Is PC gaming doomed? Apolyton 2008 edition

[Asher]

Games simultaneously released on PC and Console in North America tend to do very terribly on the PC. Look at Call of Duty 4. Or Madden, which was cancelled altogether on the PC.

[Ecthy]

Is LOTM stupid? Or is there a certain North American notion of satire that I grasp but don't appreciate?

[Asher]

He's not stupid, he's just cognitively challenged.

[Wiglaf]

I don't understand why you cannot connect a console to a PC. This kind of underwear setup would enable developers to pick whether they want the up close, mouse/keyboard, more cerebral style, or the home theater/explosive **** style of the normal console game. Since everyone owns some kind of PC, the former option wouldn't really compromise sales so much, but would have tremendous benefits for developers.

Put two USB ports on a 360, give it a better os and a vga/dvi out and you're set.

[DrSpike]

You can already get a mouse/keyboard for the 360. Connecting the console to a PC doesn't look practical.

[Wiglaf]

Why not? Make it smaller and swappable.

[Felch]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
Put two USB ports on a 360

Look at the front right of the box.

[Wiglaf]

Good luck connecting your mouse or keyboard to them. They might as well not be there.

[Asher]

Originally posted by DrSpike
You can already get a mouse/keyboard for the 360. Connecting the console to a PC doesn't look practical.

[Felch]

Originally posted by Mr Snuggles
Or Madden, which was cancelled altogether on the PC.

Madden buyers are retarded. "Oh look, it's the same game as last year, except with updated stats! Certainly this is a worthy way of spending $60."

Unless you're buying last year's Madden for five bucks, you're getting scammed.

That being said, why would anybody play in on PC? It's all about sitting on a couch and playing with friends, like Soul Caliber or Halo.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ecthy
Is LOTM stupid? Or is there a certain North American notion of satire that I grasp but don't appreciate?

since your post followed immediately upon that of one of our other distinguished posters, and if read seriously was making the exact same point, I assumed you were already speaking sarcastically and responded in kind.

Obviously the German market is different from the North American market. Even so, that in ONE signficant market MS, the maker of Windows, the proprietor of "Games for Windows" is deliberately harming the Windows version in favor of the 360 version seemed at least worth noting.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Mr Snuggles
Games simultaneously released on PC and Console in North America tend to do very terribly on the PC.

outsold 8 to one by the 360 in 2007. Excluding sales on Steam, apparently. The inclination of FPS players to pirate games continues to make it difficult to keep that genre on the PC.

I wonder what the sales comparison for 2008 so far is - I know its had legs on the 360.

[lord of the mark]

Top Ten PC games sold in US in week ending June 15


1. Spore Creature Creator
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
3. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
4. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack
5. World of Warcraft
6. World of Warcraft: Battle Chest
7. The Sims 2 FreeTime Expansion Pack
8. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff Expansion Pack
9. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
10. Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

So COD4 still has legs on the PC, but the list is still mainly Sims and WoW.

Spore CC is #1, but sells for only $10.

[Wiglaf]

Originally posted by Mr Snuggles

I have no idea why connecting a 360 to a PC 'doesn't look practical.' You pick it up and move it. It isn't that heavy, and if they built it with portability in mind the idea would work.

[lord of the mark]

more 'spam'

http://schofield.nu/blog/?p=32

"But Kevin Unangst, senior global director of Windows gaming at Microsoft Corp., said the US retail sales decline is deceptive. “What it doesn’t take into account is a massive shift to online gaming on the PC,” he said.

Worldwide sales support that argument - they soared last year, to $11.3 billion from $9.3 billion in 2006, according to DFC Intelligence, a market research and consulting firm based in San Diego.

Unlike the major console games, which are sold only on disks, many PC games are now downloaded directly onto the buyer’s hard drive. Valve Corp., creator of the popular Half-Life games, pioneered the concept in 2004, with its online service called Steam. Today Steam sells more than 250 games by Valve and other PC game publishers. The service has 15 million registered users, and posted 2007 sales growth of 158 percent. Valve cofounder Gabe Newell recently said he expects Steam sales will soon surpass Valve’s retail store revenues.

Steam has lots of rivals. Major game makers like Electronic Arts Inc. and Ubisoft Entertainment sell game downloads on their websites. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. sells games through the online service Direct2Drive. DFC Intelligence estimates that in 2007 online sales of PC games came to $450 million in North America and $1.9 billion worldwide, and DFC analyst David Cole said that these numbers may underestimate the size of the market.

PCs are also profiting from the boom in massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs, where hundreds of thousands take part in ongoing adventures over the Internet. The new Age of Conan and the perennially popular World of Warcraft are both MMOs, and neither is available on a console. Indeed, the most popular MMO games are designed for the PC or Macintosh computer.

“MMOs are definitely well suited to the PC,” said Bryan Dezayas, associate director of product marketing for Alienware, a unit of Dell Inc. that makes high-end computers for avid gamers. The games have many complex commands that would be difficult to operate with a console game controller, but are easy with a desktop computer’s keyboard and mouse.

In addition, MMOs often store many gigabytes of data on a computer’s hard drive. “That’s something that’s not possible on a console today,” Dezayas said, because console hard drives are generally not large enough to handle that much data. Funcom, maker of Age of Conan, plans to make a version for the Xbox 360, but Dezayas predicted some features would have to be eliminated.

Nobody has hard numbers on how many people play MMO games, partly because some companies are tight-lipped about sales data. For instance, privately held Turbine Inc. of Westwood, maker of Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, won’t reveal sales numbers.

But World of Warcraft, the leader of the pack, claims 10 million customers. Unlike traditional video games, which are paid for just once, MMOs generally charge a monthly subscription fee. World of Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, raked in $1.2 billion last year, most of it from gamers paying about $15 a month. Age of Conan uses the same subscription model. At least 400,000 customers have signed on, with more arriving every day. They pay $50 for the software, which includes the right to play online for 30 days. After that, it’s $15 a month. It’s the kind of steady revenue stream console-game publishers can only dream about.

Then there are the easy-to-play “casual games” like Scrabble or Bejeweled. Distributed on the Internet, such games turn up on the computers of bored office workers around the world. Casual gaming on personal computers generated $1.7 billion in revenue last year, up 20 percent from 2006, according to the Casual Games Association. Despite the games’ simplicity, players find them irresistible, with many playing for seven or more hours per week. “Casual gamers are people that don’t know yet that they’re hardcore gamers,” said Kristen Salvatore, editor in chief at PC Gamer magazine.

Not that PC game designers are satisfied with sluggish retail sales. Microsoft’s Unangst said his company works closely with game developers to make it easier for them to write good games for Windows machines. Microsoft is also paying for gaming kiosks in GameStop retail stores, where customers can try out the latest titles and possibly purchase them.

Still, Unangst concedes, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see retail continue to decline over time, at least in the US.” But that should be more than offset by new revenue from online fantasy buffs and networked Scrabble addicts, he said. “When you take those in aggregate, we see nothing but growth.”

Source: The Boston Globe