A few months ago a friend and I were talking about the movie I Am Legend, and he was telling me the ending of book was far different from the movie. In the end of the book, the “zombie” leader explained to the protagonist that he not fighting a disease but was merely impeding the progress of evolution.
I’ve been thinking similarly along the lines of where console gaming has been taking the industry over the recent years, and wondering if we’re experiencing a similar response, are consoles the next step in gaming? Sure, there’s been a pretty defined split between the two throughout the past, with certain genres (most specifically FPS) generally being dominated in the PC market, while other genres would dominate the consoles (such as platformers, racing, sports, etc.). That line has become more and more split with the growing success of the consoles, and there aren’t many games for the PC that you can’t pickup for a console nowadays.
Three years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report predicting the rise in console success and the slowing of the success of the PC. I used some of this data to show the aggregate growth of online gaming as a whole for Zapdot’s business plan, hoping that they’d be wrong down the road. I was primarily a PC gamer then, and have my roots in gaming from the PC FPS (Rainbow 6, Quake 2&3, UT2K3, and CS and CS:S). Competitive gaming had bloomed on the PC platform, and has had some amazing appeal to network television through its success: from interviews to short segments, to full blown TV shows. Not surprisingly, PWC wasn’t off their marker three years down the road. While I haven’t had access to current numbers to correlate to their estimates, it goes without saying that console gaming is flourishing now, with thousands making the switch daily.
Wednesday’s Penny-Arcarde post made me revisit these thoughts, and they made some of the same arguments I’ve been barking at for awhile.
First and foremost, Computers have been always the best platform out there in terms of the technology that can be utilized for the games themselves. They have always looked better, provided more vast experiences in online play, and for awhile, put you in touch with a much larger community. The biggest selling point for me (and the deciding factor for most hardcore PC gamers) was the precision of input on the computers always trumped that of its console counterparts.
However, I’ve even found myself spending more time on consoles lately, and the answer as to why is pretty easy: comfort. I can sit down on my comfortable couch, and pick up a game for a few hours on my HD TV, enjoying surround sound if the system I’m in provides it. Moreover, the TV and surround system I’m using doesn’t have to be solely set aside for just a gaming system (or systems). With broadband I can just as easily play online with my friends as I could with my computer, with an interface that is centralized around the gaming experience
To get a similar experience on a computer, the price is higher, and includes more wires, more setup time, and potentially, a bit more of frustration and hassle. Tycho put it best, saying that someone who would prefer this simplicity doesn’t make them an idiot, it makes them pragmatic.
So take the PC Platform, and look at what made it better than the console system: online interaction, hardware, and input devices. These major issues are being addressed by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service is utterly amazing compared to what is out there right now. Integration with its games are near seamless, communication and community itself work very well, and with online collaborations like bungie.net to allow screenshot and movie sharing is a giant leap in the right direction. Sony had the right idea with the hardware, putting out the most powerful gaming console that the market has ever seen. This is effectively their biggest issue right now though, as it will take years for coders to even fathom the use of six cores to their benefit in game design. Regardless of this point, we’ve got the “power” concept that we are constantly revisiting in the PC segment being addressed and dealt with. Lastly, we come to the incredible precision that a mouse and keyboard provides to the user. I won’t go out and say that Nintendo has covered this angle, but they are pioneering the industry in the right direction. Nintendo had the melons to release a completely new form of input into games, and tear the industry away from the standard stick-button controller approach that it had been comfortably relying on for the past two decades. This input isn’t the best in the world for trying to convert PC gamers into a hardcore FPS shooter, but it’s a step in the right idea that we need to rethink the hardware we are giving gamers to interact with their virtual environments as they toil through them, and that we should take a direction that is not only fun, and simple but intuitive as well.
So I wouldn’t jump and say that PC Gaming is starting to see it’s demise, because the lines of what PC Gaming is has become more and more blurred, where the typical boundaries that defined PC Gaming has been adopted and translated into today’s modern day consoles. Furthermore, while a PC will be considerably more powerful than the latest console, console hardware specifications are catching up. I think (and certainly hope) that while games will still be available on the PC as time continues, we will start seeing a movement towards a better input system that potentially mimics or improves the PC’s dominating stance in this area, and a more unified console experience for gamers. As a whole, I think this generation is just the final step before we get to see the next evolution in games in how they’re delivered, played, and experienced by gamers.
But until then, I still need to decide if I want to buy Bioshock for the PC or my 360.
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