Who is most to blame for the decline in PC gaming?

[Maximilian]

EA, almost every game they make, and of course the idiots that slurp up their yearly rehashes.

 

[sandorski]

There isn't one, Fool.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: Alienwho
To me the golden age of PC gaming was the late 90's early 2000's. Rune, starcraft, diablo, UT99, Thief: TDP, motocross madness. The fact that I was a teenager at the time and PC gaming was so new and fresh and revolutionary at the time with all the fancy graphics had a lot to do with it as well.

I think one of the reasons it was a good time for games is because almost anyone could come out with a game. If you had an idea and a few friends you could turn it into a game. Now it takes so much work to make anything that will be accepted as 'decent' that it is really hard for someone who just has a game concept to make a game.

Lots of people may have some excellent pc game ideas, but without the means, we never get to see those games.


I saw that the next version of Assassins Creed has 450 people working on that one game. That is just insane. Where in the past you might have had 3 guys in a basement.

 

[Mide]

Of course PC gaming is in a decline. I remember the day when 2-3 good games would come out every month or so. What do we currently have worthwhile? Nothing...we have to wait forever until something remotely entertaining gets released.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

i don't care if its revolutionary or compelling or different or a port or whatever the fuck else. is it fun? the answer to that is yes, there are lots of fun games out.

 

[Wreckem]

Originally posted by: Dumac
Since when is PC gaming dying? I think the growth of console gaming is just making PC gaming seem small in comparison, which it is.

Excluding subscription based games(MMOGs), revenue of PC gaming is down from the $2billion range to below the $1billion range in less than a decade.

Back when it was close to a $2billion business MMOGs accountedfor next to nothing, so an apples to apples approach is to discard them and compare traditional game revenue to traditional game revenue and well the PC Game industry is in a steep decline in terms of revenue(again exluding WoW).

 

[Wreckem]

Originally posted by: StinkyPinky
PC Gaming isn't dead. Games like Starcraft 3, Diablo 3, Sims 4, Fallout 4, Civ 5, Half Life 3 etc would sell a LOT. I bet there's more sales now than a decade ago. It's just that it isn't growing as fast as consoles, that's all.

You'd be wrong. All US Sales, not global.

PC Game Software
1998 - $1.8 billion
1999 - $1.9 billion
2000 - $1.78 billion (84.9 million units)
2001 - $1.75 billion (83.6 million units)
2002 - $1.4 billion (61.5 million units)
2003 - $1.2 billion (52.8 million units)
2004 - $1.1 billion (47 million units)
2005 - $953 million (38 million units)
2006 - $970 million
2007 - $910 million
2008 - $701 million

Console and Handheld Game Software
1998 - $3.7 billion
1999 - $4.2 billion
2000 - $4.1 billion (130.6 million units)
2001 - $4.6 billion (141.5 million units)
2002 - $5.5 billion (162.8 million units)
2003 - $5.8 billion (186.4 million units)
2004 - $6.2 billion (203 million units)
2005 - $6.1 billion (190.5 million units)
2006 - $6.5 billion
2007 - $8.6 billion
2008 - $11 billion

As the numbers show PCs have shrunk by more than half and Consoles have more than doubled in the past decade.

2009 appears that it will be worse than 2008 for the PC game sales barring Starcaft 2 comes out and it sells eleventy-billion copies. PC Game sales are currently down by a significant amount through the first half of the year(double digit %'s), and console games sales are down as well but by a much smaller precentage. For May PC game sales were down 40% from last May and consoles game sales were down 17% from last May.

 

[TehMac]

Wrecken: US tends to be more of a console focused market, so it's not surprising to see those statistics halved.


Thanks for your skewed input though.

 

[Wreckem]

Originally posted by: TehMac
Wrecken: US tends to be more of a console focused market, so it's not surprising to see those statistics halved.


Thanks for your skewed input though.

The US market is the driving force for PC games. Sorry to burst your bubble.

As goes the US PC games market as goes the good PC games. The quality and quantity of games for the PC has gone down just as steeply as the sales decline in the US.

It doesn't mean shit China is #1 PC games market, when the games that are sold their aren't the same games sold in the US.

 

[minmaster]

forgot all of the above +

but if i had to pick 1, i'd say game makers for making crappy poor quality games. games nowadays are not polished up and its so bad that many games already a patch out before it's on the shelves!

 

[Via]

Excluding subscription based games(MMOGs)...

To play devil's advocate - That's a pretty big exclusion, wouldn't you say? (didn't you have some other stuff there as well?)

Also to consider - if you could rent PC games from video stores or gamefly PC gaming would probably be in pretty good shape.

Every video store in my town is stuffed full of console games (hundreds, if not close to a thousand or more). Multiply that by tens of thousands of video stores nationwide and you've got some pretty big numbers.

 

[pennylane]

Consoles are more convenient.

That's it.

 

[TehMac]

Originally posted by: Wreckem

The US market is the driving force for PC games. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Lol, it's no sweat off my skin mate. I find it rather laughable you've conveniently left out the continent known as Europe in your inept attempt at posting data, but go on anyway.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: minmaster
forgot all of the above +

but if i had to pick 1, i'd say game makers for making crappy poor quality games. games nowadays are not polished up and its so bad that many games already a patch out before it's on the shelves!

Since games are taking longer to make with more production cost than before, it may just be that the complexity has increased to the point that it is very difficult to have acceptable quality control. This is an issue that will likely work itself out in time, but since it is an almost universal problem, I would think the problem is more in the environment than the individual. (More volume in the types of components, along with those components being more complex as well. Also the software portion is more complex than in the past as well, all leading to the same quality efforts as before being less effective.)

 

[Zenoth]

It's a combination of many variants, there's not just "one" culprit or guilty, in the end pretty much everything in the entire industry and market contributed to the actual situation of PC gaming, and to a certain extent to Console gaming as well.

 

[TehMac]

Tbh, I'm not really seeing a slump. Things like post-release patches are just as well, because considering game costs and production values AAA titles have today, if such patches didn't exist, games would be broken simply because the games are written on such complex code.

Other issues such as gameplay are more noticeable issues--games like Call of Duty continually use the same rail shooter formula, but they'll change when the market has had enough. That won't change for a while. What is happening though is a boom in the most visceral of human sense--vision. More subtle elements such as the human experience are sought after, but they're not the way huge titles sell most of their games. They sell because at the end of the day, everyone can have fun. It's just while some of us are wanting more than just 'stupid' fun found on consoles.
'

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Originally posted by: TehMac

Originally posted by: Wreckem

The US market is the driving force for PC games. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Lol, it's no sweat off my skin mate. I find it rather laughable you've conveniently left out the continent known as Europe in your inept attempt at posting data, but go on anyway.

OK, then may I ask what your contention is? That PC gaming is growing? Wreckem's numbers would disagree, as do the numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers:

Global Sales Projections through 2012

From the report (these are global figures, remember):

The PricewaterhouseCoopers report suggests a decline in at least one sector: it expects PC games sales to decline 1.2 per cent a year until it reaches sales of USD 3.6 billion in 2012 - down from USD 3.8 billion last year.

This article agrees with the numbers Wreckem posted but adds the units shipped in 2007 and 2008:

PC game sales slip

While video game sales rose to a record high, PC game sales continued to decline in 2008, according to the Entertainment Software Association. PC software sales dropped from $910.7 million in 2007 to $701.4 million in 2008, while unit sales dropped from 36.4 million to 29.1 million.

I have been a PC gamer since the early 90s (and before that, Commodore, Amiga, Atari, etc). I can remember walking into the local Best Buy/Babbages/EB and being overwhelmed at the sheer number of PC games available. You had everything -- sports, RTS, adventure/role playing, simulators, etc.

Today, when you walk into a store, you're lucky to find the PC game space even 25% of what it once was. You no longer have all the sports games you once had, the RTS selection is meager compared to what it once was, and the only thing you tend to see in large quantites are WoW, its expansion packs, and the WoW knock-off MMOs, along with an FPS here and there.

Maybe dying is too strong of a word, but it is certainly in a state of decline and to get back to the topic of this thread, I think that the developers are to "blame." It is generally easier to develop for the consoles due to like hardware and publishers make more money from those efforts due to higher retail costs and lower support costs.

 

[Sylvanas]

PC gaming is fine, chill out.

 

[Chriscross3234]

I don't think there has been a decline in PC gaming in general. However, I do think there has been a decline in the quality and innovation of current games that is created by a gaming industry that is infatuated with trying to create games tailored for the masses. There are so many examples of great games from the past (Baldur's Gate II, Fallout, Half Life, even Doom, think of any of the games that are considered classics by today's standards) that were created and designed to be "great" games in terms of inventing a new playstyle, instilling a truly compelling storyline, immersing the player with realism... It's like the developers barely make the effort to try to design a game with any of these goals in mind. As others have stated, no one is willing to break out of the defined "formulas" because the masses are happy and it makes them money. And that is what hurts the small niche of people who crave more then the standard and generic fps or rpg's with lackluster gameplay or storylines. Don't get me wrong, there are good games out today (Bioshock, Portal), but they don't seem to make as big of an impact and there are just a lot less of them. Oh well, here's to hoping for the best...

 

[alcoholbob]

Kobe Bryant.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

Originally posted by: Astrallite
Kobe Bryant.

no man, its T-macs fault
Text

 

[TehMac]

I could hardly care less about the state of PC Gaming in its entirety. As long as Creative Assembly keeps putting out Total War games (I wouldn't mind some new game franchises from their either) I'm good.

It's all about the market, and right now the market says consoles are big. More like bloated though. There's lots of money floating around, but licensing costs are tremendous, which means the risk factor rises for these games as well, which means you'll always have games for the PC.

Always.

 

[KlokWyze]

The market/consumers talk with their money. They say consoles are where it's at. I would fathom a guess & say that there is a much higher profit margin for the console market than the PC gaming market. The big 3 of the game industry get revenue from software AND hardware AND now DLC is becoming bigger and bigger.... TBC

This topic is a bit retarded....

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: Martimus

Originally posted by: minmaster
forgot all of the above +

but if i had to pick 1, i'd say game makers for making crappy poor quality games. games nowadays are not polished up and its so bad that many games already a patch out before it's on the shelves!

Since games are taking longer to make with more production cost than before, it may just be that the complexity has increased to the point that it is very difficult to have acceptable quality control. This is an issue that will likely work itself out in time, but since it is an almost universal problem, I would think the problem is more in the environment than the individual. (More volume in the types of components, along with those components being more complex as well. Also the software portion is more complex than in the past as well, all leading to the same quality efforts as before being less effective.)

:thumbsup:


That pretty much nails it.

Compare what it took to make a game years ago and what it takes now. It isn't really the developers or gamers fault. It is just how time changes peoples expectations. A good comparison is the movie business.

Look at the films that were made in the 1930's and the amount of work that went into them. Compare that with something in the theaters now. People grew tired of just seeing a single character on the screen in boring sets. People now want action scenes, scenes shot from around the world, soundtracks, etc.

The same is true in a lot of other professions. Architects have to build not a building the same as the last one, but 10 floors taller, and the next 10 floors even taller than the last one.

The same is true with gamers, the more we get the more we want.
I guess it is part of being human, we are never content, always looking for something better. It has been a problem with humanity for a long time, even back to Rome and the gladiator games. They started off with just people fighting and by the end they had to have full out chariot races to the death to keep the people happy.

I hope it never gets to the point that gamers expect so much that no developer can fill the need .

 

[CKent]

Last I read, PC gaming was on the incline, due mostly to MMORPGs... But there is certainly a problem when, to play all the games you want, you need at least 4 separate computers. That doesn't serve gamers, only corporations.


None of the answers suit my feelings on it. People who buy consoles and console games are to blame. Too stupid to use a computer or figure out how, or otherwise too stupid to see what's happening and play their part in preventing it, they have stifled gaming by creating the competitive console market where you can, at best, play a terrible port of a game if it's not made for your preferred system. They, the demand, are the root of the problem. The game developers abandoning the PC for more lucrative console markets, and the console makers themselves, are just along for the ride. If it wasn't them it would be someone else.


But then, stupid people are to blame for most of life's ills, from reality TV to pop music. It isn't surprising to have watched them ruin video games as well.