The war has begun - PC Gaming Alliance

Intel and AMD are putting aside their differences to wage war against consoles.


TOP SECRET:



CLASSIFIED:




I fear that I have let slip too much information already regarding this immense war.

You may never see me again.

Farewell.
http://www.developmag.com/news/29331/The-PC-market-is-not-dying-says-newly-formed-PC-Gaming-Alliance

One of the weakest areas of PC gaming compared to consoles is the fact that the games must first be installed to HD before you can play. Followed by the de-facto updating, patching, and tweaking.

Oh, and getting disruptions from the O/S ..
"You have unused icons on the desktop" anyone?

My pet hate is having to wait half a day to install the game before playing it.

Take Gears of War as an example ..

Install time: +40 mins
Unpack time: +15 mins
Play time: out of time!

Not to mention the very annoying long CD key which every game and app insists you enter (despite it being utterly pointless)

They brought us Plug and Play
Now we need Insert and Play

before CD-ROM hard drive instalation was a must
even a game on a few floppies, you didnt want to be carting around half a dozzen disk's and swapping them like on the amiga

with CD-ROM i think it was down to the load speeds, i have a fast (for the day) hard drive why should it seem like im back in the speccy days loading slowly from CD?

now we have bloated games taking up a few gig each and needing the disc in the drive as a 'key' and then taking for bloody ever to load

ive done this before
"replay a FPS game level"
'ok ive got to reload everything first'
"why? its the same level ive just played"

yet DVD based consoles need the disc in not as an anti piracy measure or anything like that
no they stream the data off and then have to keep it in a fraction of what a pc would have for RAM

'swhy i like the concept of consoles
you know if you buy an xbox game it will work on your xbox no fuss
no driver updates
no closing unwanted apps to free up the last ounce of ram
no upgrading your gfx card (again) to play the game
ok the main con is its going to be a fixed platform for the rest of its life
upgrade? no buy the next model
psone ps2 ps3 +++
xbox xbox360 +++
and hope for backwards compatibility

so its all well and good all those guys trying to standardise the gaming rig but tbh its outdated the day its announced seeing as everyone is making constant improvements to chipsets on gfx cards etc

they missed that boat 10 years ago when gaming was a fledgeling pc industry
remember MMC or what ever it was called the "multimedia pc standard" it quickly became the minimum standard as 2x 4x and faster CD drives came about

So, wacking a 'games for windows' sticker on the box didn't quite do the trick...surprise!

Frankly, I half wish the 'big boys' *would* just leave the PC alone and stick to consoles.

This'd make the market far friendly for smaller developers, and help eliminate the ugly stain of crud like 'starforce', huge patches and so on.

I haven't bought a 'big' PC game since, umm, half-life 2, which was a nightmare in itself due to various 'steam' headaches, esp. waiting half an hour for the game to 'update' itself before I could even play - despite the fact it worked OK 'enough'. Eventually learned that physically unplugging from LAN fixed it, but by that time had gotten well 'steamed'!

And with the xbox-360, why even buy a PC version of a game that may or may not run properly, may or may not install some nasty rootkit thing, may or may not spew your 'stats' all over the 'net etc.

In fact, you gotta wonder if MS's heart is really in PC gaming anymore - wouldn't they rather be selling 360 software instead? With all the conspiracy theories re: dx10 being Vista only, perhaps the truth is simply that they couldn't be bothered. And last I checked, there still isn't even a proper native game audio API for Vista...

Bah humbug!

I'll take that one-off half a day wait any day over having to put up with console-like loading times every single time I load a level. ( Or, better yet, every time I walk from one corridor into another with some games. )

with propper caching and the odd install that some ps3 titles are offering it could be a thing of the past on both ps3 and 360

even the xbox version of unreal had the reload everything to play the exact same level 'bug' that the pc has its just sloppy on the coders front
what truethfully was their to load?

f**k all

i just hope that given net access and hard drives that console games dont fully embrace the work ethics of pc games
it was broke when it shipped here's a patch

Like the afformentioned 'PC' Half-Life 2 then

Granted, HD installation does have the benefit of the game being available to play staight off the bat ..
but, even then, I still get random pauses/glitches when the game trys to load in data from the HD during play.

The CD/DVD drives in PC's are no better though. They have the nasty habit of stopping just before the game needs a 'data reading' session so you get that ''spinup'' delay

Pc's are still not geared up for gaming glory.
The O/S itself could do with a "Game Mode" whereby nothing runs in the background to interupt the play.
A bit like how the Amiga could kick Workbench in the teeth and let the game itself hit the hardware.

PC's have the same load between areas/levels/etc. I haven't cared for consoles at ALL since the 2600 but the 360 has me hooked. I've played more games on it in the last 2 months or so than I have on the pc in the last 2 years I think. Not to mention using it as a media extender.

I still prefer playing some games on the pc, but some... I have to admit are better when on a console.

my old xbox hasnt been played since i got this pc
i dont play games on this as the gfx card sucks

i just moved too many things around and boxed it in

ive done yet another move around and finally moved it to the foot of my bed/near the door and got an extention lead trailing under the bed to the socket

now all i have to do is remember where i put all my games

What games are you playing!? Some of my XBox 360 games have hideous load times, and load almost constantly. Sure, some games are good, Gears of War never bugged me with horrible load times for instance, but Mass Effect, for example, which is a brilliant game in every other respect, stops every ten steps to load for a minute. I can't believe that the PC version will do that.

That "alliance" can do whatever they want to do; unless they are able to ship a gaming PC with graphics and computing power that beats an Xbox 360/PS3/whatver-console-comes-next FOR THE SAME PRICE OR LESS, their efforts are doomed.

I need a PC/MAC that can handle two or three big high resolution displays and that has enough grunt power to do RAW image processing. But I will certainly not buy a machine anymore just to play Gears of War 2, Half-Life 3 or Unreal IV on it.

But I will purchase the Xbox 360 successor when it comes and when there are enough games for it that interest me. But a PC or Mac for gaming? No, not really.

Just had the joyous event over here of Windows' updater restarting the computer without my consent and without warning. It had finished installing updates, and it gave me the option to restart the computer immediately or any time up to 4 hours from now. I set it to 4 hours, left the computer on, came back to play a game... a tiny bit in, Windows suddenly started shutting itself down!

Absolutely no warning, except for that popup 4 hours earlier. Having something on a strict timer that leads to the most destructive result on arrival is an accessibility disaster. Doing that with anything is bad, updater or not. You cannot expect the user to respond to something within 20 seconds, 10 minutes or even 4 hours for a desktop productivity operation. (Games, thankfully, are another story).

How are these developers still on the job? Why does Windows' updater become more annoying with each release as Linux develops ways to even restart the kernel without needing to power off? (AKA: 100% uptime). Gaaaaaargh!



Other than Vista, I think standard PCs still do have life in them for games, and lots of it, though the technology is not quite in place. A big and cool feature that any modern desktop computer gives us is the capacity to double as a server, with hundreds of small daemons running in the background serving up content. My computer right now hosts an Internet-facing SSH server (and, shortly I hope, an Internet-facing d-bus relay). The end result is social mesh networking without centralization and without boundaries.
That's something that can grow as intuitively as an open computing platform can grow, which means sharing content as soon as the right tools exist, even if "the right tool" is made out of a disassembled optical mouse and a hacked together driver.

Nintendo has some great potential going in that department with their Wii stuff. It is, sadly, so far unmet, but the power is definitely there. It is an always-on device built to share stuff (in a peer-to-peerish way) over the Internet. On that topic, I think some of Nintendo's recent games (in particular Mr. Miyamoto's work) are quite inspiring. A lot of it is not necessarily games, but utilities that are magically fun. "Hardcore gamers" can complain all they want, but I think it's really cool how they do that.

Desktop computers have a place as productivity machines, but what stops that "productivity" from being entertaining? There are lots of interesting standards leaping into place on the various desktop computing platforms, and many can happily be used for things that aren't necessarily "games", but are definitely fun ways to look at peoples' PC things. (PC things being the cliche photo management applications, music, etc.).
Why can't a default music player have "karaoke mode", or a musical shooter?

What is a computer game, then? In my opinion, it can be whatever brings a smile to someone's face.

Fun is an intuitive interface. Fun is being able to watch a video, turn on my handheld gadget and walk away from the computer, having that video follow me with sound through that same device and piping the output to the best screen / speakers near me, room lights changing to suit. Fun is being able to get into a moving vehicle and have the device seamlessly switch over to wireless Internet in order to do its streaming, connecting instantly to my home computer's Internet-facing services. Fun is having that computer be my assistant whether I am right in front of it or miles away. Fun is having what I want where I want in as transparent a way possible, which is a lot more transparent than we have now. (Think Bill Gates' CES keynote transparent, * 10 thanks to decentralization).
The next generation of computer games fit in every step of the way, providing interesting services beyond the vanilla ones. A personal musical score definitely wouldn't hurt! Okay, now we're moving to the handheld gadget space, but that area is turning to open software platforms just like desktop PCs. The only reason game consoles don't is because they have always been - by tradition, it would seem - predictably proprietary. They are a different concept, with less wish for broadness than personal computers.

"Only geeks think that smart computer interfaces are `fun`?" I doubt that very much. Only geeks think of computers being fun, but everyone wants a servant doing their bidding. Computers (and eventually robots) are those servants in an affordable / morally acceptable package - just look at Roomba! It is time to bring that type of integrated service to the mainstream, and I think the imaginations of game developers fit this area like a glove.

That's funny, because AMD, Microsoft, and Epic all have motivations to ensure that the console market outperforms the PC market, and have all been active contributors to its decline.

Microsoft sells the XBOX 360, and made DX 10 Vista-only.

AMD produces CPUs used in the XBOX, and has caused more problems for PC developers than any other company, with their crap graphics drivers.

Epic says that PC gaming is in "disarray" and that they are going to focus on consoles, while releasing UT3 for the PC with no marketing and a lousy consolized menu. They sell licenses for an engine designed to run on consoles, and block out competition with the proprietary nature of console development.

Exactly who are they going to be at war with? Each other? If it was NVidia, Intel, and Crytek, I would believe it. I do not think MS and AMD are in any kind of a position to fix the PC market, and in fact have strong motivations to do the opposite.

So I am not sure what they mean when they say they will provide "guidelines". I think it means they will try to tell companies not to create technology that makes consoles look bad. I think companies like Crytek are what they are really afraid of, because that threatens their proprietery stranglehold.

No. It's already dead, THANKS TO YOU!

Amen.

Played much Battlefield 1942? The Witcher? Plenty of PC games have just as horrible load times.

For the better part of 8 years I've been trying to convince people that booting of a Linux "Live CD" into your game is the only sensible way to play games on proper computers. No one listens tho'.

The main reason the PC dies as Gaming Platform is the fact that nobish teams like Crytek and half of EAs trash teams don't understand the importance of "first the content, then the insane hardware requirements" ... many games would do several times better if they wouldn't run that crappy on 80%+ of the hardware used by regular / casual gamers.

This problem always existed but since SM3 the problem has expanded with a speed that the PC is dying as AAA title platform faster than needed just because of breakheads in the lead positions of AAA titles.