Disturbing trends in PC gaming

By Balaji Sivaraman | December 29, 2007

As 2007 draws to close, there are some pretty disturbing trends being seen as far as PC gaming goes. PCs have always had a bit of an upper hand over consoles due to the variety of titles being offered and even exclusive genres like strategy that could be played effectively only on the PC. But the year 2007 marked a change to that with formerly PC exclusive franchises like Command and Conquer and Unreal Tournament being offered to my console-playing friends and sales of amazing PC titles like Crysis and Unreal Tournament III being overrun by sales of consoles and console titles. Take this as an account from a longtime PC gamer on the decline of the PC as a gaming platform.

The major problem with the PC as a gaming platform is the high overhead it has over its console counterparts. The price of buying a decent mid-end gaming PC is about as much – if not slightly more expensive – than buying a current generation console and a decent 1080p HDTV to play games in their entire splendor. The difference lies in that anyone can go to a shop pick a console package that suits their tastes and an HDTV that looks good to them and they are all set to game. With PCs, you do need to have some sort of understanding about what is happening with the current technology to put together a PC for yourself; even if you are going to buy a pre-built PC from one of the numerous manufacturers like Alienware, Dell etc. it pays to know the current happenings in the PC hardware industry.

Another major setback for the PC industry is the amazing prices of the graphics cards that power the games of today. With prices like 450$-500$ for an Nvidia 8800 Ultra which is the most powerful card out there, no wonder even long time PC gamers are shifting to console gaming. Both Nvidia and AMD-ATI caught the hook of this disturbing trend and released two wonderful pieces of hardware in the Nvidia 8800GT and the Radeon HD3870 which lets gamers play games without having to empty out their pockets. Even with these two amazing value-for-money cards, the consoles with their major attraction being a one time investment in their 3 or 4 year lifetime are managing to entice more PC gamers to turn over to consoles or in general attract more non-gamers to the gaming hobby.

Even with the aforementioned two GPUs, one would still need to tinker with all the different settings to get the game to look good and play good on your personal computer and most people don’t have the time for that. As good as Crysis looks, if anyone wants it to run decently and look as good as it can, it does require a lot of tweaking and editing the game’s configuration files – again most people do not have the time for those sort of things, hence the decline in PC gaming.

An additional very disturbing precedent set as far as PC gaming goes is the poor porting job done on console-to-PC ports. Of course, the vice versa is not true as proven by amazing PC-to-console ports of The Orange Box and Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars on the Xbox 360. However, games like Resident Evil 4 which did not even have PC specific controls properly defined including a lack of total in-game mouse support and Guitar Hero 3 which was riddled with bugs and slowdowns which rendered the game almost unplayable at even the lowest settings prove the fact that porting console titles to PCs is not even a major priority for most developers and the only reason we do see these titles getting ported is to fill the coffers of the respective companies. That is not to say all console-to-PC ports end up being a total waste of time – case in point, Gears of War which did have many PC exclusive features and which did come with a minimal number of problems – but still looking at the majority of console-to-PC ports does not bode well for the future of such ports.

Apart from the above mentioned issues, the biggest of them all is the overall decline in the sales of PC titles. With November-only sales of PC titles like Unreal Tournament III and Crysis being 33,995 and 86,633 according to NPD numbers whereas those of even a lower quality console title like Mario and Sonic at the Olympics for the Wii being more than 300,000 which means that maybe PC gaming is not as profitable to developers as it was before. Hence, we see PC titles being ported effectively to consoles to boost their sales and even the only PC-exclusive title in Crysis ending up being in the form of a trilogy – again a tactic to potentially increase overall sales. Above all, the lack of sales for the quality PC titles is so far the most disturbing trend to come out of the PC gaming industry in 2007.

However, when all is said and done, it is not too bad being a PC gamer going into the year 2008. With thought-to-be-dead PC franchises getting sequels in Starcraft II, Fallout 3 and Mafia 2 and even Far Cry 2 and even totally new IPs from established PC developers like Id Software with Rage, Ubisoft with Tom Clancy’s End War and EA Games with Will Wright’s Spore – things are not looking all dark and grim for the PC. Whether all these titles will live up to expectations and will actually produce financial profits for their respective developers remains to be seen.