Consoles vs PC gameing thread.

[agentgonzo]

Actually consoles are somewhat good for this also.

Lugging the 48" flat screen TV on the other hand...

 

[RS-232]

Really? Are we arguing about what is better? Who cares! To each their own. Big deal :facepalm:

 

[Ark]

The problem here is threefold...

One, how many people do buy full-size faming PCs, and of those, how many will still buy them in 3 to 6 years time when tablets have become cheaper and more widespread? If the PC-buying crowd falls under a critical mass, the hardware will not be sold anymore because big retailers will want to use their space to sell other, best selling merchandise. There may still be dedicated outlets, but if the manufacturers do not see the money in it, they'll stop building the hardware and that will be it.

Two, the real money for publishers is in consoles. We're going to see more console-exclusive titles, and way less PC-exclusives. This will step down the demand even more. We need more killer apps for full-size machines.

Third, the hardware people love locked-down devices. Easier to keep under control. Once those devices become the norm, where will be the incentive to support hacker-friendly machines?

I do share your concerns, computing really is trending towards locked-down, controlled devices that can't exist without constantly phoning home to Apple or Google's servers. Consoles are money farms that are more difficult to pirate, so publishers are focusing on that market and sticking us with the crappy ports, or nothing at all. We may end up in a situation where the only stuff really available for PC is open-source developed because the big names have abandoned the platform.

All we can really do about it is continue to invest in PC hardware and software to keep the market going. Which is easier said than done, because console ports SUCK, and the one games really worth $60 are the ones that were developed for PC in the first place.

 

[Face]

We may end up in a situation where the only stuff really available for PC is open-source developed because the big names have abandoned the platform.

I, for one, would welcome our new open-source overlords. :woohoo:

But seriously: I don't play games as often now as I did "in the old days". Nowadays, I'm mostly running flight sims (and of course Orbiter), only now and then a couple of minutes on some interesting flash games or demos. The last time I bought a game was... well... 10 years ago? IIRC, it was some Star Trek thingy...

But the topic at hand is starting to creep into my life due to my kids. The usual Nintendo DS is already behind us, I guess the next will be some bigger console. And I think this is one segment of the market you can't easily occupy with PC games: children.

regards,
Face

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Consoles are much better for gaming, given that they were designed for that purpose. However, for adaptability (and Orbiter), PC ftw.

 

[bujin]

I'm exclusively a PC gamer (when I get to play games these days). I just never got the hang of console controls. I'm strictly a keyboard & mouse kinda guy!

I tend to upgrade my PC every few years, but rarely spend more than about £500. While my computer is still playing all the latest games reasonably well, it's fine. It's struggling a bit with Battlefield 3, but that's only because I've only got 2Gb RAM at the moment - I have 8Gb on order which should be here by Friday!

 

[Urwumpe]

Because it's always the same "my bike is shinier than yours" argument. Crazy as I may be about hardware, they're just tools in a box.

Ah, cool response. :lol:

There had never been an Atari ST vs Amiga war or had there been one? :rofl:

---------- Post added at 07:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:59 PM ----------

Compare the costs of paying for back surgery after hauling the desktop PC in a laptop fashion...

No self-propelled PC yet?

 

[Ghostrider]

There had never been an Atari ST vs Amiga war or had there been one? :rofl:

Probably there has been. Where are the Archimedes guys by the way?

 

[Urwumpe]

Probably there has been. Where are the Archimedes guys by the way?

Still happy and floating a few cm above the floor. :lol:

 

[agentgonzo]

Where are the Archimedes guys by the way?

Greece?

 

[Linguofreak]

I'm not particularly afraid of that, as long as people are still buying full-size gaming rigs they aren't going anywhere. It's like the Small Block Chevy, even decades after GM stopped building them, there is a tremendous aftermarket community that manufactures new and improved parts for them.

The thing is that, as long as Moore's Law keeps up, desktops will eventually be outperformed by laptops for anything that doesn't involve massive parallelism or high redundancy requirements. There's a reason that mainframes and minicomputers are no longer popular: Performance increases in computing come from miniaturization. For a given size, there's a maximum performance you can get, limited by the length of your signal paths. Sure, there will probably be *some* market for desktops in the future, but quite possibly not for the uses you might expect, and in any case, you'll lose the economies of scale that desktops now have. Even now the advantages of a laptop are considerable enough to offset the extra price for enough people that they outsell desktops. If Moore's Law continues to hold for long enough, the time will eventually come when the desktop hits a point of diminishing returns and ceases to even be price-competitive. (Of course, eventually Moore's Law will run up against hard limits in semiconductor technology. If a new technology cannot be found by then that can make similar exponential performance gains by miniaturization, none of the above will apply, and there's a chance that that will happen before desktops hit that point of diminishing returns).

So eventually people will stop buying desktops because they cease to be competitive price-to-performance-ratio-wise.

Even though computing in general seems to be trending to locked-down, Fischer-Pricey tablet interfaces, as long as people still buy full-size gaming PCs, the hardware isn't going anywhere. Right now the hardware is cheaper and more accessible than it's ever been.

But even PC hardware is trending toward lockdown. You've got UEFI and secure boot coming in, and while that's not a concern if properly implemented (allowing the user, rather than the manufacturer, control over what operating system signing keys the firmware accepts or rejects), the trend seems to be toward an implementation that is cause for concern.

While it's not (yet) the "everything but Windows will be locked out" that some in the free software crowd have been panicking about, it does seem that, for many machines, only Windows (and maybe one or two more select OS's determined by the manufacturer) will be able to take advantage of secure boot, with users being forced to disable the feature to run OS's of their own choice (and to keep flipping between having it enabled and disabled to dual boot). And I find it a fairly good bet that, if firmware that does allow the user to arbitrarily approve or deny signing keys does show up on the market, computers with it will be priced predatorily high.

And I won't be surprised if Microsoft's marketing department doesn't take advantage of that: "Linux is not secure because it does not take advantage of the secure boot feature of UEFI, whereas Windows does", when really, Linux can take advantage of secure boot, but would just be running up against manufacturers not selling machines without user-configurable secure boot.

---------- Post added at 15:30 ---------- Previous post was at 15:00 ----------

But the topic at hand is starting to creep into my life due to my kids. The usual Nintendo DS is already behind us, I guess the next will be some bigger console. And I think this is one segment of the market you can't easily occupy with PC games: children.

Neah... Me and my brother were into our teens before we ever owned a full-up console at home, and I was in middle school before we even had a Gameboy. All our childhood gaming was done on a PC (and much of it on an old 486 at that). Now, granted, none of our games were the big-name titles you find prominently displayed in stores: they mostly came out of shareware packs, but they entertained us quite well through our childhood.

Now, we may have been atypical children, but I think (though it's purely a semi-educated guess) that a Linux PC might help defray costs that you might otherwise spend on consoles: a lot of the games that are available for Linux are in the same vein as those shareware packs we played as kids (but free full versions instead of demos!). Such games are available for Windows (in fact, I got into the FOSS scene at first through FOSS games and utilities for Windows), but involve more websearching effort to find, as Windows doesn't have much in the way of centralized repositories (except Steam, but I'm not familiar enough with its content to know if it has a large number of titles in the vein of those that entertained me as a kid, plus I don't trust commercial repositories not to implement perverse DRM schemes).