In three years it's going to be too easy to compare the specs and quality to the latest and greatest pcs.
EDIT: I'm watching the live stream now: http://www.gamespot.com/features/playstation-meeting-2013-ps...
It’s do or die time for consoles. Decent hardware is necessary, far from sufficient. The real battle will be fought elsewhere.
Also, PCs won’t even be competing there. Apples and oranges.
This is why consoles are still producing pretty good looking games with 512 MBs of ram.
You lose in the end of course, but the goal is just to keep the momentum going until your next release.
PS4 is doomed to be years behind PC. Even at launch, PS4 will be at least a year behind spec-wise.
It's like saying: "The iPhone X is years behind the latest PC chips"
Your iPhone "argument" makes no sense, it's a red herring.
PCs serve the "PC market" (A subset of that is the High end gaming market that enjoy keyboards and mice).
Show me a Street Fighter tournament being played on PC?
Or a Starcraft game being played on Consoles?
...
The reason you can't find those things, is they are different markets.
With the new PS4 x86 + GPU architecture, portability becomes trivial.
PS4, essentially, is a PC stuck in one configuration.
Fighter games, in general, are on consoles. You simply just don't play them on PCs. Similarly, RTS games are PC only; the only RTS on console I know of is Halo Wars, which sucked.
Just these two cover ENORMOUS markets, with Starcraft tournaments having millions of dollars in prizes, etc, yet are based on entirely different markets. PC vs Consoles more accurately share _subsets_ of the high end gaming market, which overlaps in some places (like Call of Duty), and differ in many others.
And people couldn't and can't do that if it isn't x86 hardware?
The "weakest link" of most consoles right now is the GPU, and those GPUs are branches of the current gaming GPUs, just as they were with the prior generation. People have long been comparing the two.
But it's irrelevant. The target market for an Xbox 360 isn't going to get a triple-SLI GTX Titan PC.
>triple-SLI GTX
Roadmaps supposedly show the next Xbox is planned for a(nother) ten year cycle, presumably the ps4 is the same. Half way through it's lifetime it will be beaten by low-end GPUs; perhaps even integrated graphics and smartphone graphics. Not to mention the fact that there has been a faster single GPU available for a year already, then $350 (7870).
The PC-master-race notion of upgradability is utterly detached from the mainstream gaming public who have neither the interest, patience or financial ability to run that gauntlet.
It's about the console I buy today having a comparable shelf-life to one purchased 5 or even 7 years ago. When the 360 in my home office died late last year, I was faced with paying essentially as much as I spent in 2008 to get a new one, but knowing it would be end-of-lifed and all-but-unsupported in a year.
To say nothing of the odd situation where that same 360, purchased in 2008, was no better than the 360 I bought for my living room in 2006 (insert RRoD joke here).
Yet the Roku I bought last year for my folks was better than the one I bought in 2009. And the AppleTV I bought last year was better than the one I bought a year before.
The public is never going to swap a GPU. But they certainly understand the difference between a $300 purchase that lasts 5 years and one that lasts 2. And a $300 purchase this year that confers an improved product over what one could buy for $300 five years ago.
On February 8, 2008, during the Game Developers Conference 2008, Microsoft announced that the "Failure rate has officially dropped", but without mentioning any specifics.[28] The same month, electronics warranty provider SquareTrade published an examination of 1040 Xbox 360's and said that they suffered from a failure rate of 16.4% (one in six).
Personally I'm on my third Xbox 360 after the first suffered a Red Ring of Death failure and the second had a faulty DVD drive that killed any inserted disk, destroying my copy of Rock Band. It actually convinced me to switch to gaming on the PC, as I refused to trust my Xbox and I didn't want it to fail until I had finished the Mass Effect trilogy.
The peak of the PC gaming world was Windows 95 to Windows XP (2003/2005 time frame). Shareware was extraordinarily popular and accessible during the first part of that, and the Internet had made downloads / patches / updates / modding possible in the last part. Meanwhile consoles began to present increasingly superior accessibility to casual gamers while providing enough of the eye candy to satisfy many serious gamers.
If you go down through this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g...
You'll find the lopsided majority of those hits occurred during the 1995-2005 era. The biggest hits however, are since then. The PC gaming market has simply become smaller and consolidated to a few hit franchises.
This also doesn't account for the rise of free to play gaming on PC. The most popular video game in the history of the world isn't on this list at all.
Also, fatally, digital sales are not factored into these numbers. There's this thing called Steam . . .
34 of those games were released after 2005. 79 were released in the 1995 / 2005 time frame. So those ten years averaged 7.9 per year; the seven years after averaged five per year. It's a nearly 60% increase per year.
In my opinion digital PC game sales would do nothing but tip the scale toward my point about the PC gaming market consolidating into just a few mega hit franchises that generate all the sales while the volume of games has significantly contracted. In PC gaming there are maybe ten titles that matter, such as WoW or Sims. In console gaming, there are over 100 titles a year that sell 1 million or more copies.
Free to play PC gaming is a very small market still. The Sims 2 alone made more money than the entire free-to-play market combined did in the previous four years. That may change in the next few years, but it doesn't change the facts that exist right now.
Four of the top five on that list are from 2004 or earlier. Meanwhile of course total console game sales have exploded to the moon during that time.
First of all, would you mind showing me the sales data from Steam? No? Then how do you intend to use that as part of your argument exactly?
Which game on steam has sold 11 million copies on the service, like Starcraft did at retail? 20 million like Sims 2? 9 million like Half-life 1? 12 million like Half-life 2? I'd wager it's not even remotely close.
It's my opinion that Steam is moving a mid number of high priced new releases, and a lot more lower priced discounted games (eg buying Shogun for $9.99 or Torchlight 2 for $9.99 during discounts). A quick look through their top 50 best selling reveals the strong majority are $20 or less, with many being $11.99 or less. Is Steam popular? Of course, but what does that have to do with whether the PC gaming market has consolidated into a few hit franchises with less total games produced per year?
Also, I count only 73 in ['95,'05). Are you counting ['95,'05]? That's 11 years. 7.3 per year is really not that different from 4.8/yr (29 in ['06,'12)), which includes two to three years of recession.
As for this:
> First of all, would you mind showing me the sales data from Steam? No? Then how do you intend to use that as part of your argument exactly?
I'm not interested in winning a debate with you, I'm just trying to demonstrate what's true to any fair-minded people reading this. If you want to pretend that Steam sales didn't account for a huge portion of all PC games sold, and therefore that the PC sales are extraordinarily under-represented in the last few years of this chart, be my guest. It's only yourself that you're deceiving.
> The PC gaming market has simply become smaller
I'd argue that the second half of the 1990's was actually something of a bubble. 3D-ness and CD-ROM's were the hot new thing, and everyone tried to make their games 3D, increase polygon counts and texture resolutions, add cutscenes, fill an entire CD with assets -- which meant bloated art and development budgets, and a loss of focus on innovation.
In short, new 3D and storage technology, dotcom-era funding of big publishing conglomerates, those conglomerates' control of retail channels, and a lack of alternative distribution for smaller developers, led to an unusually large number of big-budget games.
IMHO gaming's "natural" state is more similar to the era c. 1975-1995, where small studios and innovative gameplay were a big part of the industry.
There's still a market segment today for big-budget "A" titles, but c. 1997-2005 was the heyday.
Anyone in the world who can make a game now has affordable access to a number of digital distribution and payment channels like Steam, Gamersgate, Android/Apple Apps, Facebook, HTML5, or plain old downloads on a website with payment provided by Paypal/Stripe/Dwolla/Amazon/Google Checkout/Bitcoin [1]. There are plenty of open-source and commercial tools and libraries for developing games. This means individual developers and startups can enter the industry relatively freely, with minimal upfront costs, can restore innovation to its rightful place, and can exert downward price pressure with their small costs.
I believe the number of games/developers/publishers in the ecosystem is larger than it ever was [citation needed], as is the revenue of the industry as a whole [citation needed], but A-list console and PC titles have given up a fair amount of ground to the "long tail" of modestly successful indie games.
[1] 1990's connection speeds, and the pesky business of tying up telephone lines for hours or days during long downloads, made yesterday's Internet an unappealing distribution platform.
It's also generally better to buy on steam directly versus physical copies to avoid headaches (usually cheaper as well if you catch steam seasonal sales). I can understand not doing that if you preorder for some special items though. That and to always make sure the game does not come with some sort of other annoying DRM that is not listed[2].
[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/09/deus-ex-human-revolution-s...
[2] http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?page=DRM_Lists/T...
I am curious where you are getting this information
Steam wouldn't start is a vague statement, care to elaborate? Steam.exe wouldn't run, or the window wouldn't show, or...?
And which game took 30 minutes installing on a not-too-ancient PC (one that we're lacking the specs for, keeping in mind not every PC can game well).
Losing the activation code is just as likely to happen with consoles especially with the increasingly amount of games that require codes for online gaming.