Rumor: Microsoft to relaunch PC gaming with Windows 8

[Mike Gayner]

He's just too young to remember how much a pain in the ass it was to play games in dos.

Yeah that's exactly what came to my mind. Shut down windows - dos command into a game, close game, restart windows. Massive failure. Why would you advocate leaving your operating system to do something as simple as play a game these days?

 

[RavenSEAL]

Yeah that's exactly what came to my mind. Shut down windows - dos command into a game, close game, restart windows. Massive failure. Why would you advocate leaving your operating system to do something as simple as play a game these days?

I don't mean it in any way remote to that...

Think of it this way- Windows it self is the platform. Divided into 2, your normal user stuff and your DirectX.

When you launch the game, windows would simply log off all the processes and log into a platform, aka, DirectX, and the game file would be executed with JUST the processes required for the game to run, disregarding anything else that might disturb performance.

Again, i don't know jack about programming, it's just an idea looking from the outside.

 

[blurredvision]

He's just too young to remember how much a pain in the ass it was to play games in dos.

Pain in the ass? Are you telling me you didn't enjoy setting DMA's and IRQ's to get a game to run?

 

[sandorski]

Pain in the ass? Are you telling me you didn't enjoy setting DMA's and IRQ's to get a game to run?

...and Memory loaders/controllers(forget the name now lol). Glad all that crap is over.

 

[datalink7]

...and Memory loaders/controllers(forget the name now lol). Glad all that crap is over.

Boot disks yay!

 

[Bateluer]

Windows 8 won't revitalize or relaunch PC gaming, Intel's SB and AMD's fusion line of chips will. It's going to cause the market for people that have capable gaming systems to absolutely explode. Everyone will have a laptop or a system capable of playing games at a similar performance level to the consoles and as the retards that buy games on the iphone, people will buy it if what they have will play it.

These fusion chips will bring PC gaming from an enthusiast activity to one for the general populace.

That's not even remotely to say that PC gaming is in trouble, when you look at the projected revenue of just MMOs, it's staggering. PC gaming is doing well enough already.

Uh, doubtful. At least, not in the first generation anyway. The IGPs on Fusion and SB are comparable to the ~50 dollar video cards right now. And remember, discrete graphics won't sit still either. As AMD and Intel improve their xPUs, they will also be improving their discrete graphics chips as well. The IGPs on the CPU core will improve, but will continue to be on the 'entry' level side because the discrete chips improved as well.

I've been gaming for 20 years and PC games today are better than ever. You guys really need to get a grip on this whole "pc gaming is dying" stuff.

Games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect are hardly dumbed down or inferior to games released a decade ago. If anything they're superior. THe production values of modern games are fantastic.

Wanted to comment on this as well. I've been gaming for nearly 15 years myself. While some aspects have drastically improved, such as the APIs and platforms, its important to note that having a 10GB install and hundreds of millions of lines of code do not make a game 'complex'. Planescape Torment was complex, Baldur's Gate 2 was complex. Both had involved, intricate stories, etc. DAO and ME, while enjoyable games, are VERY dumbed down in comparison. Look at the characters. MEx's characters were fully voiced, and VERY well done, but those couple of paragraphs per character of fully voiced dialog fell way short of what we saw in Torment. Torment's characters weren't fully voiced, but were much more fleshed out, with intricate backstories, they felt more real.

Remember, most of the money on today's 'production value' games gets spent on graphics and sometimes sound. Very little gets spent on writing, and often support of the game falls by the way side after its released.

 

[NinjaCat]

Right ... Microsoft didn't have to kill hardware audio acceleration, but yet they did so with vista (and continued in W7)

I'd much rather be able to use any sound card for gaming than only having a creative sound card to get full audio quality.

I'd like to be able to use linux when gaming, then I can use it as my main os.

 

[CPA]

We've heard this before from MS. I hope it happens, but I'm not confident they will push it hard.

 

[mmntech]

Wasn't Windows Vista supposed to revitalize PC gaming way back in 2006? The Games for Windows campaign didn't pan out so well. DirectX 10 was never exactly well utilized either. Arguably services like Steam have done the most to reenergize the platform.

PC gaming is a niche market. It has been probably for the last 20 years and will be so for some time. It has a high entry cost. I think the publishers have corrected their mistakes for the most part. It doesn't need saving at this point. The platform has recovered.

 

[Nintendesert]

Uh, doubtful. At least, not in the first generation anyway. The IGPs on Fusion and SB are comparable to the ~50 dollar video cards right now. And remember, discrete graphics won't sit still either. As AMD and Intel improve their xPUs, they will also be improving their discrete graphics chips as well. The IGPs on the CPU core will improve, but will continue to be on the 'entry' level side because the discrete chips improved as well.




Wanted to comment on this as well. I've been gaming for nearly 15 years myself. While some aspects have drastically improved, such as the APIs and platforms, its important to note that having a 10GB install and hundreds of millions of lines of code do not make a game 'complex'. Planescape Torment was complex, Baldur's Gate 2 was complex. Both had involved, intricate stories, etc. DAO and ME, while enjoyable games, are VERY dumbed down in comparison. Look at the characters. MEx's characters were fully voiced, and VERY well done, but those couple of paragraphs per character of fully voiced dialog fell way short of what we saw in Torment. Torment's characters weren't fully voiced, but were much more fleshed out, with intricate backstories, they felt more real.

Remember, most of the money on today's 'production value' games gets spent on graphics and sometimes sound. Very little gets spent on writing, and often support of the game falls by the way side after its released.

It doesn't matter what the discrete market does, that's the PC gaming niche market. That isn't where the potential for growth is, it's the everyday buyer that gets a laptop, netbook or new PC from BestBuy that now has a competent enough graphics capability to play thousands of games that are already out there and the thousands of more that developers will design for those fusion chips.

iOS has already shown us that the average person will buy games if they have something that will play it.

 

[magomago]

Here's whats been happening in a nutshell. The game sells poorly because PC players were disgusted with it and because pc piracy is so rampant, the publisher wrongly blames it only on piracy on the PC for low sales, publisher devotes more resources to console games where, in general, it isn't easy to pirate, usually needs a hardware modification, and where there is a bigger pool of people to increase the chance of buying your game regardless of the quality, which leaves less for the PC versions because the market isn't as big and piracy is so much more rampant among the market. The PC versions become even less optimized, more buggy, and receive less support, PC sales suffer. Publisher blames piracy and devotes more resources to the consoles. Rinse, lather, repeat.

On the plus side though, since PC gaming is the only thing keeping me running Windows, there's a good chance Windows 7 will be the last MS OS I buy, since the odds are that I won't get an educational discount on Windows 8.

fixed

 

[exdeath]

Over zealous DRM killed PC gaming. Nothing else. It would appear that it was because of XBox 360/PS3, but the reality is the consoles themselves didn't kill PC gaming, the fact that you just pop in your disc and play without being treated like a criminal on probation is what makes it more attractive than PC gaming.

Also the gaming business is headed towards the black boxed locked down nickel and dimed to death lease model like the cell phone industry. Total control of your living room by EA and Activision, buying up all the good independent developers, franchising and milking good titles for all they worth, throwing in a new level and selling it again as an empty sequel, making you buy 15 different $100 plastic guitar controllers for each game (that cost them 50 cents to make in Taiwan), etc.

That is what is killing gaming in general, not just PC gaming. EA and Activision and their desire for publisher dominated and controlled gaming industry like the cell phone/WoW business model where it's all about reselling you the same online content under 15 different labels.

Of course we see why everyone is hell bent on DRM... has absolutely nothing to do with piracy. Before long all vendors will move to online only content because they despise you for having the ability to rent, borrow, or loan out your games/movies/etc. If they could they would take control of your microwave with a mandatory connection to your BluRay player, and you'd get an added surcharge for movie theater popcorn prices if you popped popcorn in your microwave while you were watching a copyrighted movie.

It wasn't Microsoft who killed PC gaming, it was a greedy shift in industry business model. Seriously how many times are they going to sell you Call of Duty and Madden? Seriously.

 

[exdeath]

...and Memory loaders/controllers(forget the name now lol). Glad all that crap is over.

Ah yes DOS 32 bit protected mode XMS extenders... I DO miss those days actually.

DOS/4GW and CWSDPMI are the ones I mainly worked with

 

[paperfist]

I've been gaming for 20 years and PC games today are better than ever. You guys really need to get a grip on this whole "pc gaming is dying" stuff.

Games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect are hardly dumbed down or inferior to games released a decade ago. If anything they're superior. THe production values of modern games are fantastic.

Game play these days is dumbed down in almost every shape and form. Look at the Battlefield & CoD series and then compare them to their predecessors. Look at Simcity vrs Societies; Civilization IV vrs V.; UT 2003 vrs UT 3.

Look at genres: adventuring, flight, tycoons, simulators, sports, and space are nearly whole segments that are dead.

Look at a company: Epic, and even id, massive FPS games with mind bending SDKs for which you could build anything out of are extinct. Epic won't even touch the PC anymore.

Even graphics the holy grail of PC gaming has slowed down considerably.

The only saving grace arriving on the scene are Indy developers who are returning gaming value back to game play. Maybe they will rise u, maybe they won't, but for now PC gaming is a shadow of its former self.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

If World of Warcraft was on consoles, PC gaming would be over.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

I don't care if they are console ports as long as they are done nicely on the PC.

When people say that PC gaming is dead, part of the context of that is the knowledge that consolization tends to reduce the quality of the games on the PC compared to what they would be like if they were PC-only.

For example, consolization destroyed the Unreal Tournament franchise. Also, consolization essentially eliminated online multiplayer and modding and custom maps from Dragon Age, which was supposed to be a spiritual successor to Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate II.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Look at Simcity vrs Societies; Civilization IV vrs V.; UT 2003 vrs UT 3.

Note that UT 2003 was regarded as consolized garbage by most fans of the original UT99.

Look at a company: Epic, and even id, massive FPS games with mind bending SDKs for which you could build anything out of are extinct. Epic won't even touch the PC anymore.

I agree. Consolization killed the "arena style / online multiplayer cybersport" FPS genre. On its release, UT3 was severely stripped of non-game play features and was pathetic; it was as though they had released a beta.

 

[Craig234]

The status of PC gaming is more complicated than any one of these factors. I'll list several I think need to be weighed, there might be more.

- Absolute availability of good games. Are there a lot of good games available? This is the first, basic factor.

- Games keeping up with hardware. One thing that makes games better than old games is the advancement of hardware. A great game that was in CGA is not going to look good compared to today's technology. This gives an impression games are improving. But are they really improving less than, as much as or more than the hardware generally? For example, more or fewer 3D monitors, more or fewer advancements in gaming audio cards, etc., might mean gaming is doing better or not.

- PC relative to to other platforms. If PC games are generally made on the PC and a third are ported for consoles, PC's are dominant. If 80% of games are ported on consoles and a fraction are ported to the PC, then the PC might seem to be doing fine, but it really losing ground to consoles. How many GREAT games are only available on consoles, not PC? The more, the worse PC gaming is doing.

- Are more PC games worse because they're console ports, than they would be if natively ported on the PC, restricting gameplay, maybe graphics, etc?

- Business issues - some developers have been driven out of the PC market to consoles. How many much money is in PC's versus consoles? How much PC pirating?

I'm not including it as a factor, but you have to notice retail game stores have gone from filled with PC titles, to having that sad rack like Macintosh used to have.

But people are right that IMO PC gaming seems better than it's ever been now, even if it continues to face questions about changes coming and competition with consoles. At some point, the trend that keeps moving the consoles to have more PC features may reduce the PC gaming market more and more, leaving people who will spend a premium for a quality PC gaming system - maybe fewer and fewer.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Game play these days is dumbed down in almost every shape and form. Look at the Battlefield & CoD series and then compare them to their predecessors. Look at Simcity vrs Societies; Civilization IV vrs V.; UT 2003 vrs UT 3.

Look at genres: adventuring, flight, tycoons, simulators, sports, and space are nearly whole segments that are dead.

Look at a company: Epic, and even id, massive FPS games with mind bending SDKs for which you could build anything out of are extinct. Epic won't even touch the PC anymore.

Even graphics the holy grail of PC gaming has slowed down considerably.

The only saving grace arriving on the scene are Indy developers who are returning gaming value back to game play. Maybe they will rise u, maybe they won't, but for now PC gaming is a shadow of its former self.

Man, that's just BS. THere's a shit load of complicated games on the market.

The Witcher/Witcher 2
Dragon Age (removing the retarded 2nd ed D&D rules hardly makes it dumbed down)
Total War games
Starcraft hasn't changed at all
THere's a shit load of simulation games around.
Tactical shooters...how the hell is Doom complicated?? Stalker is way more interesting.


PC Gaming is dead? Have you guys looked at the sales figures? Games ten years ago would only dream of getting sales figures like Dragon Age and Civ 5. Games like Fallout 3/NV outsold Fallout five-fold on the PC alone. Put it this way Fallout 3 sold 4.7 million copies in its first week, and granted only 17% of those were PC sales that's still almost 800k sales on the PC. I very much doubt Fallout 2 sold 800k in its first week.

 

[Aikouka]

Note that UT 2003 was regarded as consolized garbage by most fans of the original UT99.

That's why they made UT 2004, which was definitely better than UT 2003 .

 

[Maximilian]

http://www.techspot.com/news/41710-rumor-microsoft-to-relaunch-pc-gaming-with-windows-8.html

Oh not this shit again The last attempt with "games for windows live" did more harm than good. Microsoft just needs to team up with valve/steam who know what the hell theyre doing and just leave the gaming side of things to them.

 

[Red Storm]

Wasn't Windows Vista supposed to revitalize PC gaming way back in 2006? The Games for Windows campaign didn't pan out so well. DirectX 10 was never exactly well utilized either. Arguably services like Steam have done the most to reenergize the platform.

PC gaming is a niche market. It has been probably for the last 20 years and will be so for some time. It has a high entry cost. I think the publishers have corrected their mistakes for the most part. It doesn't need saving at this point. The platform has recovered.

Sorry but that's an overused myth that is flat out false. Any modern store-bought computer has all the necessary components to game except a good video card, and you can get a very capable card for around $150.

Just because someone doesn't game, doesn't mean they don't have a computer. They just don't have a high performing video card. That's your cost of entry, and it's right in line with consoles, with both cheaper and more expensive options to suit individual needs and tastes.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

^ If Sandy Bridge graphics turn out to be any good we could potentially see a resurgence in PC gaming - since all those cheap basic systems might actually be able to play something.

 

[fatpat268]

Sorry but that's an overused myth that is flat out false. Any modern store-bought computer has all the necessary components to game except a good video card, and you can get a very capable card for around $150.

Just because someone doesn't game, doesn't mean they don't have a computer. They just don't have a high performing video card. That's your cost of entry, and it's right in line with consoles, with both cheaper and more expensive options to suit individual needs and tastes.

I agree with you, and that works for those who have desktops, but more and more people are buying laptops instead of desktops lately.

 

[BladeVenom]

I agree with you, and that works for those who have desktops, but more and more people are buying laptops instead of desktops lately.

But that trend is coming to an end. People are buying tablets, netbooks, and smartphones now instead of laptops, while spending more on their desktop.

"PC Prices On The Rise" http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374486,00.asp