How eSports are saving the PC industry
hopesandfears.com
hopesandfears.com
For the pros too it's not about the hardware or graphics, many use the lowest possible settings to make sure they get a decent performance. I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. We are talking about games where a few ms can make a difference.
What is selling hardware is not eSports. It's all those games that look amazing and perform the best on great hardware. Skyrim(or even GTA V) for example, on a console will never look as good as on a PC. A recent controversy was that on PC Watchdogs was "downgraded" before release to look more like the console version because they weren't powerful enough.
Here's another thing that is saving the PC industry, the mod community.
If there is one thing for sure is that phone gaming wont destroy PC gaming.
I can't say for sure with CS but I know it's definitely the case with StarCraft. I saw it firsthand when I was in Vegas for a competition and had the chance to spectate behind some of the competitors irl. All that I saw were on the lowest graphics settings.
I never played seriously enough to go as far as finding out if it made a difference. I just liked to play a pretty game.
Turning off bloom is always a good decision IMO... just looks ugly most of the time.
The main reason pros will use lower settings for CS:S or CS:GO is because it is incredibly important that the game runs perfectly smoothly so that it reacts consistently to their input. Since everyone is on 144hz monitors now, that means they will need to stay above 144fps at all times.
Now, most CS pros who are sponsored will have good hardware and can do this on 1920x1080, but the problem is that at LAN tournaments in foreign countries, it is much less common that hardware which can do this is available. So the pro players will purposely use something like 1024x768 because they know 100% that the computer they will be given at any tournament will handle that, and changing something like resolution would take a few days to get used to and they won't get that chance.
In HotS some of the ability effects show through the fog of war, and supposedly that's easier to spot on low settings still. It also reduces the business on the screen when everyone in the game is teamfighting in one area.
However, CSGO majors viewing figures went from ~150k to ~300k to ~1mil to ~1.2m for the last few majors, so it's growing really fast.
You only get drops if your Steam account that owns the game is linked to a twitch account that is watching, and is IP restricted (you won't get more drops unless you watch from different IPs at the same time). View botting exists, but it requires a lot of time/money to do, and the Twitch viewership numbers are actually more accurate than you would think.
Obviously not everything is black an white but I think that the reasons why "the PC industry is being saved" are way more that just eSports.
1. instead of those HDMI-path recorder middleboxes, you could have an Ethernet-path renderer+recorder box and put all the heavy GPUs there. (Note that, if you don't care about streaming precisely "live", the rendering and recording no longer need to be dataflow-synchronous; you could play the whole game, buffer the network data into the rendering pipeline, and then it would sit there rendering the results for however long you wanted to give to achieve a desired "quality" bound. Effectively, you're doing the same thing as people who stream their commentary of a finished match by rendering off the replay-file the match; but in this case, the "replay file" is streaming to the renderer as it's being created.)
2. You could have an in-game option to asynchronously stream the session data to a cloud GPU instance and render the game there. (Or, y'know, if any of the game infrastructure providers really knew what they were doing with the Internet, they could offer those instances themselves, for a profit.)
3. Or, with the game studios' cooperation, just throw the whole edifice of local rendering away, capture the "replay" data for every match to the studio's data-centers, and then provide a service for cacheable just-in-time rendering of any replay data. Effectively, the game studio would say "whenever you play a match, we render a video from each player's perspective and post it immediately"—but without the need to actually do that (or keep said videos around long-term), because the video is entirely "computed state" that can be recreated from the replay files at any time.
4. One step more: a sudio could even provide an HTML5 "enhanced viewer" interacting with such a render-farm-backed CDN, that let people change perspective of the action themselves, to switch between the perspectives of the players and other views, sort of making such a viewer into an HTML5 thin-client for the game engine on the renderer instance (but without game-state-manipulation logic.) Imagine such a viewer as an embeddable iframe, like a YouTube video. A replay commentator could walk through a session as they would in-client to store a camera-movement-record on the server, get a permalink to the embeddable "video" for that, and then feed it to MashupTwitch along with commentary audio. Presuming the thing that gets embedded is an iframe of the same rendering service, though, any given player could "break out of" the commentated-on view to look around at what else is happening in the game at any time (pausing the commentary mash-up and starting up an extra renderer), and then, when they're done, restart the commentary (terminating the renderer instance and resuming the parent session from where it was.) All the control of being a spectator for a physical sport; all the convenience of a DVR.
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Mind you, with such a shift, you no longer get "for free" the compositing of the game session video-feed with other things going on on your PC, like voice/webcam recording. But it's simple enough to create a "mash-up" site that plays a raw video-stream from a game-renderer service, and then syncs and overlays a much-more-diminutive 96kbps audio stream from the user's own computer. Twitch would likely grow to serve that market that if the components were in place.
The important thing about this change, though, is that with remote async game-session rendering, you could actually stream games on a less-than-stellar internet connection (you'd still need low latency to play at all, but high bandwidth would no longer be a concern.) So many of my friends living in rural, under-served-by-ISPs areas wish they could stream, but can't.
The data is usually 32tick which isn't as good as the live game (64tick or 128tick) but watchable.
It feels like (most) studios are really dropping the ball on this one. Event-sourcing through "rules engines" isn't that hard; you can have a client that "remembers how to be" every past version of the client, network-sync/replay-sync wise. You just need to go into the game architecture phase knowing you're building a networked game.
As a free bonus, when you build a game engine this way, you can also "audit" ladder/tournament matches by (asynchronously!) running through the game physics on the server after the match, before letting the match determination influence each player's ranking. (And doing your cheat-detection post-match really eases the requirements on the client sync protocol!)
It's harder with mods, unless your mods are also cleanly separable into "presenter-level" and "rules engine" parts. Not that I've seen this particular innovation before, but if the "rules engine" parts of mods are all in some common bytecode, the particular "house rules" required to run a replay could be embedded in the replay itself, along with package URLs for fat clients (and renderer instances) to pull down the presenter bits as well.
I do think that twitch and the lets play community have done a lot though.
I've owned consoles in the past (last one I bought was an Xbox360 when it was on sale some years back) but I've always had a PC in the house. For all the talk of how expensive PC gaming is, for me it's always been the least expensive way to play video games. On the surface, a PC (of any stripe) will look more expensive than a game console at $500-1500 for a typical computer versus ~$400 for a game console. But to me, a game console is an additional $400 that I'd be spending for another box just for playing games.
I think for a while, the growing popularity of laptops and fewer desktop sales might have affected this balance since notebooks were generally more expensive for equivalent hardware and often lacked the GPU power needed for even modest gaming. But now I see even more modest laptops with integrated graphics that can handle at least some level of game performance as well as a crop of reasonably priced ($800-1000) notebooks that come with some sort of dedicated GPU.
I'm sure that for a lot of people whose computing usage can be handled solely with mobile-grade hardware (tablets, phones) the game console is a cheap and easy way to keep playing video games on a screen larger than 5 or 10 inches. But for anyone who already needs a laptop or a desktop, the cost difference to add a bit more RAM and a decent video card is less than the cost of a game console and even the base level specs are getting to the point where you can expect at least a decent level of gaming capability.
I guess the tl;dr version is: eSports help and more powerful phones/tablets may be cutting into the desktop/laptop markets but at the same time, desktops and laptops continue to improve and even mainstream PCs can handle games now (even better if you put an extra $150-250 into RAM and GPU).
As has historically been the case, the PC (whether a $600 Asus or a $2000 Macbook) is the gaming platform many people already own so it stands to reason that many will continue to use it as such.
...which is basically anyone who is a white-collar worker or studying.
While this is true pros still have very high performance pcs because there is an advantage to playing at 300 - 400 frames per second.
Not anymore. There are plenty of pros playing at 1920x1080 with all settings on high + MSAA. High-end video cards are common as a result (as the target is ~200-300fps on 144hz monitors)
I think the reasons for this are a combination of that's what this generation of pros grew up expecting AND the rise of twitch streaming. Better looking streams attract more viewers.
There have been some investigation of settings and high vs. low generally doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage either way.
>There have been some investigation of settings and high vs. low generally doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage either way.
Yes and no. In a game like Starcraft where cloaked units give a slight glimmer when moving, pros universally optimize settings to enhance this glimmer as much as possible, and low graphics is one of the settings they use. More so though pros just stick to what their used to regardless of objective performance. It's why so many CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratio.
Blizzard has done a much better job with SC2; one of their goals from the start has been to optimize for low-end computers.
Sorry I wasn't clear, I was specifically talking about CSGO. Seeing through smokes & fires isn't any better at low vs. high settings.
> It's why so many CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratio.
Hmmm I disagree. Many of the current CSGO pros using 4:3 AR came from CS 1.6 and I think they just never felt like changing. There's no competitive advantage to it. If anything it's a FOV loss and thus a slight disadvantage but it's so minor as to not matter most of the time.
With regards to eSports and the sites that cater to them, I would like to see them impact on game sales as well as the hardware used to run them. If anything watching others play a new game is a great way to determine if its even worth buying
The hardware sales come with the culture of PC gaming along with what you said, but the people become PC gamers first and hardware buyers second.
Digital distribution is obvious NOW but back in the day there were a loooot of people scoffing at paying the same price for the digital version and making fun at people for not getting the obviously superior physical version.
Digital distribution was obvious back then; it took about half a decade for them to get it right though. Steam was plagued with all kinds of issues, and in the early 2000's broadband wasn't quite ubiquitous in the speed we expect from it today. I remember it took a full day to get Half-Life 2 downloaded.
eSports historically has gone through bubbles and we are currently in the 3rd one. No eSports has ever been dominant for a long period of time.
There's also a ton more investment in the quality of the games themselves relative to console/cross released titles. The Battlefield and CoD series are great examples of titles completely incompatible with competitive play: there's hardly any balance, no spectator mode, games and DLC churned out every year, distant/apathetic devs/producers, made to be 100% approachable rather than engaging for people who invest more time, and buggy as shit without exception. Valve has found ways around these problems, and that is why they excel at eSports titles.
Thing is Windows survived for so long only because it's been (sort of) neutral. I mean yeah, it has always been complementary to other Microsoft products or services, like Office, but Windows has been much more neutral or open than a console's environment, or more "modern" operating systems like, say, iOS.
But now you can see Microsoft introduce things like the Windows store, with the traditional revenue cut of course. You have to consider, for example, that Steam is pushing for Linux as a defensive move. And I tell you, if Microsoft goes even further then this, it will mean the end of Windows ;-)
Most of your arguments here are based on the fact that halo is only released on console. It's obvious then that it would have these console shooter features. If it were released on PC it obviously would not have aim assist.
> and the aim reticle is 1/3 of the way up the screen, instead of the dead center like you'd expect in a PC FPS.
This is something people would easily get over.
There are still people playing Halo 1 for pc online (Even after microsoft shut down the servers) and there is an even larger community playing a reverse engineered Halo version that was released in russia as F2P. (http://www.reddit.com/r/haloonline)
Its a much much bigger deal than you think. Not only is player camera movement effected but the entire flow of the game - all the weapons, the chokepoints, areas to balance all become REALLY different when you change the targeted control scheme. Go into games like Titanfall and CoD on a console and then try them on PC - PC players are MUCH more aggressive and use the map and weapons quite differently because their control scheme allows it, while on console people are much more likely to be slower and methodical in their play.
:), I dont think you understand what esports is about, it is not about playing with a pad with huge autoaim.
CS GO was dead in the water eSport wise on release and took major core gameplay changes for it to get to a point where people were okay with it, but 1.6 is generally considered the better ompetetive game.
The idea that companies can just make a game an eSport is incredibly flawed. A game needs the qualities to become one. It's why the Gamecube version of Super Smash Bros, Melee, destroys the brand new one in tournament viewers despite Nintendo promoting the new game as an eSport.
> Defense of the Ancients 2 (1,262,612 daily players)
Sure, there is a real comfort to work when you have big screens and a mouse/keyboard, but you don't actually need a PC for that, a tablet is enough.
Right now, PC are still way cheaper and the difference in power is still sensible, but I think this will change very quickly.
Of course, this is true for basic office work : if you need power, as a dev/graphist/whatever, a PC will still be the way to go.
However, most office job don't actually need that much power, and the flexibility offered by a tablet is huge : being able to work from anywhere, bringing your whole computer to take notes/read mails during a reunion, etc...
I can hardly get work done on my laptop let alone a tablet.
I meant you don't really need the power of a PC to work with a big screen : a tablet has/will have enough power to handle it, all you need is a dock for your tablet and and a cable between the big screen and the tablet. Same goes with keyboard.
The upside of a tablet is that while you can dock it and have basically the same comfort you have with a regular PC (minus raw power), you can also unplug it and use it pretty much anywhere.
Twitch and Youtube Gaming I think validate eSports as an emerging industry.
Unless of course it is "All your industry are belong to us" :`)
Thanks for the post!
I think it will find its own niche, overlapping some of the games which were previously keyboard/mouse exclusive as well as some of the games previously XBox/DualShock controller exclusive.
For example, Dishonored plays fantastically well with the steam controller. You have all the advantages of a traditional controller, except the camera control is much more precise and mouse-like.
And although the steam controller may never compete with a mouse and keyboard for games like CS:GO, r/SteamController is reporting encouraging findings, with people claiming to be surprisingly competitive using a steam controller by utilising dual aiming (trackpad for large, coarse movements and gyro for tiny correctional movements).
The bottom line is that for me a steam controller is a massive improvement over a traditional controller, it is like it takes the best aspects of mouse+kb and game controllers and combines them in one package.
Console makers should take note, but unfortunately at this point outside nintendo the traditional console makers are very unwilling to innovate with the base controller.
When you'll join a PC server with your steam controller, you will have 0 kills and 20 deaths, because everyone is playing with a mouse.
That is not fun.
Steam controller helps with, I don't know, 10% of the gaming - the single player. And if you're casual and single player is 100% of your games - hell, buy a Wii U, because PC has zero split screen games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKuO9M0WuMg&feature=youtu.be
(disclaimer - I work at Valve but not on the steam controller so this technique was a surprise to me)
If any of the popular game consoles were to implement something similar for their own controllers, it would be considered a "killer feature".
That is very fun.
As for local co-op on PC, it could use some improvement, but there are already more local co-op PC games on Steam than Wii U.
http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Local%20Co-Op/#p=0&tab=...
Lately people in my social circle have been getting together on a weekend afternoon and playing a cheap game. Usually they don't have much depth, but if I get four or five hours of play out of a game that cost $4 I'm happy.
JG: I think mobile has it since the install base is massive and people have a lot of spare time sitting around where they have their phone right with them. Mobile has a fantastic growth opportunity."
(all console games rely heavily on 'aim-assist')