During today's computer gaming panel at PAX East 2014,
"The (Incredible) Future of PC Gaming," the topic at hand was — as you
may have guessed — a contrarian viewpoint to the conventional wisdom
that holds that the PC is on the decline. At the same time, it's not as
if the panelists, who came from a wide spectrum of the PC gaming
industry, were blind to the realities of the market. They just focused
on the gaming segment of the platform. Gaming, they said, will keep the
PC relevant for the foreseeable future.
According to the panelists, there are many positive aspects of the PC
platform that are obvious, including how open it is and how
customizable it allows games to be. The PC is also in a transition
period as a whole, noted Tom Petersen, Nvidia's director of technical
marketing — sales of computers have been declining or staying flat at
best, with many people opting to use smartphones or tablets as their
primary computing devices these days.
However, said Petersen, the gaming sector of the PC market is
growing; in fact, it's helping to keep the platform alive. Chris
Roberts, founder of Star Citizen developer Roberts Space Industries, added that gamers are a major driver of sales of computer components.
PC gaming's transition to digital distribution has had a number of
consequences, most of them positive. It has helped to open up the
marketplace to a wider group of developers, and it has also given
publishers new business models. Fans may not like online-focused games,
but Matt Higby, creative director on PlanetSide 2
at Sony Online Entertainment, pointed out that the internet requirement
eliminates — for the most part — the threat of piracy, which was so
devastating to the PC gaming industry in the early 2000s.
With Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey on the panel, the speakers
mentioned virtual reality a few times as one of the main pieces of PC
gaming's future. When the panelists brought up cloud-based streaming of
games, Luckey stepped in to voice his belief that the technology isn't
ready yet — not because of the lack of bandwidth, but because of the
latency. A cloud-based pipeline for rendering isn't possible for VR
games at this point, Luckey explained, noting that latency is one of the
main obstacles to robust VR experiences that don't make players feel
ill. In fact, Luckey said he hopes that the Oculus Rift will persuade
developers to move away from the trend toward cloud-based streaming,
simply because it doesn't work with VR (or many fast-paced non-VR
titles).
"That game would never work as a streaming game," said Luckey of the twitch shooter Quake 3.
The same is true for some more modern games, Luckey pointed out, saying
that if you tried to push Call of Duty as a streaming title, even
casual players would recognize that it wasn't a great experience.
As for the future of PC gaming platforms, the panelists expressed
excitement about Linux's rise and Valve's efforts with SteamOS, but said
they don't expect it will overtake Windows anytime soon. Asked about
the potential for a Linux version of PlanetSide 2, Higby said
Sony Online Entertainment has no plans for it at this time, since it
would take "a lot of work" to port the game's engine to OpenGL.
Nvidia's Petersen said he believes Microsoft is invested in gaming on Windows, and pointed to the company's recent announcement of DirectX 12
as an example. And as much as the panelists joked about the failures of
Windows 8, Roberts said, "I do think that Windows will still be the
dominant OS."
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Of course, gamers (or, more specifically, fanboys) heard that the use of the PC as a tool of productivity and a software hub is in decline, and they immediately applied their own rhetoric to it. I've said what this article is alluding to before. I said that the #1 reason PCs aren't gonzo is simply due to the fact that people use 'em for gaming, and that Valve's gonna give it a run for its money in that department. And - hey, look at that! - the experts end up saying the exact same thing. If anything, PC is merely becoming a niche platform; its purpose as an all-around machine, or even one of productivity, is being relegated to more efficient, more convenient devices (namely tablets and smartphones and cloud services that can be accessed from both). With gaming consoles doing more than just playing games (instead becoming entertainment hubs like the XBOne and PS4), no longer can PC gamers swing their "multitasking schlongs" in everyone's faces; they're not the only ones with said schlongs anymore.
However, I do disagree with the notion that MS will retain the dominance it has. If anything, I'm predicting a great chism in gaming between the AAA industry and literally everyone else, at least on the PC side. Steam has been a TREMENDOUS platform that elevates previously-unknown indies to a new level of fame. Already-well-established developers/publishers can just make an announcement and use whatever they choose (most likely the platform that allows them to make the prettiest-looking game the easiest to the most amount of people because bottom lines an' alla dat). PC-exclusive indies are liable to similar behavior if they end up in the same situation, unless they choose to expand their offices to more than just Windows/Linux and the shiniest boxes (which is smart) instead of relegating themselves to only those (which is dumb). Said chism will mean that neither OS would retain an overwhelming dominance.
However, this does depend on whether or not MS can actually sell their OS and hardware to more than just gamers. They'd sure hate to relegate themselves, as a software company, to just gaming. It's the near-equivalent of forcing Nintendo to go mobile, except on a much bigger scale. We'll see if MS can unfuck itself in gaming with its actual gaming consoles first, along with its mobile devices (Surface is crashing-and-burning and the iPhone is worth more than the whole damn company).