving discounts for the bloody consoles or give the discount to the real customers so they can get better things .

Another great thing about pc gaming is the online, its 99% of the time better on a pc as the servers can hold say 64player matches instead of the 360/ps3 with 20 or something, mods are easy to come by and download able content? well thats free for the pc but charged on 360 and perhaps ps3. Wireless is easy for the pc i find as you get wireless keyboards etc and i dont have a problem with cables .

Console gaming is best for the people who dont know how to build their own pc (imo) as it doesnt require any effort, but they must have money as the games cost an arm and a leg. PC gaming is more casual (and some hardcore) gamers as a game costs little and so if you dont play often its not wasted. I liked my 360 when i could play with my mates but the amount of screaming little kids on there is pathetic, their high pitched voices etc and their playing gears of war or something, something that is bearable sometimes .

I say that pc gaming will look much brighter in the future with the release of a new xbox and ps because every generation there seems to be a £10(atleast) increase on the price of games, an xbox game cost £30 on release but on 360 it costs £40 or even £55! (gears of war in game ).

Sorry for the long post but im bored xD

[grayg1]

Take the XBox 360. If I'm not mistaken, That came out in Sep 2005.
I think at around that time for PC, something like a GeForce 7800 was good.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but can GeForce 7800 play todays games at around 1080p?

No but neither can the Xbox 360

Your 1080p on your Xbox 360 is fake it's more around 720p and sometimes even less. Just because it says 1080p on the games box doesn't mean it's really 1080p.

[Virtual Monkey]

I'll always have a PC.
But when the next generation of consoles come out and are are more closer to PC, It'll be something that people into PC gaming will find harder to ignore.

For me, PC means a flexible platform that I can upgrade and repair myself to my needs. But I'm don't think that gaming on PC is something I can really afford.

I've started thinking this more and more lately: in terms of value the PC is unable to compete with consoles, especially as the lifecycle of consoles seems to be increasing (purportedly the PS3's going to be around for 10 years), and through that lifecycle the console is only used more and more efficiently by developers. Meanwhile pc games are never really optimised since new hardware is only ever a year away from being released. An upgrade of £300 would be an investment of about 3 or 4 years in the pc market, while a similarly priced ps3 bundle would last a few years more.

Usually the power of PCs has been a major point in this kind of argument (at least in fanboy arguments !). While Crysis isn't coming out on any consoles anytime soon, the graphical fidelity that consoles are capable of is by no means poor: I was amazed by GRID running on a 360 in Blockbuster. In terms of graphics, they're only going to get better as the current generation of consoles get older. Surely we're approaching the point where graphics are going to become less and less significant in determining the quality of games anyway?

One thing that is definatlely lacking on consoles is any form of mod scene: I have got so much gameplay out of the £20 I spent on Half Life 2 thanks to the massive amount of mods for it. There are generally mods for most popular pc games, and considering the hdds on consoles it wouldn't be hard for Sony and MS to start opening up the platforms a bit more for modders. I suppose the downside of that is if you provide the ability to mod console games, you lose the idea that you can 'put the game disk in and just play' since a lack of standardisation would mean a lot more bugs etc.

[Ferral]

Point I'm trying to portray here is where will it all end.

A console is now becoming a media center, granted at the minute storage isn't that big on the consoles but the next gen we will probably see round about the 500Gb mark I am reckoning. Not forgetting like mentioned £300 for a new console every say 5 year is still cheaper than the PC market.

At the minute the graphics cards manufacturers are releasing new cards around every six months. If you follow that upgrade path over 5 years it will cost you a lot more. That is just graphics cards, take into account also new processors and also ram, inevitably motherboards also and you will be hitting thousands.

What is stopping the console manufacturers from actually allowing you to upgrade the console itself, like you used to be able to add more ram to the Amiga. An add in slot that allows you to upgrade video ram or even allow you to change the graphics chip in the same way you can swap hard disks from a 5" bay on a PC. Make them swappable that way and consoles will definately move forward. Granted this is just speculation.

I don't actually have enough sockets in my front room as it is and when I move my PC in there I have to unplug something to hook it up to a ower source.

This is where us as consumers loose out, due to titles that are just released on specific formats. If we started seeing more RPG like The Witcher for example on the console it would definately up the sales. Just to run that title alone I had to go out and buy more ram to be able to run it.

Having one format that does everything is what we are most likely going to see, whether it is PC or Console based it is going to be interesting to see just where it goes.

[grayg1]

One thing a lot of people seem to overlook when comparing prices between PC and consoles is how much the actual games cost. The PC is far better price wise for games.
A new game on a console is £40 or sometimes about £35 if you really have a good look around. On PC the games are typically £25 new or £20 if you have a really good look, heck sometimes games are just £20 naturally on release.
I got RSV 2 on PC for £19.99 delivered on release. Kanes Wrath for £15 on release, but how much do you think it's going to cost on release for Xbox 360? £30 perhaps? and your still going to have an inferior game without that mouse to use.
It's now come to a point that I feel quite disgusted when I have to pay £40 for the new game on my PS3.

All this paying less for games adds up.

[kalniel]

Only problem is that more complex PC games genres such as flight sims may decline further due to their unsuitability for consoles.

There are several genres that have already died, but that's just because they're unpopular Flight sims will stay on the PC for many many years to come - all that will happen (if it's not already) is they'll become hobby/simulation software, not a 'game'. People who glide/fly already shell out hundreds/thousands of pounds on their hobby, charging close to a hundred pounds for one program is still 'good value' compared to flight time, especially if it gets any kind of official creditation.

What is stopping the console manufacturers from actually allowing you to upgrade the console itself, like you used to be able to add more ram to the Amiga. An add in slot that allows you to upgrade video ram or even allow you to change the graphics chip in the same way you can swap hard disks from a 5" bay on a PC. Make them swappable that way and consoles will definately move forward. Granted this is just speculation.

As soon as they do that they'll loose all of the advantages of being a console - ie one platform so compatability is assured. Hence it'll only ever happen in a way that affects peripheral use of the console - hard disk size, connectivity etc. Changing graphics chips will suddenly turn the console into a PC where you have to say 'this game only works with graphics chips more powerful than X'.

[CaseyV9]

No but neither can the Xbox 360

Your 1080p on your Xbox 360 is fake it's more around 720p and sometimes even less. Just because it says 1080p on the games box doesn't mean it's really 1080p.

Maybe not, but you can't deny that the consoles got a hell of a lot more performance out of it than PC did.