Like pretty much everyone in my age group, my first foray into online gaming was on a PC. It was on a Pentium 3, and it was Half Life online, using a 56k dialup connection. Since then, online gaming on the PC has given me many good memories, from Command and Conquer, Team Fortress 2 and even draughts. But is PC gaming dying out?
Lets look at the facts. The easiest gaming experience is usually through the consoles. You get the game, put it in and go, with the occasional patch downloading within seconds. You have one machine that you don’t really have to upgrade, and rarely have software clashes. Now look at the PC. You have to check the basic specifications on the box when you buy the game, and if you aren’t up to scratch then you go and buy graphics cards, sound cards or extra memory. Perusing the last issue of T3 magazine, the gaming PC’s are going for around £3,000, which may become obsolete within a few years. PC Gaming is generally for the people that can afford it.
A recent survey shows that the PC is the gaming king, having made around $11 billion last year, following on by saying that there are 1 billion PC’s out there- 250 million being used for gaming. I’m taking this with a generous pinch of salt though, as the statements and figures quoted come from the PC Gaming Alliance, a consortium of developers, publishers and manufacturers whose main aim is to advance the PC as a gaming format.
On the horizon is something called “Onlive”, an attempt to get more gamers playing, without worrying about their PC. You can see the blog about OnLive by my esteemed colleague Chris Parr here: http://community.plus.net/blog/2009/03/27/onlive-why-its-head-is-in-the-clouds/
By using servers at their ends that will deal with all of the graphical processing, you can use your “entry level PC or Mac”. The problem that I see is that the quality of the picture that you see is dependent on your Broadband connection. You need a connection of at least 5Mb to get HD visuals, and 1.5 – 2Mb to get standard visuals, similar to that of a Wii. The state of broadband at the moment simply isn’t enough to provide a satisfying experience across the board in my opinion. Add into that the fact that Onlive is boasting a 1ms latency figure, this is sounding like a good dream, but I think that this is all it will remain, a dream.
I do hope that Onlive is successful, and that this will attract more gamers to the online experience, but I think that the plan that they have is 10 years ahead, and the broadband capabilities that we have at the moment are 5 to 10 years behind. Only time can tell. In the meantime, I am going to apply for beta testing, and if I can shed more light on this in the future, then I certainly will!
This entry was posted by Carl Lockley on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 10:47 pm and is tagged with Gaming, mac, online, onlive, PC and is posted in the category Gaming, PlusNet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Game patches in seconds!!!! I think NOT
Maybe if you set your alarm for midnight and start it then. I downloaded an update for PS3 last night - it was 21MB and took 15-16 mins (7pm). I have a full 8MB profile and it would take 24-25 seconds after midnight.
Not quite sure where it says anything about game patches in this?
I downloaded from psn last night after midnight (The busiest time for downloads). It was the update for burnout paradise which is about 900mb - 1gb and that took 45 minutes to download and install. My profile is only 4MB.
'The easiest gaming experience is usually through the consoles. You get the game, put it in and go, with the occasional patch downloading within seconds'
ITS HERE
Is PC Gaming? this question has been asked for aquite a few years now and pc gaming is still here,so I would say not 
, if you said is it evolving then yes.
High end consoles I fear are more like pcs these days anyway, 360&PS3 both have hardrives and games are released that are bugged and need patches. both have online gaming networks. 360 has been plaugued with hardware problems. granted a lot of the big devs do now concentrate on consoles, but thats where the money is.
There is tons of stuff comming for pc ie new devs & old making stuff for pc
just check out steam(valve),impulse,blizzard, plus any mutiplats that get thrown our way
There's no need to spend £3,000 on a gaming PC, that's a crazy amount of money and these days it would only give you a marginal performance boost. Long gone are the days when a new CPU or GPU could give you 50 to 60% extra performance in a single year.
Provided you don't mind building it yourself then about £700, maybe a little more, is all you really need. That rises to maybe £900 or more if you buy something pre-built for you. The key is in choosing the right graphics card and CPU for the best value vs performance.
Anybody that spends several thousand pounds on a PC for gaming is either rich or wasting money.. a lot of money.
maybe 250m in a billion if Solitaire counts...
Well I think PCs r going to carry on no matter what but i also think that OnLive is definately going to work, i have reasons to.
PC gaming will be around for year to come,many of my friend on XBL and PSN still play online gaming using there PC. You have more options with PC extra maps overall download content is better and in some cases free unlike XBL and PSN
I wouldn't say that PC gaming is dead. In fact I think there's a time and a place for it. For example, its nice to sit in the lounge playing on the Nintendo Wii (or actually moving around!) but it's also nice to sit upstairs at the PC with the TV on in the background while playing something like Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sim City or something similar. OK so from my selections I'm not a hardened gamer - maybe that is dead because gone are the days where people want to use a standard joy-pad and just have stunning graphics - they want to actually feel the games that they are playing. Sometimes with a PC game you can't do that. As for me, give me a PC game any day - the graphics are often heaps better (and you can have the TV on in the background!) - double bonus
If you have not already try this http://www.quakelive.com in Firefox or IE. It is free, legal and it rocks.
pc gaming and console gaming will be around for a long time, by the time onlive is released just imagin the sort of standards it will have to compete with as the pcs and consoles continue to get better.
PC gaming will grow for a long time to come...while blizzard still has a huge hand in the mmo market they will carry on developing to keep there customer base happy.
The console market has grown over the years but until we see machines that can beat pc gaming for the pure size and the intraction and cost they offer i think it will be a long while before we see a real change.
Microsoft could change this if they take the step to make it so you dont have to pay to access the xbox game servers then that could change things ps3 is still over priced when you can get a gaming rig for a bit more that will last a while.
Already pay to access the internet i think its wrong to expect people to pay to play there game with others.
For me pc gaming is still the best, the fact you can take a game and also build maps, skin items,making mods, these are all things you cant yet do on a console you cant take cod4 on the xbox and reskin the models or map your own .
To me i enjoy taking a game i like and building a player base around it with adding my own content so peeps can play a game the way they want to but with a console game atm everyone is doing the same thing and it gets boring after a while.
Take "broadsword" a cod map i helped skin back in 2004 you cant do that kind of work on any console without the game makers and the console's leading the way into a new kind of gaming.
Beta testing alone keeps me busy and its free
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