Is pc gaming still alive? like it was back in 02-03'

PC Gaming is rocking right now in my opinion.

There are lots of very popular online and single-player games. For multiplayer FPS you have the upcoming Modern Warfare 2, which will probably be the biggest seller of the year with single-player, online co-op and online multiplayer. Then you have the Valve stable including Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 (both online co-op, very fun and don't need much of a beast to run well), COD 4/5 which are still going strong, Unreal Tournament 3 for mindless blasting. Also upcoming is Battlefield Bad Company 2 which looks like it will be a good return to Battlefield form with some pc-only features.

There are also some other great single-player (mostly) PC games you may have missed, such as Crysis, Crysis: Warhead, Mirrors Edge, Prototype, Mass Effect, the brilliant Fallout 3 and just for fun the most excellent Plants vs Zombies

Then there are the other popular PC genres like strategy (C&C, Supreme Commander), driving games Need For Speed: Shift, GRID, the upcoming Dirt 2 and the GTR series. Not to mention the 9 million or so World of Warcraft players and all the other fantastic games.

You can get a great DX10 graphics card for £100 these days, and good ones much lower than that (ATI HD4770/4850 for instance) and will be good to go with a dual-core cpu (speed more important than quad-core at value end although this is changing with more recent games, and even then there are great bargains at the moment with value quads both AMD and Intel).

Basically PC Gaming is alive and well, rumours of it's demise were exaggerated

whoever thinks pc gaming will ever die is an idiot. the potential market for pc gaming will always have its die hard fans - and lets not forget the MOUSE. console gaming has its definite advantages - mainly pressure sensitive trigger buttons but that can also be solved with a wheel pc gamer for life.

I'd have to disagreeon most of your points unfortunately....

1. The original playstation - runaway success largely due to to the availability of pirated games - I didnt know anyone *without* a modchip (perhaps 30 or 40 people with playstations)

2. Fair enough development is probably easier for a targetted hardwar configuration

3. More consoles than PC's? I think not 110million total sales of 360/ps3/wii combined - this year alone 241million pc's sold - now mine is three years old and runs current games perfectly well - so ?600million pc's that could play games
4.You dont need the best graphics card to play the latest games - my 7950GT plays the new flashpoint at 1280x1024 (somewhere between 720 and 1080 hd resolution on a console) with everything on high and no lag - i reckon with judicious purchasing over the life of two consoles you could get away with one pc and a few upgrades.

pc gaming and gaming in general is bigger then ever

That's always best for a hearty discussion

Should have "dropped a dime" on all of them. The numbers are what they are. If the bean counters aren't worried, I trust that they have access to better data than we do.

Take away all those bought by businesses and what you got left ? Take away those owned by grandma and grandpa, aunt tilllie ..... I have 12 PC's in my house.....3 are used for gaming.

But why not just use real numbers:

http://www.mygaming.co.za/news/New [...] nsole.html

http://www.boston.com/business/tec [...] le/?page=1

"And market research company NPD Group says that while North Americans spent $18.8 billion on game software in retail stores last year, just $910 million went to PC games, down from $970 million the year before."

That's over 20 to 1.

And your 7950 machine cost you how much compared to a $299 console ?

Let's let the knowledgeable folks chime in:

Cevat Yerli of Crytek, the makers of Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis Warhead has publicly stated:

"We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. "

John Carmack, often called the 'father of PC gaming', and co-founder of id software, makers of the Doom and Quake series, recently stated:

"It's hard to second guess exactly what the reasons are. You can say piracy. You can say user migration, but the ground truth is just that the sales numbers on the PC are not what they used to be and are not what they are on the consoles."

Cliffy B, lead creator at Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Tournament and Gears of Wars series, has been quite outspoken on this topic:

"Here's the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC. Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy. "

Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games, makers of Supreme Commander, also chimes in with his assessment:

" ...people are going to stop making [games] on the PC because of my earlier point, what's happened on the PC with piracy. The economics are ugly right now on the PC. You're not going to see these gigantic, epic investments of dollars on the PC when it just doesn't work. The economics have to work. You're going to see those investments made on the console side and it's going to become a more console-centric investment. And then you're going to see them ported back over to the PC and that creates a different experience on the PC. "

Robert Bowling, Community Manager at Infinity Ward, the makers of games such as Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4, provided a fairly blunt opinion on the issue. He made a blog post entitled 'They Wonder Why People Don’t Make PC Games Any More', the title of his post along with the contents clearly linking the move away from PC game development with piracy:

"On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn’t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).... the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. "

here's some more data from http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_5.html

"Back to our comparison of Call of Duty 4 PC and console sales. Even if we double the number of copies of COD 4 sold for PC to 766,000, ostensibly to account for the best case scenario of an equal number of additional digital distribution sales to that of retail sales, that is still nowhere near the 3 million+ copies of the exact same game sold solely on the XBox 360 in the same region during the same period; it's still a 4:1 sales ratio in favor of a single console over the PC platform. To counter claims that US NPD sales data is non-representative of global sales, because the PC is supposed to be much more popular in Europe for gaming, look at European GFK Chart Track sales data for the more recent Fallout 3 release, showing that 55% of Fallout 3 copies shipped were for the XBox 360, 28% for the PS3, and 17% for PC. In other words once again, an almost 5:1 ratio in favor of the consoles.

Very well written conclusions here:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_10.html

Again, I have never played a game on a PS3, X-Box or Wii.....I have no wish to. Despite my personal preferences, the game industry (read bean counters) is clearly focused on a different path. Who would have though they'd ever hear anyone say that the next Unreal Engine at this point is console only.

I agree w/ the tweakguide folks that PC gaming is changing .... and needs to in order to be factor. $900 million is still a significant market. Porsche doesn't sell as many cars as GM or Toyota, but they still make money.....I don't think the folks in Stuttgart are worried about job security.

Yes, the atricle addresses this in detail. In their comparisons they said basically even going as far as assuming even a 1:1 ration of retail to d/l it still separates the numbers by orders of magnitude.

NPD's numbers are useless and misleading when it comes to PC Gaming, they should be completely ignored. Also, PC Gaming dwarfs console gaming for most of the world.

In the end simplistic games continue to thrive on consoles, more complicated games continue to thrive on computers, it really hasn't changed for years.

Regards,

I've been a pc gamer since I sold my PS3 to build my Gaming PC hahahah. Gaming PC's are way funner because you can boost your gaming beyond PS3 standards. All you need is $1500 and you could have PS3x4 performance and visuals. Games for pc have realistic physics and just thinking that a gaming pc can only do everything not just gaming makes you wana buy one. Plus its a good hobby to just enjoy building and creating your own rig. When you buy a console(Xbox, PS3) you only get what you payed for and nothing more and that is going to stay like that. On the other hand when you build a gaming pc, you still have the option of upgrading it anytime as it becomes a need for better graphics, which is likely to happen by mid next year(2010). Games such as Crysis 2 and beyond will never look the same on a PS3 or Xbox, The PC will always beat the odd. Its simple if you play Games more than 3 hours a week you should own a Gaming PC, not to mention how rediculous it is to ask your parents to buy you a PS3. Ewww, just build your own and "Play hard": XFX.