It'll finally a be a three horse race on the desktop.
Honestly, gaming "on the desktop" is a shrinking market. I'm sure I'll enjoy a few Steam games on my Linux box (which I use basically 100% of the time), but this is hardly a paradigm shift. Consoles and mobile (maybe "web" will persist as a separate sub-market, but I'm not sure about that) are the future of gaming platforms.
Source?
Let's throw bullshit in the air, it's not like anybody has numbers or give a flying shit about them anyway.
> Consoles [...] are the future of gaming platforms.
Consoles have been the future of gaming platforms for 25 years now. And oddly, computers are still there as gaming platforms with developers and distributors making significant amounts of money from them. Hell, computer-based gaming has never been better as far as I'm concerned, the big shitty franchise-based publishers are getting the fuck away from it and indies are coming back to the front of the scene.
Consoles are not the future of anything, they're a gaming media amongst others. And mobile is nice, I play a lot on my phone, but let's not kid ourselves: it's the future of killing handled consoles and that's about it.
Second-best graphics card (GeForce 680) is $550 these days.
Xbox 360 was $300/$400 depending which version you chose. PS3 was $500/$600 and I really can't imagine next generation being significantly more than that.
Or were you talking about something else?
Console growth is considerable. Hand-held, including phones and phone-like devices, is growing even faster.
What's prevented consoles from fully conquering the desktop is a few key applications for which the PC is still a superior platform. One is ultra-high-performance graphics, especially when directed at enthusiasts, and the other is anything that requires a keyboard to be reasonably useful, e.g. strategy games and MMORPGs.
If the next generation consoles include a mouse and a wireless keyboard, the PC gaming market would implode in a matter of years.
Kids that have grown up with an XBox of PS3 aren't going to want to fiddle with drivers or find out how to patch their game using the "Downloader App" or endlessly wrestle with DRM. They won't bother to switch unless there's a very good reason, and every day there's fewer reasons.
Have you used Steam? It patches games automatically and you don't have to fiddle with DRM. My Steam client keeps dozens of games perfectly current without asking me. This is part of why everyone loves it: specifically because it makes it as close to painless as you're going to get.
Also, I'm guessing that a good number of current PC devs/gamers grew up playing a Nintendo console, and they still migrated over, somehow.
Even as painless as Steam is, there's still the driver wrestling, yak-shaving that is maintaining a properly working Gaming PC. Some people enjoy the challenge. This is not going to fly with those used to the "put in disc, play game" crowd.
In time the "PC" will slowly fade away to be replaced by other things just as the precursor to the PC, like the "Minicomputer" and the "Mainframe", will become an anachronism. I'm not saying this will happen tomorrow, but you'll see a shift over the next ten years.
There comes a point where the performance advantage offered by the PC, which is considerable, is negated by the fact that developers can't make use of it. What good would a graphics card with 3,000,000 shaders be today? Why should you need a 256-core CPU to play games? If your equivalent console had only 1,000,000 shaders and 64-cores, which would surely attract scorn and derision, would you really be missing out on much in the scheme of things?
aka it handles all DRM issues as long as you leave Ubisoft rotting.
I was very annoyed when I couldn't play COD4 with keyboard + mouse on the 360.
There are a few trackball controllers (http://trackballcontroller.com/) which promise to fix this, but I wonder about that. Most balls are removable for cleaning, and anything removable on a controller will end up underneath the couch eventually.
PC's were never originally intended to be games machines anyway, my first PC didn't even have a soundcard (as was common for PCs in ~1993) yet id certainly did well with wolf3d on the PC.
Since people are currently doing their work on a PC/laptop and that is also what they are using for web browsing etc it makes sense for them to re purpose it into a gaming platform. This is especially true of either very casual gamers who just want to play farmville or a few flash games and don't want another device, it is also very true for techy types who enjoy building high performance systems for the purpose of gaming.
Of course this really goes down to how you define a "PC", I think of Steam as basically a games console implemented inside my PC. Let's say for example a system is released with high performance graphics than runs a stripped down Linux distro with only Steam + a few other apps. Is this a PC or a console?
On the other side of the fence , MS is making their Xbox more PC like. For example adding internet explorer.
PC gaming will only die when the PC itself does.
So we're doing that thing where we just make shit up now about the largest gaming market in the world?
Consoles are a primarily American/Japanese phenomenon with some other western countries participating. PC gaming is how the entire world games and it's growing faster than ever.
The "entire world" doesn't really matter. If some dude in Somalia has money to buy a PC game, he probably has money to buy a console.
Recipe to make desktop into console. 1. plug desktop into tv. 2. buy wireless mini-keyboard and mouse, or install menu system that operates by D-pad to select games. 3. There is no step three.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/97705-pc-gaming-vs-console...