PC Games vanishing from Retail?

Happened to be in town last weekend looking for a birthday present for my brother who's a difficult person to buy stuff for. He does like PC games but only simple single FPS shooters, or shooting games like House of the Dead; he also needs something that fits his hardware (typically 1-2 years behind the typical).

Anyway I thought I'd have a look to see if there was anything that might fit the bill in Game, what did surprise me is that PC games have almost vanished from the shop entirely. There's no PC game chart, almost no new PC titles on display and obviously no marketing push on them, heck the PSP budget games have a more display space than all the PC games put together.

What happened? This only confirms what I've been thinking for a while which is that the mainstream PC gaming market, as we knew it, is dissapearing and it's only a matter of time before it's completely unrecogniseable from 12 months ago. Seriously if the retailers are pulling out I think it says that the bottom is finally due to drop out.

If PC gaming is going to survive the industry needs to start responding to customers requirements. Cheaper prices, lower hardware requirements, less REQUIRED updates, LESS often. It also needs to answer the question "Why bother with PC Gaming?" and also "What's going to happen when the next generation consoles come out?", because I think when the next gen consoles do hit the market it will be the killing blow. At the moment PC gaming is too expensive, too risky, too boring and "Spore" ain't gonna save it.

Darkheart

Still, the lack of PC games is saving me a lot of money. I probably used to spend circa £70 per month before. Now I can go months without buying a game.

In Game, they're normally at the back, left hand side, bottom two shelves. :/

hehe yeah EB is the same here. I go to Fry's electronics now, there even the PC indie games section is bigger than my local EB store. Xbox, Wii and PS3 get 5x30 foot isles for games and hardware whilst the PC gets 7 all by itself for games.

Wish I could take photos :)

> What happened?

Console games outsell PC games by a 10 to 1 margin. Any shop with limited shelf space (in other words, all of them) are going to stock console games first - and PC games second if at all.

Reminds me of what happened to the Amiga, the shelf space dedicated to them kept getting smaller and smaller till it finally vanished...

Bad news for me, I can't stand playing games on a console - although if the Wii had better graphics I would play that, but playing an FPS with two thumbsticks is just not right.

Don't know, here PC still has the same space within the store as always, which means the same and more than a console.

Due to the price of console games here (100-120 USD for PS3 / X360) they have a hard time to outsell PC games that worse which "only" cost 60-80 USD.

The bad thing about consoles is that they are computers, where the megacorporation is telling which software to use and which not, which has hardware and software digital restrictions management (which can be illegal to break in certain jurisdictions) and being closed-source can report all sorts of private things to the megacorp.

So true. The PC is the new Amiga, and PC owners are the next Amiga owners.

I noticed the same thing in EB about a month ago. The PC game shelves took almost a quarter of the front of the shop, but now they take up a small section on the very back wall.

I don't have a console myself but an considering one now. I'd just like to be able to control games with a mouse and keyboard rather than those clumsy hand controllers, expecially on FPS's.

I may have to start looking XNA programming afterall.

MVC here have religated (since the begining of the year) to several rows of a couple of The Sims games.
WHSmith dont sell any games (and haven't for a while now), whilst Wooworths have religated them to a shelf with several rows.

The only place that stocks a lot of them is PC World.

Without wanting to sound like an old git, it happened to the speccy users, even before the Amiga or C64 users...

One day evertyhing was normal, the next month the whole freakin' platform was vanishing before your eyes as everyone bought their Sega System or Amiga or Atari ST etc. ...

It's happenin' I can feel it...

Darkheart

@puki, it s probably not the lack of games, but like me your getting on and have less time for games.....



step in the indies then... yay!



not to sound bitter but NOTHING can replace the old miggy. PC owners will never be lucky enough to own hardware that still works 12 years after the event....



if anything will be the death nell is the necessity for the latest and greatest hardware to run the blah... you get the point. Yes there is a market for cutting edge, but there is a Larger market for 2-3 year old technology that still cuts the mustard quite well albiet at a smaller return.

Sounds about right for what I have seen lately too.

I've all but given up on PC games, for the following reasons.

1. DRM crap. I don't want this stuff on my computer.
2. Extremely bloated installs. A console can play it off the disc, why can't my PC? I'm willing to wait for longer loads if I have to.
3. I don't update my computer very often, and it seems like it is not often enough to run anything I might be interested in. This means I may wait a few years before I get around to a title, and I don't trust the DRM or copy protection schemes to be around long enough.


Consoles,... I know I can buy a game and it's going to run properly, and it's as simple a dropping in a CD.

Yea i from amiga time...

Hey i havent bougt a pc game sens Oblivion SE. GTA is nothing i likely to buy and iam bored at the fps.

When walking around my local PC world the other day I also noticed that there less new PC game titles on display.
There used to be a top 20 display shelf for PC games, now it's only 10 and it hasn't changed much over the last few months.
I also noticed that there is a lot of stuff that never use to be there or in small quantities like office furniture and digital picture frames ( the kind of tat found in Argos). And there definitely is more console games there.

The question whether todays PC's will end up like the Amiga and other computer systems all depends on what people use their computers for.
As gaming machines the problem there is if you want to run the latest games with all the bells & whistles you need a top-notch machine (some of the entry level machines that cost about £100 more than a console can run these games but not as good as consoles) that can cost thousands.
where as you can buy 2 XBox 360's for the price of a nvidia 9800GX2 or 1 XBox 360 with a couple of games for the price of a nvidia 9800GTX.

I can see that the only uses for a PC in the home market when PC gaming die out will be digital photography, the internet, people who work from home and pirating.

Question is more if users will shift even more to online buying games which they can redownload whenever they want ... I actually prefer buying games on Steam as they are normally cheaper and the fact that I can redownload them whenever I want makes them much less annoying than CD based trash that forces me to use fake images to play as I don't like to play the disk jokey..

The problem there is broad-band capping limit. Not everyone has unlimited broadband ( even IPS's that say they have unlimited aren't telling the whole truth there ). And can you backup such games (from steam) to other media ?

I've noticed this too. PC games have smaller and smaller sections in game shops now. Soon they'll be the same size as Gamecube sections ;-)

This has really been happening for years around where I am. Up through the mid-90's, just about every mall I went to had either an Electronics Boutique, Software Etc, or Babbage's in it (they're all merged into GameStop/EB Games now). They carried probably 90% PC games and 10% console stuff. In the mid-to-late-90's, the shift started happening, and they were probably 50% PC and 50% console. By the time EB Games and GameStop merged in 2005, they were already at or past 10% PC and 90% console.

the price of games regardless of the format is always going to be a factor

you might get a game on 360 but would you also buy the same game for your other systems?

can my pc play this game?
no, ok ill get the console version
yes, hmm its also out on 360/ps3 which do i buy

The PC isn't going to die off like that, I think your forgetting how big a part PC's are in this world.

Back when, the Amiga wasn't owned by millions of businesses.

The PC game market is shrinking... The question is does one persist on the blitz route or move into the console indi market which (on the xbox at least) appears to be growing and has a distribution method already in place.

If there was a blitz command set wrapper for XNA?.. I'd buy that.

[Request]Mark, Don't bother with Blitz3D 2.0 for the PC, do it for XBox 360 and PS3... Ta! ;)[/Request]

I don't think the PC market has shrunk, it's just changed. Only one vendor can sell games online for the consoles, but there are loads of them selling to PC owners. Steam, Strategy First, AdventureGamers, Dreamcatcher, GameTap, Direct2Drive, etc. And that's just what used to be retail games available online, I've not even mentioned the casual games.

As Plash already said, the PC isn't going anywhere. If all the big AAA developers stopped developing for it tomorrow, there's still going to be a huge potential market because most people need a PC for something. You could argue that it would get harder to distribute if that happened, but equally I could argue that there would be less products vying for attention, so it's probably even.


Yes you can.


Big indie developers who already have games on XBLA can't get their newest games on XBLA now, so what chance do you think a relative newcomer has? Even the indie devs who have been picked up by consoleland like the guys behind Flow and Everyday Shooter were developing PC versions side-by-side in case it never happened. It'd be one giant risk to develop something where you only have one potential outlet and that outlet is getting 10 times more submissions than it can handle.

The PC game market may or may not be shrinking at the current time but I seriously doubt it will vanish completely due to the fact PC will not die off for the reasons Plash said, in addition to the fact millions of homes have PCs and use them for more than just gaming.

> If all the big AAA developers stopped developing for it tomorrow

Soon after the graphics card industry would go into a slump, starting a final death spiral for PC gaming. Which might or might not end up in ultimate death - but it would be a very bad patch for PC gaming at that point.

Then again, console gaming was thought to be dead in the mid eighties after Atari imploded.

Why? Suddenly we're all going to get braille screens and not need a graphics card any more? Yeah sure, we won't have a hundred different variations on a theme, but 3d accelerated graphics are here to stay. An awful lot of serious applications need them, heck in the case of Vista, the Operating System needs them. If anything, it would be easier to develop if there were only half a dozen different cards out there. You'd have a target which wasn't moving quite so fast. And it's not like (many) indies are targetting 8800GTX as minimum spec as it is.

> Why? Suddenly we're all going to get braille screens and not need a graphics card any more?

No, but if there is no demand for faster and faster graphics, then card makers will start scaling back - or only doing the design work for consoles. Video card makers do not work for charity, and if PC gamers start drying up then so will high end PC graphics cards.

Consoles may eventually win in the end (regarding games), but the PC will still be the powerhouse of the worlds infrastructure.

Let's face it, all those wonderful game servers have to (ultimately) be run on a computer.

EDIT: The only reason I would buy a console (if, when games are no longer sold on the PC) is if it had a keyboard and mouse (no, not just for web browsing, I want to PLAY games with them).

Exactly, and by the time you have a console with a keyboard and a mouse - and bearing in mind that Microsoft are already in the console business and unlikely to want out any time soon - what have you got? A PC with a fixed hardware standard. Isn't the lack of a fixed hardware standard the single biggest bugbear for PC developers? ( Leaving aside piracy which is technically more of a boogieman than a bugbear. )

Also, apart from the direct download scene, there are a lot of online stores who've gotten their act together such that it's more convenient to order and have it turn up by courier the next day or so.

yeah I started ordering PC games online, there are several places that use california overnight shipping. I've been amazed because for $5 same as regular post office 3-5 day shipping I can get CA overnight and usualy get the package within 20 hours. And the way fuel prices are going up here I get a cheaper online price and the shipping is probably comparable to driving to the shops anyway.

Good point actually. Online reductions on PC games do seem to be significantly larger than online reductions on console games. I can often buy XBox 360 games at £10-15 less than RRP in-store where the online shops are offering only £5.

The computer though will always stay alive because of the aditional adjust ability. Many gamers like the extra control options and ability to add more and more controllers with usb from many differnent console bring different kinds of gamers together.It also allows people to use different console games on one computer If you set it up right.

Btw, supply is adjusted to link to demand. So long as enough of you 'demand' PC games, there will be supply :)

Fine by me, let the corporate monsters like EA go console only, more bread for us indies :)

Although, you cant play an rpg or fps properly without a mouse, and consoles just are not there.... except mabe the wii.

im more used to fps-ing with an xbox pad now (s type on the console not pc) mostly due to my desk lay out (or lack their of) to use the keyboard now its on my lap and i have no where to put the mouse to effectivly wsad + mouse
im sure their is a sensitivity adjustment you can make with the games for windows/360 wired pad that developers could tinker with that could almost be as quick and or accurate as a mouse

least in the amiga days you knew that if you had an A500 with a ram pack you were guarantied to be able to play the games on sale
it was the A500+/600 users that were scuppered cos game coders wernt using the os libs but their own hardware hacks ... so the new ecs hardware borked alot of code calls

pc's cga/ega/vga aside used to only have adlib or soundblaster to worry about supporting
post doom it kinda exploded (re graphics cards) and ive no idea what kind of on board card i have, what slot type i have or where i go from here if/when i get a better one for pc gaming in the 21st century (as it sure as hell dont like anything too recent as in the last 5 years)

I would imagine that if a graphics card manufacturer was going to make a card for a console, then they'd also make a PC version. Why spend all that money on research and chip manufacturing technology if you don't take that relatively small extra step to maximize your market.

aye why go through all that R&D money making the next gen chips if you only have a few 'buyers' on the market
you show sony, microsoft and nintendo your latest chip set and so do all the others (with an exclusivity deal no doubt) so sony buys chip A microsoft chip D and nintendo chip C ... so if their is a 4th card manufacturer they have no console market (i only know of nVidia and ATI but if their WERE more gpu manufacturers than consoles someone would loose out)

render farms are always going to want the next best thing (is SGI still going i last heard of them round the N64 days)
as are CGI artists in general as their software now needs as much oomph as possible, even if their game isnt coming to the pc they dont code on the console itself

im sure psp and photopaint now rely on better gfx (i remember how fast corel draw was on a low end 486 with a cirrus logic chip set compared to a faster one with just vanilla vga ditto for doom our other shoppers bench mark)

and we as pc users have reached that point where we expect to have some form of whiz bang gfx card even if we only ever watch DVD's and play spider solitair outside of office apps

When faced with the choice of buying the PC version or 360 version of game. I usually go for 360 unless it's an RTS, mainly cause I don't want to wait for it to install, then download some 300meg patch, then fiddle with settings, I just want to play it.
Imagine if everytime you got a car, you had to fiddle with he engine and check that everything was setup right? It'd be a nightmare, and that's just how PC games are now. The averge PC owner doesn't know the specs of their machine, so how can they know when the guy in the shop says "Have you checked the requirements on the box match your mahine?". Being a nerd I know what gfx card and soundcard, RAM, HD space etc... I have, but 90% of my friends don't.
That's the main reason why PC games are declining. That and the fact a lot more are being sold online now.

Having scores for PC setups can help the average joe, but it needs to be accepted as an industry standard. So my PC scores a 4 on the benchmarking site, but do I see that on game boxes in Game? No.

I know PC games allow modding and designing extra levels, but this only appeals to the 1% of players who ever bother, and with the consoles now getting in on that act too, i.e. Halo 3 forge, Tony Hawks, N+ on XBLA. Even the modding scene is losing strength.

PC Graphics cards manufacturers won't lose business if PC games get less popular cause they're the same companies making the cards for the consoles, so it's a win-win situation for them.

Previous posters on this are also correct though, in that 3D acceleration is getting common place in PC applications, from HD video on media centre PC's to detailed 3D on Google Earth, as well as embedded 3D objects in webpages using 3D plugins.

PC is going to die? That's just stupid.....

And you use your Xbox or Wii to make a comment then?



I buy most games on Steam, I don't have to drive to the nearest store, don't have to wait in line, just buy it and wait a few mins to download and in the meantime play another game maybe. And patches? The autoupdater makes sure you have the latest version all the time.

I predict that within 3 years PC games will be entirely gone from retail stores (excluding bargain bins). Already there is no performance advantage on the PC, the next round of consoles will be the killing blow for PC gaming, unable to catch up and too expensive to continue. Consoles will survive because they are better value, better performance and easier for everyone to use as a games platform (customers, suppliers and developers).

The gaming periphal market will decline as will the PC gaming press, advterising and marketing that goes with it. PC gaming will die a quiet death. Existing graphcis cards will simply become cheaper, the NV 9800 you pay £400 today will be £30 upgrade in a few years. The desktop as we know it is due to become a rarity anyway as people start to use hypervisor's and SaaS.

A mouse and keyboard could easily be added to any current console (they all use USB anyway), indeed the 360 will work with a USB keyboard plugged into it. However the companies have made design decisions not to support this unnatural game mode.

I remember when I first started playing PC games and I had to use cursor keys. It seemed so unnatural for the "down arrow" to be on the same level while the "Up Arrow" was above the other keys. Later Microsoft inrtoduced a keyboard where the keys did do this and I hated it because it felt so unnatural. In the same way people will get use to the other input devices which are (generally) better designed.

Darkheart

> In the same way people will get use to the other input devices which are (generally) better designed.



Gamepads are the worst way to control an FPS ever devised - I might get used to it, but I'll never like it. The Wii controls I could...

I think it's simply because consoles are making waves against the PC. Vista is slower and bloaty compared to XP and sadly for Microsoft this time they can't rely on the next generation of faster processors to save them and make their operating system seem better.

There's not too much room for improvement on a Windows platform that still to this day is fraught with the usual problems that every Windows OS has at some point.

Consoles have made waves in recent years with all the online play of the Wii, X-Box and PS3 and the fact they are infinitely more reliable and easy to use. Why would you want to use a PC to do the same thing?

The PS3 can make graphics far better than a PC can right now and laptops are ever more popular and usually because of the size their specs are slightly reduced to a standard desktop. PCs are more of a casual gaming platform now and the hardcore PC gamers start to get less and less.

And for Vista, it's just a piece of shit that never needed to be invented. Microsoft may have made things worse for themselves by releasing it.

In the past Windows was mainly for playing games, going on the Internet, watching movies, playing mp3s etc, there wasn't really any other way to do it. But there's now so many other ways to do these things, especially in regard to consoles. Less and less reasons to need a PC. I use my phone, my DS etc to do things I used to do on Windows.

Even in this community people have resorted to making mostly puzzle games, it's only a matter of time I think before we see a drastic change in PC gaming. I think next gen PC gaming has been bad for over 10 years and should have died long ago.

..im not an expert, but im very sure that games on PC not going to disappear...actually, more big folks leave PC world, more space will remain for creative folks such as indies...and again...im not that convinced that PC gaming going to die...everything has to have ups and downs..so do PC world...i wouldnt bet that PC gaming going to end..not at all...

its how you look at it

i got used to it as i for some time only had an xbox for entertainment (running on a travel 7" tft looks like its too small to ever be usefull but it actually seems huge when sat nigh on infront of it)

but the wii rifle adapter looks brill ... if someone would make a gizmo that enables it to work out of the box on the pc it would be brill ... but at the mo you need an ir bar the wiimote and nunchuck and iir bluetooth dongle

the media has been talking about this for a couple of years.... forecasting the "shrinking" pc game market

it's flat out not true.... when you use faulty data you get faulty results.

*revenue for PC games is growing by double digits and should exceed $9.5 billion for 08. for a perspective, the total revenue for all CONSOLES in 2006 was $12.6 billion.

it's true, the purchase of BOXED pc games is on the decline and the retail space is getting much smaller... that's it! broadband media distribution and subscription based models are more than making up for the retail decline.

these past media articles that were claiming the "death of PC gaming", they only included sales from these retail spaces. they did -not- include the download casual games market, non boxed steam games and so on... in other words nothing bought on line.

recently, the last few months, there have been articles written that brought these very points up

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10711&Itemid=2
http://www.developmag.com/news/29331/The-PC-market-is-not-dying-says-newly-formed-PC-Gaming-Alliance
http://ionnetwork.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2011764%3ABlogPost%3A596

this is nothing like what happen to the Amiga.