I’ve kind of o we really need to pay for this...">covered this subject before, but that was a long time ago and I think things have changed since then. The subject came up when me a friend where on one of our lunch time forays to the local shopping mall. In ‘The Game’ store there my friend pointed out that as far as display space goes, PC games had less space than the current big 2 consoles (Xbox360 and PS2). In fact the PC section was about the same size as the PSP section!
Does this show then end of PC games? I don’t think it’s the end, but the beginning of the end industry as it’s been for a while. Before I go on I’ve got to say that I have never worked in the gaming industry and don’t know any one who has, so this is just uninformed speculation from me.
You can’t blame the game companies for wanting to limit the platforms games are released on. Game development is long and expensive and the 3 platforms that represent the majority of the market are so different that most if not all of the implementation work has be been done 3 times over! This must be a huge burden to the companies.
Now while the PC market is the oldest and easiest (see my reasons for this statement below) to develop for, I’m guessing that market isn’t growing much if at all. But on the plus side for the developers, the money they make in that market is all theirs. Where as in the console market the console makers take a slice (I suspect a big slice) of the price of the game. This is how they can afford to sell the consoles them selves at a loss.
So why did I say that PC games are easiest to develop for? Well as I’ve said in the past, the breathless pace of hardware development means that programers can afford to be lazy. If the game doesn't run fast enough then in 6 months time machines will be powerful enough to run the game at a decent speed. Console programers don’t have that luxury. The life time of a console is likely to be 5 years or more. It has to be that way to allow the console manufactures to recoup there losses. The console programers have to be good at squeezing every last drop of performance out of the hardware. Also unlike their PC counterparts they don’t have fancy API’s like Direct X, to do there work for them, they have to access hardware directly. This means they can really push the hardware hard.
And they do. Just look at what you can do with a 733Mhz processor and a 5 old video card design (Halo 2 on the original Xbox).
So, if what I said is true about console games, then why do the game companies bother with them?
Good question. I’d take a guess that the console manufactures subsidise development of games (which would explain why to date Microsofts Xbox division has only made a profit once and that was on the month Halo 2 was released!) which helps reduce risk to the developers. Also I guess that the market is growing.
And finally I think there is a certain amount of peer presure from other developers which means they have to develop titles for the consoles. If they don’t someone else will.
So where does this leave the PC game market? Well I think there will always be that market, PC’s aren’t going away any time soon, and people will always want to play games, but I think the consoles will keep on getting exclusive titles and the PC won’t get them (did any one say Halo 2?)
So what effect will this have the video card market then? Well with less games that really push these cards, I can see the development rate of these slowing, after all who wants to shell out £150 every 9 months or so to have the latest state of the art card when it dose nothing to improve the game playing experience? This could have an effect on future consoles , since it’s these technologies that the next generation of consoles will be based on.
Maybe this won’t happen. As I said I’ve got no contacts in the gaming industry, so I just shooting in the dark.