One of the things that I keep touching on in the show is that the fact that PCs are dead. Or doing really well. Or the PS3 is going to overtake the 360, or that the 360 is going to remain dominant. Or the iPad will be a success. Here’s the arguments for all of these things, and yes I know each set contradicts the others.

PC Gaming isn’t in fact dead, it’s about to explode again.

Argument for the defence:

Ever since this generation of consoles launched the PC has been declared dead, but this doesn’t take into account the fact that in fact the platform has been going great guns in the meantime. Steam has taken off and throughclever use of sales has shown that PC games can have long tail sales years after their original releases. In the last few months I’ve grabbed games such as KOTOR and the UFO series as well as games from the last few years that are probably still on the shelves. Console games just don’t have this long tail in the same way for the publishers, in fact the games stores pretty much make sure that it’s only in the interest of the publisher to have discs on shelves for the first few months because they then take over with second hand sales for which the publisher gets nothing. A company like Blizzard is still selling copies of Starcraft and Warcraft 3 today. On top of that Steam is just such a convenient platform it’s made me impulse buy several games when I wouldn’t have normally.

The biggest advantage that the PC has is that the console platforms have given up competing with it by declaring that they are going to have 10 year cycles this time round. Can you imagine how good a 10 year old platform is going to look compared to a PC with the latest $100 graphics card? Games can get better looking over time, but they can’t squeeze the sort of power out that new hardware can bring. Already PC games are higher resolution and can avoid the nasty trick of using lower than HD resolutions for rendering elements that most console games resort to, and over time this is only going to get better.

The console platform holders are scared of one thing: People will break their DRM and make piracy as easy as it is on the PC. This gives the PC a big advantage because they ban something quite important: modding your games. The two giants in this arena are Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. There are tools available for them from the developers themselves that allow you to craft your own content right into the game. This is an invaluable tool for people who want more content, to tell a story or want to learn how to make content for games.

The compatibility problems of old are greatly improved, most games run fine on all modern graphics cards and we have DirectX 10 to thank for that. Yes, even for OpenGL and DirectX9 games. DirectX 10 drew a line in the sand and broke the cycle of cards just adding random features to DirectX 9 that may or may not be supported by rival card manufacturers in the same way. DirectX 10 demanded that a fixed set of features was implemented and now that nearly all cards are DX10 compatible in modern gaming PCs this has filtered down to the old DX9 games as well.

The final point to make is that PC  gaming is already much bigger than console gaming and so has already won. Casual gaming is much more massive than all the consoles combined, and distribution methods such as Facebook reach a staggering number of people. I know people will say that that’s not real gaming, but they are wrong. A game is a game, whether it’s World of Warcraft, Call of Duty or Farmville. Just consider how many more PCs there are than consoles and this fact: Valve consider the considerably smaller Mac market to be bigger than the PS3 market, that’s the order of magnitude of the difference.

The argument for the opposition:

PCs are expensive and unreliable. You barely need to make more than that argument to guarantee that consoles will always win. You buy a PC from Dell, it comes and works for a year or two. New games start to get a little sluggish and so you buy a new graphics card, but your power supply isn’t powerful enough to run your new card so you need a new one of those as well. This isn’t consumer friendly gaming, this is hobbyist gaming. This may not matter to you or me, but to the average person (Let’s call them “Normals”) it’s a deal breaker when they can just grab a 360, PS3 or Wii and never have to worry about upgrading it, the PC just can’t compete. It’s not just graphics cards either, add a couple of more years to the cycle and you need a whole new set of brains (processor and memory) in order to run the latest games. You might as just well buy a new PC every 3 years, which given the 10 year cycle for the current consoles means that you’ll buy 3 PCs to every PS3 or 360 you buy.

There are three letters that strike fear into every PC gamer. DRM. Whether it’s a root kit installed by Sony, or a need for a constant internet connection to Ubisoft servers it never works reliably. Upgrade your operating system and the DRM will stop working because it was doing something nastily wrong in the first place. Hackers attack the authentication servers and you can’t play your game. You’re in a hotel room in the arse end of nowhere for work and you have no internet and you can’t play the games on your laptop. We all fear it, we all know that in a few years we’ll need cracks to even be able to play these games legitimately. We all know that consoles do it better.

Conclusion

The biggest threat to stop PC gaming becoming dominant again are the publishers and the pirates. Nobody is going to let DRM kill PC gaming, and with another half decade on this round of consoles to go it’s the PCs game to lose. In 2015 PC games will look so much better than the PS3 and 360s it can’t fail to win.



Last time I listed the little niggles that I think are wrong with the PS3. This time I’m going to do the same with the 360 because I’m nothing if not an equal opportunities griper.

1. The first, and biggest, problem is their reliability. I’m not saying that the PS3 is bulletproof, I know it’s not as I’ve had failures myself, but the rate of 360s popping their clogs is staggering. I’ve had two fail, and nearly everybody I know has had one go. Hopefully the current design is stable, but they really need to make a new unit that can get a reputation for being solid as the current design is shot.
2. Xbox Live Arcade is great. There are some staggeringly good games on the service, from classics such as Doom to brand new games made specifically for it. There is one niggling little flaw though. It’s a real pain to find the games I want to play now that I’ve downloaded so many. Search, better categories similar ideas would help but in the short term the ability to favourite games so they’re at the top of the list would be great.
3. The controller isn’t perfect, in fact it’s far from it. Although it doesn’t leave me in pain like the PS3 one (yes, I know I’m a freak) but what excuse do Microsoft have for having the worlds worse d-pad? I can never get the direction I want reliably without hitting one of the others at the same time. Look at the design of the PS3 d-pad, that’s how it should be done with each direction effectively being an individual button instead of an inaccurate rocking button. OK, you get diagonals on the 360 controller, but what’s the use if you can’t reliably hit them? There’s also the matter of those bobbles on the two sticks. You remember them, they wore down in a few days and were gone. Well if you keep playing I’m sure some of you will know that you go further through the rubber on the stick itself and that then splits. You have to be pretty obsessive, but I haven’t noticed that problem with my PS3.
4. Possibly the best feature is the way that when you turn a 360 on you have to double check that it’s actually on because it’s so whisper quiet. Oh wait, the fan sounds like a 747 taking off in my living room. While (amazingly) later units are much quieter than the launch ones they’re still awkwardly loud. A new xbox model should be made to fix that, everybody would upgrade to it (probably)
5. While we’re talking about noise I can’t let the DVD drive slide. The best feature on the console is that one that allows you to copy the contents of the disc to the hard drive because it makes playing some games not sound like you’re playing while under heavy machine gun fire.
6. Games on Demand. This is a brilliant idea, and one that I support 100%. It’s just I can get the games off Amazon cheaper usually. Sure, I need to use a disc which I like, but I’m also running out of disc space on my 360 anyway so a few more 4gb game downloads aren’t practical.
7. The hard drive costs HOW MUCH? The rather strict rules about which hard drives can be used on the 360 which effectively limits you to buying an overpriced driver from MS (yes you can upgrade them yourself for less, but it’s a hassle and the drive has to be the exact right type and you risk a banning for modding). I have a 120gb drive in mine, a quick look at my hardware retailer of choice shows that I can get a 600gb or even a whole terabyte of storage on a 2.5” hard drive now. There’s even a smaller 10k rpm one I notice, that’ll help game loading times. I don’t mind playing a little bit more than the retail price of the drives, but just give me lots more storage than the pitiful amounts available now and don’t make me feel like I’m being abused while paying for it.
8. Xbox Live Indy Game. I think they’re brilliant, anybody can pay $99 or so and release their own games on xbox. Sure, they’re not going to be the new Halo and not going to sell a bazillion copies but it lets the average person who knows a little bit of coding to put something onto the console. Sony started this with special consoles for education, but Microsoft have opened it up to everybody. Nobody told the Marketing people though. Or the Xbox UI people. Put the games front and centre! I MAED A GAME WITH ZOMBIES!!!!111! was the best selling Indy game of last year, where is the big icon on the front page? Why not just link the top 10 games that week on a single menu and let people discover new games that way with a way to get through to the rest of the catalogue. The more people play, the more people will buy and the more people will develop because they make more money.
9. Gold is king, silver users smell. Because we pay for gold, silver get hardly any features because they want to make everything seem worthwhile. No, I don’t mind that. What I do mind though is when Microsoft turn down features because they can’t charge for it. Sounds nuts right, nobody would be that dumb? Well when Microsoft apparently told the BBC that they’d only add iPlayer to the service if it was allowed to be a gold feature, which is at odds with the BBCs access remit, we passed into the territory of cutting off your own nose to spite your face. 8% of BBC iPlayer viewing is via the PS3, I would imagine that there would be a similar number if the Xbox had it, or at least that 8% would split.

You’ll notice that I left off a few things that you might consider a gripe yourself. I don’t mind paying for Live, in fact I’d rather pay and get proactive banning of cheaters and the better service in general than not pay anything and get the PS3 service. Yes, that also means I would pay for PSN if it were made better. MS points instead of cash? Nope, don’t mind that as I know roughly the conversion so I mentally do it in my head anyway now.

Let the flaming commence.