NVIDIA's Roy Taylor: PC gaming is not dying

"People are just not so interested in picking up boxes from retailers as they used to be, and there are many other places where people can spend their gaming dollars."

http://www.yougamers.com/news/17877_nvidias_roy_taylor_pc_gaming_is_not_dying/

Well it makes a change from Peter Molyneux jabbering on about the games industry being dead. Again.

sure he tells that ... he will soon be without work if it would be the other way round naw? ;-)

A ConsoleMark would be kind of boring too, right? :O)

would be funny ... ;-)
first time that the "cool kids with brickhead pay for everything" parents wouldn't be able to pose ;-)

it's like the police coming in saying "There's nothing to see here, move along, the market isn't dying, we are fine, continue to give us funding, continue to contract us out, nothing to see here...."

;-)

PC games industry has certainly been dead for several years.

Thank goodness we have Japanese developed consoles and an industry away from Microsoft and EA.

Also in the news this week, turkeys have announced there will not be a Christmas in 2008.

meh, I don't like Japanese games. I don't like much that EA spits out either.

I don't think PC games are dead. Seems to be about the same these past 7 years, the only difference I see is that my attitude towards games has changed and I don't have much interest in most of them anymore. I still manage to buy 5-6 really good games a year, which is better than the late 90's when I was lucky to find a couple of good ones.

I feel the same. Perhaps it's because we were there during the video game revolution. What I mean by that is we saw video games evolve from simple 2 color boxes on shimmering screens to realistic physic driven cash cows they are today.

I mean when you think about it, every game that came out since pong and what not, we were looking to say "oooh, I wonder what this will give me that the last game I played didnt... something new and exciting". And in the last 10 years that has been mostly graphics. Now that we are approaching the plateau of technology with real time graphics, I mean sure it can always be added to, but the degree of separation we see in between leaps and bound is much smaller these days than it was back when the voodoo cards were released. It just doesn't seem all that impressive anymore, and I personally tend to get bored quickly just because it's hard to appreciate the fact that anyone can throw 4 million at a game idea and see it to reality where back in the day a small 1-4 man team created an entertainment extravaganza!

Atari is dead
Sega is dead
Sony is dying
Nintendo is Dying too.
And microsoft wins it all. but is eaten by linux and blue ray.

I agree with you Dark Half. Been playing games since the late 70's and seen them evolve. Most recently it has been graphics but the underlying games themselves havent really changed much.

Untill developers move on from graphics to target something else like decent AI. Were going to be stuck with the same old games with the usual graphics which fail to bring out the wow factor it used to.

I remember when Terminator 2 came out, and it totaly blew everyone away. The movie industry jumped on the new enthusiasm for FX till we got saturated with them. People want more from their games just like they have wanted more from their films for a while now. A visual extravaganza isn't enough, we want good acting, story, and often to be engaged on some kind of intellectual level.

I see a lot more kids playing consoles these days, and I think that's what's driving the console gaming market. A lot of people still get to experience games for the first time and aren't as tired as I am. I think thats part of where consoles have an edge. Simple easy games with advertising targeting people that can afford to be consumers and always want the next great thing.

Generalizing a bit but thats roughly how I see it.

Wow. Does anyone else think he sounds exactly like Colin Proudfoot?

PC owners ARE the new Amiga owners. QED.

I understand why he says what he does, Gaming is Nvidia's highest margin business area so they have a large vested interest in talking it up but PC gaming still going down the pan, I expect it to be gone as we know it now in the next 3-4 years possibly less.

The thing that has really killed it is HDTV and consoles ability to perform at as high a (or a higher) level than PC's although there are many other factors. Customers vote with their wallets:

A decent gaming PC costs £600-£1000 and requires a £200 refresh every 12 months or a £300+ refresh every 2 years. You can't rent PC games in the same way as console games (although I expect you will be able to soon as the market continues to slide and desperation creeps in).

A console will cost you a maximum of £350 and lasts for 4-5 years with NO NEED to buy upgrades. That makes it MASSIVELY more cost effective for everyone which is particularly important when parents are wondering what to buy their kids. Over the life span of a console, evening upgrading at the most cost effective rate I would still spend nearly 4x as much on keeping my PC current JUST TO PLAY CURRENT GAMES.

Why worry about wether my PC system can handle "Assasin's Creed"? When I KNOW my Xbox 360 can, and it looks great at a higher res than my PC is capable of (my 19" monitor is maxed at 1280x1024 as opposed to my 40" tv at 1920x1080p). In fact it's likely to look and play WORSE than on my 360 even with a GFX card that cost almost as much as an Xbox 360 (8800GT) itself. In any case I've already played and completed the game way before it's out for PC anyway, as has anyone else that really wanted to play it, old news.

There are loads of other reasons why console games make more sense now (I've been meaning to write an article myself on this) to developers, customers and publishers and the market is starting to correct.

I will still own a PC, but for Office work, programming, Browsing in fact EVERYTHING else other than gaming I will probably never need to upgrade my PC again which is why I'm moving to consoles for the majority of my gaming and have pretty much stopped buying PC games. (I bought 5 last year, down from ~8 the year before and ~10 before that).

Darkheart

ditto

its kinda what i say in nigh on every thread like this that i post in (like a broken record)

what were the pc specs of the first xbox when it came out
which was cheaper?

i know in the end you could get one for £100 could never see a pc coming down that low

...

in the olden days the mega drive wasnt that much different to the ST/Amiga (still love that joke / over heard quote in ST/Amiga format "im looking for that new religious mag Saint Amiga" least it wasnt the other way round Amiga Street ;) )

all had 68000 cup's all were 320*200 or there abouts (think mega drive was 220?) had a limited onscreen display from a fixed pallet
iir st and mega drive were 16 and 64 out of 512 compared to Amiga's 32 from 4096

so save for multi disk loading times alot of mega drive games could be directly ported to ST/Amiga's with little to no alterations and vise versa if your game wasnt reliant on the keyboard or mouse (pretending you could get sega to manufacture it that is)

so in them days it was a semi level playing field

now with no decade old hardware standardisation (why they tried starting now is beyond me) you never know if your game will work out of the box on any given system but console owners know it will

im not one for beefing up my system (i bought a medion dual core from sainsburys cos i couldnt be bothered to system build after a 10 year break and it was cheap and came with nectar points too)
save for the shitty gfx card it does the job of dvd wmp and itunes

i cant play starwars battle front on it so i still use my xbox disc

actually, pc games renting is far simpler than console game renting and far cheaper if you use a gaming flatrate like gamesload.de or metaboli (multi country) and is the way I play most of the games I play. My only preorders for pc games for this year are Star Craft 2 and Spore ... the rest are Wii

But yeah ... gaming suffers the same problems the music industrie did until piracy forced them to rethink their models a little ...
Its just that EA still shits too many bucks to be force to think about a really new way .. the can still cross finance for to many crappy games with the few exceptions every year.

Thought if will wright would leave EA, they would be doomed seriously sooner or later as Sims is their by far strongest selling franchise

PC gaming is not dying, it is already clinically dead.

The last game that I will buy for a PC, if it's ever going to be released, will be Neil Manke's 'They Hunger: Lost Souls'. And I will only buy a PC version of it if it won't come out for the Xbox 360.

If NVidia would charge $100 for a GE Force 8800 GTS all hardware issues would instantly disappear.

Still too much power consumption...

hehe, you know Leadwerks. That 7800GS AGP you sold me plays Crysis at a playable framerate with almost everything turned up. Same with all the latest games.

My system has mostly 4 year old hardware + 2 year old GPU and runs almost everything you can throw at it. If you don't mind at playing 20+ fps without AA, motion blur turned off but crank everything else up, even games like Crysis play repectably.

I doubt my good fortune will last much longer, but hopefully till the Autumn when I'll consider upgrading.

it does not run anything current gen as the card is no DX10 :)
Thats why the run fine, DX9 is 50%+ less demanding than DX10 / CG 2.0

Evak, what kind of CPU do you have?

I have a old socket 754 athlon64 3000+ with400mhz overclock. Came out about 4 years ago.