PC gaming to get gloomy
March 4, 2009 by Jin
Filed under Jin's Corner, Recent
According to Gartner, PC sales will contract 11.9% this year - three times worse than the worst PC industry’s previous drop of 3.2%. The numbers make sense. If you’re worried about the economy or you’re unemployed, new PC purchases go into the nice-to-have category instead of the must-have category where you pay for housing, food, clothing and medical care.
Despite the fact that PC gaming remains one of the bright spots in the economy, with games still moving off shelves even despite the economic downturn, the lack of new PC purchases is a troubling sign for the industry. PC gaming has always had a symbiotic relationship with hardware. The capability of new hardware have allowed game developers to offer continually richer gaming experiences, which in turn have encouraged many enthusiasts to upgrade to keep up with the changes. Though costly for gaming enthusiasts trying to keep up, the escalating relationship set the PC platform apart from consoles which have a static hardware profile throughout their product life cycles.
So what does all this mean given that one part of the symbiotic chain that binds PC game makers with new hardware will be considerably weakened this year? Well for one, if you’re a game developer, releasing a game that can’t run on moderately middle of the road or even low-end PC hardware would not be a smart move. While there will always be a few hardcore enthusiasts that decry the fact that no new games push their $5000+ gaming rigs, those won’t be the majority of your market. Expect that a lot of players will still want to game with PCs pushing the end of their typical life cycle: 3 or 4 year old machines.
One of the other things that I see happening will be the trend to upgrade instead of buying new. Adding memory, a new video card or adding more hard drive space are relatively low cost ways to give that old machine another year or two of life. Memory in particular is cheap, with 2 GB of RAM (PC 3200) that will work with many older machines going for $74 US. And makers like ATI have cut prices of popular cards like the ATI Radeon 4850, which now sell for $50 cheaper.
Further, expect PC gamers to cut back on some software purchases or look for free / low cost alternatives. For those gamers looking to spend time in MMOs, a number of them are free to play. Players will also probably delay some purchases, buying must-have titles only when they go on sale or when they are discounted after being on the market for a few months. In addition, expect many major game developers to offer substantial discounts earlier. In a market where the available pool of gaming dollars are limited, it will make sense to get as much of it upfront as possible, even if you’re getting less on a triple A title than you would in other years. As they say, a half a loaf is better than none.
I suspect that the lack of investment in new PC hardware this year will have long term effect on PC game makers as a whole. One of the reasons why games like World of Warcraft do so well is that it can accomodate everything from the top of the line gaming rig to machines that can be considered antiques. The minimal specs for WoW are an ultra low Pentium III 800 MHz processor with 512 MB of RAM. This philosophy of accomodating the low end will take on greater importance in the next couple of years, and have a carryover effect: new games will sport less zing but possibly more meat. If you can’t update your game with as much flashy graphics, story and character development will take more prominent roles.
It’ll be interesting to see if my predictions come to fruition. The PC gaming business will still be strong, but it will adapt to the times, and so will their customers.
Partly sourced from Daily Tech
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I think they are overlooking something critical - PC games nowadays are rehashes of the old ideas. Things and ideas and even concepts are just being repeated over and over, just with newer and better graphics. What is the point? You sacrifice good gameplay for better visual appreciation. The games will all get to be the same after a while. This is what happens from making gaming a business instead of the leisure it was supposed to be.
Kinda makes id software’s browser based Quake Live, and the technology that David Perry and co. over at Acclaim have been looking into all the more appealing.
It’s the hardware companies that will be the must affected. No pc gamer is going to be buy any hardware soon there is no point. The only hardware worth getting will intels new graphics card that comes with project offset.
IBM,Micro soft and and AMD are such dum companies for supporting console gaming. Now they are going to pay the price. The pc Industry will suffer as a whole. They only have them self to blame. I wonder what their share holder think?
I think you’re going to see a decline on the high-end. Why? Most of the hardcore gamers buy the latest and greatest. When I worked for a PC Reseller / Builder, I had many customers buy a $500 video card 6 months after they purchased a $500 video card. It was insane. You’re starting to see a bit of a slow down of performance gains between the top card today, and the top card 6 months ago. So the hardcore enthusiast market will see a drop.
However, you can get some solid cards in the sub-$100 range. Many gamers, myself included, don’t run at insane resolutions. My 17″ LCD is fine for what I do, and maxes out at 1280×1024. I don’t need a $300 video card to play at acceptable frame rates now. This may turn some people back to PC gaming, as it’s a more affordable venture than it was 2, 3 years ago.
pc gaming will have rippel affect on the Pc Industry as whole. the more people trash talks pc gaming the less money them hardware companies going to have. It makes thing even worse in a recession. I think us pc gamer should just boycott AMD and IBM for supporting consoles.