Armchair Speculation Pt 2

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, February 28, 2013, 22:45 (4073 days ago) @ electricpirate

Just a few points. PCs growth as a gaming platform comes from experimentation in games, business models, and distribution systems. Thee fact that you can outpace the current gen consoles with a 600 dollar PC at this point is a bonus, but the games driving PC gaming growth are decidedly low spec. PCs are growing because of Minecraft, LoL, Dota2, Team Fortress 2, and the massive back catalog that can be had for cheap.

I don't think that can be substantiated.

These sorts of titles certainly do make up a lot of the PC sales that do exist. (Although Minecraft also did really, really well on XBLA as well.) Myself, I started playing on XBLA and moved over to my Mac so I could access mods.

But it's a different thing to say that indies and experimental games and models are driving PC sales than to say they are driving PC growth as a platform.

For AAA releases like destiny though, the PC market is still a fraction of the console market. I'm trying to find a link, but Far Cry 3 had something like 16% of it's sales on PC, so while the market is growing, it's still small.

It's not really growing, though. It's gaining in comparison to the console markets, which are slowing at the end of a cycle. As a platform, Windows (which is really what you mean when you say PC gaming) is not really growing as a platform for gaming. It is being beat out by consoles and now, in past few years, mobile devices and tablets.

What I expect to see in the coming years is not significant growth on the PC side of the gaming industry, but rather consolidation under ecosystems like Steam and Origin. Those platforms will grow, but as other kinds of devices take up residence in niches that before would have had PCs in them, and expand to fill other niches that PCs never could, we may in the future look back at some point around this time and realize that this was the peak for traditional PCs-- not just for gaming, but for a whole range of applications. These kinds of shifts-- from general purpose to specific purpose and back again-- tend to be cyclical, but I think we're still at the beginning of a special purpose cycle, not heading back the other way yet.

In the future, i'd expect the excitement over next gen consoles to slow the PC's rise, not stop it. The correct position for Bungie is to be releasing on PC IMO, you want that market to have your game as it is a platform on the rise.

I pretty much expect it to be reversed entirely, at least in terms of market share. That doesn't mean that PC games won't have an absolute increase in titles sold, year over year, or that platforms like Steam and Origin won't continue to increase their market share, but I think by the time that the current consoles are so old that no more new releases are coming out, the new consoles will have enough installed base to take up the slack. Perhaps 2-3 years.

The only places doomsaying about no PC versions are PC gaming evangelists.

This is dead on. That Rock Paper Shotgun clickbait was awful.

Which is a shame, because when they write about games that just happen to be on the PC (as well as on other platforms) they're a cut above. There's a kind of bunker mentality groupthink in there that reminds me a lot of what it was like to be a Mac user in the darkness of Apple's Gil Amelio days.

Yea, I've kind of been figuring that the "Seamless co-op" model was in large part to reduce bandwidth and server costs, while having the benefit of removing some of the awfulness of large scale MMO clusterfucks.

I think that's only part of it. I don't really think Bungie is that bottom-line motivated, although they are not immune to commercial considerations. It'd be silly to think so.

I think what they're looking at is accessibility. Matchmaking is much more accessible than a server list, but a system that does matchmaking behind the scenes is even more so. I think Bungie is very aware of how the multiplayer Halo community is perceived, and how much of those interactions are colored by the nature of the experience. I think Bungie wants to make a cooperative experience just as accessible, and just as seminal, as the solo and vs multiplayer experiences are.