When I was in high-school the act of playing a video game was as socially acceptable as announcing to the world that you’d contracted leprosy. People played games, of course – many kids had Playstations, Gamecubes and other such consoles. But gaming was not something it was okay to talk about. Uttering a sentence about the latest Zelda game was only marginally more acceptable than crapping your pants.
Now, a decade later, gaming has developed a strong culture that involves millions of people of all ages. Identifying yourself as a gamer still places you into a sub-culture, to be sure, but it is no longer considered unusual to have a conversation with friends about the awesome killing spree you’d earned in Halo the night before.
This is a victory, but for me it is a bitter-sweet one. I’m a PC gamer, you see – I grew up not with a controller but with a keyboard and mouse – and while I enjoy some console games it is still PC gaming that has my heart. Yet the explosion of gaming culture has not resulted in any apparent love for PC gaming. Indeed, PC gaming is much less prosperous than it once was. PC games generated over 1.8 billion dollars of revenue from retail sales in 1998. By 2008 that number was down to about 700 million. Some of the slack has been picked up by digital distribution, of course, but not enough to keep pace with retail’s downfall. While some PC gaming fans have a hard time accepting it, the truth is that PC games simply aren’t as profitable as they once were. But why?
What is clear is that the industry as a whole has experienced incredible growth over the last decade, bringing in hoards of new gamers and leading to the gaming sub-culture that now thrives. But most of those new players don’t care much for the PC. Those who do choose the PC have become old foggies, yelling at the console kids to get off their lawn. According to the NPD research the average age of gamers generally is 32 years, but the average age of a PC gamer is 42 years. I’m only 26, but this figure doesn’t surprise me. Most of the people I played against in deathmatches and RTS skirmishs were much older than me, and now those 20-somethings I played against as a teenager are reaching their late 30s and early 40s.
Consoles are usually given the blame, and this popular arguement is at least partially correct. But, looking at the history, it isn’t clear that PC gaming was damaged by a mass exodus. Consoles have existed for years, after all, and it isn’t clear why PC gamers would suddenly decide to jump ship. Yes, the new consoles are more powerful than ever before. Yes, they have new features and can do more things. This is all true, but it was also true of every other console ever released. Even in its best years, PC gaming was often not as large of an industry as consoles – but it did continue to grow, propser, and allow for the development of amazing blockbuster PC exclusives.
Perhaps the fall of PC gaming isn’t about the power of modern consoles at all,but rather about the lack of power found in many modern computers – and laptops specifically
10.4 million people in the United States bought laptop computers in 2000. They were relatively large and chunky back then, but advancements were being made like clockwork. Within five years it was clear that the rules of the PC market were changing. In 2005 stores shifted over 22 million laptops, and that figure rose to nearly 35 million in 2008. Laptops market share used to be expressed in single digits. Now over half the computers sold are laptops.
I love laptops. You’re here, on my blog, which is about laptops. I own both a desktop and laptop system and split my time between them equally. Yet even I have to admit that laptops have their downfalls, and on of their biggest downfalls is gaming performance. And there is no denying that the rise in laptop popularity correlates nicely with the fall of PC gaming’s popularity. The golden era of PC gaming was also the golden era of the desktop computer.
Correlation does not equal cause, of course, so the simple fact that laptops became more popular while PC gaming lost ground doesn’t nessicarily indicate that laptops were holding the bloody knife. Sales figures of laptops are not the only evidence, however. Another strong piece of evidence indicting laptops is the way PC gaming has shifted over the te past decade. Popular PC games used to be the games that were at the cutting edge of technology. They required powerful machines and were built by geniuses who knew how to squeeze every ounce of wonder from a 3D engine.
Today’s market is completely different. The most popular games are not amazing 3D shooters but rather games like World of Warcraft and The Sims 3. These games are a lot of fun, but they’re not technological marvels – indeed, they purposely try to make the most out of technically crappy graphics in order to appeal to as many customers as possible. Jaw-dropping 3D shooters are still around, of course – Crysis and Metro 2033 are the best recent examples – but they’re now niche products that appeal to only a limited number of customers.
At first glance, one might think that this shift was a natural and inevitable evolution. After all, gaming culture’s past decade could best be labeled as the decade of accesibility. Games are more focused and easier to understand than ever before, and Nintendo’s Wii surprised everyone by dominating the market on the backs of casual games. But if a rise in casual gaming caused this shift, why have traditional PC gamers dwindled in numbers and stopped buying as many games? Where did all of these former die-hard PC gamers go?
The rise of laptops fits nicely as the missing piece of this puzzle. Perhaps PC gamers began to vanish not because they wanted to but rather because the computers they decided to purchase were no longer capable of playing the games they enjoyed.
I may not be correct. I might be blowing hot air out of my ass. But if it is true, or even partially true, it leads us to an important conclusion: PC gaming wasn’t damaged because people didn’t want to play PC games anymore. It was damaged because the computers gamers purchased couldn’t play PC games anymore. This conclusion also leads us to a prediction: a revival of PC gaming is entirely possible. All that must happen is a dramatic incresae in the average graphics capability of a laptop computer – and it just so happens that both AMD and Intel are working hard to improve the performance of their IGPs and incorporate them directly into the architecture of future processors.
Hot air or not, I hope I’m correct. I’m a PC gaming fanboy, and I want to see more games that force me to pick my jaw up off the floor.
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