171 replies to this topic

[Malooko]

trycksh0t, on 24 January 2012 - 02:11 PM, said:

I doubt it. The reason the PS3 and 360 dominated gaming when they released was because PC gaming was still fairly expensive to keep up with, and the developers were able to rapidly adapt to the newest hardware, so upgrading your regularly was almost required in order to keep up. As has been stated above, this is no longer the case. Not only is PC hardware cheaper, it has a drastically longer life-span. Current generation entry and mid-level PC's ($400 - $700) can handle anything that's come out recently, and will be able to take just about anything you can throw at 'em for quite awhile without needing to upgrade anything. The misconception that PC gaming is expensive comes from people thinking you need a "Gaming Rig", which are those several-thousand dollar machines. If it became common knowledge that this is simply not true, in-fact I find most of those "Gaming Rigs" to be complete overkill, I believe that PC gaming would explode on much larger level, as they really are superior to consoles in every conceivable way.

This. My machine is a AMD dual core 3.0 Ghz. I spent a *fair* amount of money on it but that was years ago and it has been able to keep up nicely with anything and everything put out since with only minor upgrades since. And I dare you to find me any console with 3.5 TB disk space that hasnt been banned from Live or the PSN.

[Fresh Meat]

Decent PC hardware is fairly affordable these days and the price/performance ratio just keeps getting better.

[Mason Grimm]

I own both a PC and an Xbox360 and I gotta say that each is great for it's own reasons. I love my Xbox if I wanna do some Kinect sports/fitness on a rainy day or even some Forza 4 or Call of Duty but if I want something with a little more depth and complexity I turn to my PC. Consoles are great for wham, bam, thank you Microsoft.

[Warbeast]

I spend a vast chunk of my disposable income upgrading my PC each year and I'm damn sure even the next gen console will not have a patch on my current rig never mind the PC I will have when the next gen console comes out.

in the long run I really don't see consoles being able to compete with the PC gaming masses, what ever their next gen console is they always looks shiny for a few months then the PC market just moves on again to the next new tech. As always the consoles stay in one place for their 5 year+ life cycle and PCs keep moving on.

Even budget gaming rigs today are very fast with awesome graphics and your getting a lot of bang for your buck as prices drop people just throw in a new graphics card and away they go.

My buddies were raving about how awesome skyrim or modern warfare was on the xbox at which point I showed them the same games on the PC with every thing turned up to 11 and ruined it for them.

That's without even starting on the MMO scene where people are very loal to their chosen brand of platform and in most cases wouldn't swap even for free cookies.

[Kodiak Jorgensson]

Celestial, on 24 January 2012 - 12:08 PM, said:

With the recent announcement that the 'Xbox 720's chipset is now in production (and has been since december last year) It is likely that it will launch late 2012.
While Mechwarrior online will be released mid 2012 ( we hope).
With every new console generation, masses of players flock to the consoles because the first few years of their lives they are superior to PC's. This current generation of consoles nearly killed PC gaming back in 2005-2009. And only now is PC making a comeback.
This game is dependant on players to continue playing, so if my prediction is correct and PC gaming is killed in 2013, will Mechwarrior Online have enough time to be successful before the new consoles are released?

sorry i REALLY could not resist posting it

but in all serriousness no, they arent supperrior in the slightest, there just too slow to keep up with the ever evolveing Pc hardware market another thing about consoles is they cant be upgraded or repaired by the user unless you void the warranty then your pritty much stuffed if it brakes, and will have to pay up 250-500 for a new one,

second, console games are stupidly over priced imo £40-£50 for a new title 30-35 for a 3 year old title, why the in the good name of kerensky would i EVER bother paying that much, when i can get the same game for £30 off steam and all i have to do is wait 5 mins for the dgigital download to complete.not only do i get a cheaper better looking game i get the ability to mod my game which is a BIG community for the PC.

consoles never nearly killed PC publisers nearly killed PC. all the major publisher blew piracy WAY out of proportion and aimed it soley at the PC market to try shift the market over to the consoel markete. which is stupid becasue console piracy is just as big possibly bigger then PC piracy. problem with PC piracy is that games and software will get tallied together makeing it look like a bigger threat.

also Epic Games recently pulled away form the console makret and decided to develope for the PC market once again.

just to clarify reasons PC sales look bad,

1. games are cheaper
2. hardly anyone uses a store for PC games anymore (thanks steam )
3. steam wont release sales numbers. (so i have read, but if anyone can reinforce this point would be great thanks.)

Warbeast, on 24 January 2012 - 02:45 PM, said:

My buddies were raving about how awesome skyrim or modern warfare was on the xbox at which point I showed them the same games on the PC with every thing turned up to 11 and ruined it for them.

That's without even starting on the MMO scene where people are very loal to their chosen brand of platform and in most cases wouldn't swap even for free cookies.

lol nice

[Graphite]

Consoles are just cheap computers. They just can't match a PC for power.

Anyway, I think MWO may potentially be one of those rare games where PC and console gamers could compete fairly.
For most FPS games the mouse and keyboard just destroys gamepads, but MW aiming is relatively slow.

[Refizul]

Considering for how long PC gaming has been dieing it must be undead by now. The current console generation added a lot of console gamers (which had its own drawbacks) but never killed PC gaming, not even in the USA. Nowadays people talk about how mobile gaming and social gaming is going to dominate everything and that is exactly the same useless talk.

Let the new console generation come. The hardware is getting increadible old anyway. Personally I hope for a seperate Physics Processor in the next gen. If a console actually beats a top of the line gaming rig I would be very impressed.

Here are some interresting numbers for the USA (XBOX country :
http://www.newzoo.co...fograph_US.html
The fact that people spend as much time playing PC games as console games (without MMO/casual/etc.) while spending less money is probably a reason why FTP is a big thing on PC.

Edited by Refizul, 24 January 2012 - 05:23 PM.

[Graphite]

Refizul, on 24 January 2012 - 04:54 PM, said:

If a consol actually beats a top of the line gaming rig I would be very impressed.

Then prepare to not be very impressed.
There's good reason why a top gaming PC costs 10x the price of a console.

Edited by Graphite, 24 January 2012 - 05:14 PM.

[trycksh0t]

Rumor mill is freaking out, apparently the 720 is "supposedly" going to be running an ATI 7000 series GPU...that automatically puts it behind what PC's will be running by the time it releases.

[Demi-Precentor Konev]

If you think the last gen of consoles 'nearly killed PC gaming', you need to get out more.

[Kodiak Jorgensson]

Graphite, on 24 January 2012 - 05:14 PM, said:

Then prepare to not be very impressed.
There's good reason why a top gaming PC costs 10x the price of a console.

lolol brilliant i like you

trycksh0t, on 24 January 2012 - 05:31 PM, said:

Rumor mill is freaking out, apparently the 720 is "supposedly" going to be running an ATI 7000 series GPU...that automatically puts it behind what PC's will be running by the time it releases.

nope http://www.ebuyer.co...-HD-7900-Series

Edited by Kodiak Jorgensson, 24 January 2012 - 05:44 PM.

[Refizul]

trycksh0t, on 24 January 2012 - 05:31 PM, said:

Rumor mill is freaking out, apparently the 720 is "supposedly" going to be running an ATI 7000 series GPU...that automatically puts it behind what PC's will be running by the time it releases.

Only one? Than current PCs beat it already. But it would be nice to finally have Directx 11 used in more games.

[Rhinehart]

One other factor, these days an impressive gaming machine can be a laptop you can carry with you and use anyplace you can get a wifi connection. My laptop runs games like Skyrim with all the settings maxed out. Laptops at the time of the last consle craze didn't have that kind of capability, you needed a good sized desktop to run the big games then. Not too mention a 22 inch Screen that folds up and fits in a briefcase(Albiet a large one) Is pretty freakin cool lol.

[Catamount]

Despite the frequent claim, consoles are almost never more powerful than the PCs they share the market with, even at launch.


Take the PS3, for example. Its CPU sounds impressive at first glance, because it has a few SIMD cores in addition to the main CPU core that give it high floating point performance, but software needs to be no less written to specifically take advantage of this than to take advantage of GPGPU, which was also coming into its own around this time (a lot of it with the Physx engine), and outside of floating point performance, the PS3's "cell" CPU is rather unimpressive.

The GPU was even less impressive. On paper, it's basically a Geforce 8600 in almost every way (transistor count, memory bandwidth, etc), though, iirc, it's actually based on the 7800 series, so it was vastly less powerful than what was available from PC GPUs.


The only advantage of the console was the price, and while its takeaway price is, perhaps, lower than buying an entire gaming PC, since people need PCs anyways, getting a console isn't really cheaper than the price difference of owning a gaming PC, vs a less powerful PC for just everyday tasks, and you don't have to upgrade the PC anymore often, if all you want is console level graphics, which are honestly pretty bad by comparison (a couple years ago, someone on another forum compared Left 4 Dead on the 360 to a PC running an INTEGRATED Radeon HD 4200, and the PC was able to make the game look just about the same in a side-by-side; consoles games are usually rendered at very low resolutions, comparitively low graphical settings, and are often run at lower framerates, sometimes as low as 30fps).



People will flock to the new consoles, sure, but not in a way that will likely hurt the PC market, because there's just no reason, from a technology or price perspective, to choose a console over a PC. In short, the new consoles will attract console players, and since they're already not playing MWO, that's not a loss.

Edited by Catamount, 24 January 2012 - 05:47 PM.

[trycksh0t]

Kodiak Jorgensson, on 24 January 2012 - 05:40 PM, said:

lolol brilliant i like you



nope http://www.ebuyer.co...-HD-7900-Series

What do you mean "Nope"? Those are what's CURRENTLY available to PCs, the 720 won't be around until at least the end of this year, more than likely wont arrive until next year, by which point I fully expect another jump in GPUs. Hence my statement that PCs will have better hardware available by the time the 720 releases.

Edit - Wow, thanks multiquote failure...

Edited by trycksh0t, 24 January 2012 - 06:07 PM.

[Paul Inouye]

Nothing official here but...

Spoiler

One thing often overlooked by the gaming community is the testing grid/matrix required for PC development. To develop for console, you test against 1 system and 1 system spec. You don't have to test for XYZ Company Knockoff4000OMGz +35GB LMNOP RAM on an ABC 123LOLZ Motherboard. This type of testing is very expensive both in component cost and time required to test.

Is MW:O to be concerned about the XBox 720? Not at all. We're a F2P title on PC which has a larger demographic than any console. Sure our min spec is going to be slightly higher than normal but it's not really a barrier to entry.

Did I mention our game is free? FREE. Zilch. Nada. You can have the same experience playing our game while paying nothing as someone who does want to pay for some silly bits.

As an industry vet, I can tell you that the console development model is becoming harder and harder to sustain. You will always have the key players such as EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Take-Two etc who currently have the resources to fund the R&D AND development on new consoles. The slightly smaller studios are having a harder and harder time. Meanwhile, the revenue on new hardware transitions in the console market are making is not streaming in like it used to.

Don't get me wrong, the console market is not going to die anytime soon, but there are better financial and business models out there that are win win for the developers AND the gamer.

Think of it this way.. when was the last time you bought a console title for $50-$60 and the game was pooched by bad design decisions and implementation? You've already shelled out the initial price of the game, what makes you think the developer is going to spend even more development cash to fix the busted title? Even a patch isn't going to fix all the problems and patching lasts for a few months then the game is considered stale.

With the PC F2P model, the design and gameplay can be iterated on and re-released to you, the gamer, at no cost. If I were to make the call that LRMs were dead on accurate and you could snipe a light Mech from across the map with them. You guys would flip out and Bryan would stomp on my fingers so I couldn't design the next release. That big of a game imbalancer is easily addressed with releases of new gameplay patches and executable updates with the F2P model. This is not the case with console. There are memory/footprint limitations on the size of patches you can apply to a title before you're considered an expansion pack. This footprint it NOT dictated by the developers but the hardware manufacturers. An example is that the exe size of a certain console (you can guess) cannot increase in size beyond 4MB in its LIFETIME. So if you have to change a game system and add some script to missions, your potential to keep adding and fixing is VERY limited. This is not the case with F2P PC titles.

So HA! 720 shmeven twenty.. pfffff... psshhhhh.... whatevah!

This message is the point of view of the author only and is in no way related to the point of view of Piranha Games and affiliates.

[Trireaper]

Paul Inouye, on 24 January 2012 - 06:08 PM, said:

This message is the point of view of the author only and is in no way related to the point of view of Piranha Games and affiliates.

I call a minor BS on this... my opinion though
We still love you though Paul. I personally think you're the best/funniest out of all of them.

Edit: Capitalization

Edited by Trireaper, 24 January 2012 - 06:13 PM.

[Paul Inouye]

Trireaper, on 24 January 2012 - 06:10 PM, said:

I call a minor BS on this... my opinion though
We still love you though Paul. I personally think you're the best/funniest out of all of them.

Nah.. unless it's an official announcement in the top forum, my rant here is pure me... not Piranha... if it were Bryan or Russ, that would be a different story.

[Trireaper]

Paul Inouye, on 24 January 2012 - 06:20 PM, said:

Nah.. unless it's an official announcement in the top forum, my rant here is pure me... not Piranha... if it were Bryan or Russ, that would be a different story.

I'll accept this... for now

[Lethal Joke]

IceSerpent, on 24 January 2012 - 01:04 PM, said:

Consoles are irrelevant IMHO. I actually think we'd be better off without that particular crowd in the mix - less of "make it ezmode now!" whining.

That's a bit unfair, isn't it?
The fact that I own a console has no bearing on whether or not I play a game based in my favorite sci-fi universe. I have no conceptions that I would be any better on a console than my pc. I use both. If deprived of one for any period of time, I have the other until I rectify the situation.