It's PC gaming that's on the way to obsolescence. I tried to help set up a game for my brother in law (he's 12) on my brother's not-too-ancient PC. Steam wouldn't start and we'd lost the activation code for the game (printed on the manual). Which we found out only after we'd spent 30 minutes installing the game. I was minutes worth of patience away from just going out and buying him an XBox.
This single troublesome incident does not really say anything about the status of PC gaming, sorry. You could of just as easily experienced a red ring of death with the Xbox 360.
I don't think it's true that, statistically, I'd be just as likely to experience the red ring of death than to lose a manual, have to run an installer for a game, or have problems getting software started up. With a console, there would've been a 99.9% probability of just handing the kid the game, starting it up, and leave him to play it.
Steam, or platforms like it, are the future if not already the present of game distribution on the PC. I can't really state why you've had problems installing Steam as I have done it on three of my PCs, but I will say that the installation of games purchased through Steam is almost seamless. On Windows, it means you punch in your password for UAC and let it run. Steam's primary use isn't installing games purchased on disc - it's a marketplace and a community that will hold purchase history in the cloud for easy downloading.
Not so with the Xbox 360, I'll cite Wikipedia on this one:
On February 8, 2008, during the Game Developers Conference 2008, Microsoft announced that the "Failure rate has officially dropped", but without mentioning any specifics.[28] The same month, electronics warranty provider SquareTrade published an examination of 1040 Xbox 360's and said that they suffered from a failure rate of 16.4% (one in six).
Personally I'm on my third Xbox 360 after the first suffered a Red Ring of Death failure and the second had a faulty DVD drive that killed any inserted disk, destroying my copy of Rock Band. It actually convinced me to switch to gaming on the PC, as I refused to trust my Xbox and I didn't want it to fail until I had finished the Mass Effect trilogy.
Yeah, the Xbox360 hardware is unreliable at best. I never used my first Xbox360 for long hours nor in extreme conditions and yet in less than one year after purchase it did the RROD thing. It was one of the first models, so this may have improved, but this does not leave a very good image of the product.
It seems to me that the PC and console markets will ultimately merge, or, the PC market will absorb the console market. However you want to look at it, that seems to be an inevitable conclusion at this point when you consider what Valve is apparently looking to do and the hardware powering the PS4 and new Xbox.
Not exactly. There are now a lot less PC games produced every year, and instead there are fewer but much larger hits (courtesy of the scale of the PC market globally).
The peak of the PC gaming world was Windows 95 to Windows XP (2003/2005 time frame). Shareware was extraordinarily popular and accessible during the first part of that, and the Internet had made downloads / patches / updates / modding possible in the last part. Meanwhile consoles began to present increasingly superior accessibility to casual gamers while providing enough of the eye candy to satisfy many serious gamers.
You'll find the lopsided majority of those hits occurred during the 1995-2005 era. The biggest hits however, are since then. The PC gaming market has simply become smaller and consolidated to a few hit franchises.
I don't see a significant difference here. There are about seven elements per year on that list. There are a handful of years during the recession where there are fewer top sellers, but 2011 had just as much as any of the earlier years, and many of the games from 2012 probably are still selling in large quantities today.
This also doesn't account for the rise of free to play gaming on PC. The most popular video game in the history of the world isn't on this list at all.
Also, fatally, digital sales are not factored into these numbers. There's this thing called Steam . . .
34 of those games were released after 2005. 79 were released in the 1995 / 2005 time frame. So those ten years averaged 7.9 per year; the seven years after averaged five per year. It's a nearly 60% increase per year.
In my opinion digital PC game sales would do nothing but tip the scale toward my point about the PC gaming market consolidating into just a few mega hit franchises that generate all the sales while the volume of games has significantly contracted. In PC gaming there are maybe ten titles that matter, such as WoW or Sims. In console gaming, there are over 100 titles a year that sell 1 million or more copies.
Free to play PC gaming is a very small market still. The Sims 2 alone made more money than the entire free-to-play market combined did in the previous four years. That may change in the next few years, but it doesn't change the facts that exist right now.
Four of the top five on that list are from 2004 or earlier. Meanwhile of course total console game sales have exploded to the moon during that time.
First of all, would you mind showing me the sales data from Steam? No? Then how do you intend to use that as part of your argument exactly?
Which game on steam has sold 11 million copies on the service, like Starcraft did at retail? 20 million like Sims 2? 9 million like Half-life 1? 12 million like Half-life 2? I'd wager it's not even remotely close.
It's my opinion that Steam is moving a mid number of high priced new releases, and a lot more lower priced discounted games (eg buying Shogun for $9.99 or Torchlight 2 for $9.99 during discounts). A quick look through their top 50 best selling reveals the strong majority are $20 or less, with many being $11.99 or less. Is Steam popular? Of course, but what does that have to do with whether the PC gaming market has consolidated into a few hit franchises with less total games produced per year?
Yes, with the gap for the recession, that makes perfect sense to me. Also, you're forgetting that as sample size decreases variance increases. The ten year sample is larger than the six year sample (2006-2011) that you've set up. I expect variance.
Also, I count only 73 in ['95,'05). Are you counting ['95,'05]? That's 11 years. 7.3 per year is really not that different from 4.8/yr (29 in ['06,'12)), which includes two to three years of recession.
As for this:
> First of all, would you mind showing me the sales data from Steam? No? Then how do you intend to use that as part of your argument exactly?
I'm not interested in winning a debate with you, I'm just trying to demonstrate what's true to any fair-minded people reading this. If you want to pretend that Steam sales didn't account for a huge portion of all PC games sold, and therefore that the PC sales are extraordinarily under-represented in the last few years of this chart, be my guest. It's only yourself that you're deceiving.
List is also kind of misleading in regards that many games do not release individual sales based on systems anymore so they cannot be accurately listed (and are omitted). For example, Deus Ex: Human Revolution sold at least 2 million copies[1] since it came out 2 years ago and a large % were probably PC based on it being a PC franchise.
It's also generally better to buy on steam directly versus physical copies to avoid headaches (usually cheaper as well if you catch steam seasonal sales). I can understand not doing that if you preorder for some special items though. That and to always make sure the game does not come with some sort of other annoying DRM that is not listed[2].
I'd argue that the second half of the 1990's was actually something of a bubble. 3D-ness and CD-ROM's were the hot new thing, and everyone tried to make their games 3D, increase polygon counts and texture resolutions, add cutscenes, fill an entire CD with assets -- which meant bloated art and development budgets, and a loss of focus on innovation.
In short, new 3D and storage technology, dotcom-era funding of big publishing conglomerates, those conglomerates' control of retail channels, and a lack of alternative distribution for smaller developers, led to an unusually large number of big-budget games.
IMHO gaming's "natural" state is more similar to the era c. 1975-1995, where small studios and innovative gameplay were a big part of the industry.
There's still a market segment today for big-budget "A" titles, but c. 1997-2005 was the heyday.
Anyone in the world who can make a game now has affordable access to a number of digital distribution and payment channels like Steam, Gamersgate, Android/Apple Apps, Facebook, HTML5, or plain old downloads on a website with payment provided by Paypal/Stripe/Dwolla/Amazon/Google Checkout/Bitcoin [1]. There are plenty of open-source and commercial tools and libraries for developing games. This means individual developers and startups can enter the industry relatively freely, with minimal upfront costs, can restore innovation to its rightful place, and can exert downward price pressure with their small costs.
I believe the number of games/developers/publishers in the ecosystem is larger than it ever was [citation needed], as is the revenue of the industry as a whole [citation needed], but A-list console and PC titles have given up a fair amount of ground to the "long tail" of modestly successful indie games.
[1] 1990's connection speeds, and the pesky business of tying up telephone lines for hours or days during long downloads, made yesterday's Internet an unappealing distribution platform.
I've been playing PC games since the 80's. Every time a new generation of consoles come out, people claim that PC gaming is going to die. It hasn't thus far, and many developers still openly admit that hardcore PC gamers are a large part of what's driving the entire gaming industry into the future.
Really? A bad experience you went through suddenly means PC gaming is going to be obsolete?
Steam wouldn't start is a vague statement, care to elaborate? Steam.exe wouldn't run, or the window wouldn't show, or...?
And which game took 30 minutes installing on a not-too-ancient PC (one that we're lacking the specs for, keeping in mind not every PC can game well).
Losing the activation code is just as likely to happen with consoles especially with the increasingly amount of games that require codes for online gaming.
