isnt this topic out each month?
PC gaming isnt dead its just practically stagnant, (even in once pc dominated contries like germany its become the little brother to console gaming)
contrast this with console gaming which year after year grows 10-20%

Quote:Original post by eedok
It's not like we're having a gaming shortage or anything, like the other day I saw this silverfall game on steam, and I decided to try it, and liked the demo, but have far too many games to go through to consider buying it yet.

A little off topic, but I wouldn't get it. It got blasted in the reviews for technical problems, interface issues, and gameplay flaws, and I would have to agree with them after playing the demo myself. Not worth getting.

PC gaming is dead!
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PC gaming is alive!!

Quote:Original post by Promit

Quote:Original post by boolean
Console gaming is dying, not PC gaming.

GTA IV, possibly more than 9 million sales in its first day.

Apparently its more like 4.2 million. This raises the question though, if 60% of the sales were on the 360 which only has an install base of 18 million (and 60% on the PS3 in Europe with just 5 million consoles), how much better would it have done last gen? The PS2 and the PSX had an install base of about 100 million units, can you imagine GTA IV sales with that kind of install base? If this is console gaming succeeding, I'd hate to see it when its dying.

Quote:Original post by Promit
The 360's attach rate is above 7 games per console now. The Wii is selling faster than the PS2 ever did. March saw more than a million home consoles sold, and software sales were $1.7 billion.

Yet the 360 hasn't even hit 20 million consoles yet, the amount they sold last gen when they were on the losing end of the PS2, let alone launching a year ahead of the PS3. The PS3 is a joke in comparison to what the PS2 sold, sitting at 12 million instead of 120 million. The Wii is selling millions of consoles, but that's why there is a huge debate over why people are buying it just for Wii Sports then sticking it on a cupboard. It's quickly falling out of love with the gaming demographic because the third party games just aren’t there, once again falling back to the Mario/Zelda/Metroid/Kart racing formula. Where is it's GTA killer? Where is its Halo killer?

But this is more than just sales figures. My point is PC gaming is far from the “MMO machine” people like to paint it as. It’s got just as many big games as the consoles do, the consoles are becoming just as prone to problems as PC gaming (hence the swarm of problems with GTA circling the net), and the advantage of the price tag isn’t what it used to be. PC gaming may not be stronger or weaker than before, but consoles are certainly struggling more this generation than the last. There isn’t a market leader, with the Wii running off ahead but leaving all the big budget games like COD4 and Bioshock behind while the other consoles are getting all the big budget games but failing to turn a decent install base. If this generation has a leader, I can’t find it.

Quote:Original post by Nytegard
Although this has been discussed to death, I'll be paraphrasing from a post Draginol made about Piracy & PC Gaming.

PC gaming isn't dieing. The hard truth is not that only online FPS's and online MMORPG's, or things that require an internet connection are going to be the future and the only thing that sells. It's about sales. Sooner or later companies will stop making games that look good, or they can brag about, and start making games that sell.

...
And about Crysis and piracy? Let's be honest a moment. Crysis isn't a game designed at people who pay money for games.

Thanks for that link. That's pretty much my view of this subject too, and it explains it far better than I would (and with more credibility to boot). Games like Crysis seem to be explicitly designed designed for credibility in developer circles, and all that gee-flash wizardry not coincidently tends to also appeal most to those who are comfortable with pirating software.

PC gaming is never going to die as there will always be a market. But the industry is always changing. Pirates are indeed shooting themselves in the foot, as more developers realise that it's far better to target their products towards paying customers. And paying customers tend to have different tastes in games.

Quote:Original post by think_different
The way I see it.

Consoles are becomming more and more like Media Center PCs with each generation. Soon we'll have consoles with keyboards and mice as additional peripherals. We'll browse the web. We'll check e-mail. We'll play RTS games. We'll install custom software. And soon I don't think we'll be able to easily tell the difference between a home console and home PC. They'll both serve the same purpose. PC's on the other hand will shift mostly towards servers and application development. The good news, the lowest common denominator in homes is going to be much higher. Right now it's absurdly expensive to keep up with PC technology.

Just my predictions.

I kind of like this way of thinking, I've always heard how lousy the x86 architecture actually is and that it's success is mostly due to good timing, good marketing or whatever, if the success of consoles finally allows us to move from the x86 architecture to say cell processor PCs I am all for it [smile].

I've always wished Commodore had been the big Home PC winner.