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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

PC gaming is still growing, but the rate it's growing at is marginal compared to the growth of gaming in general.

Console growth is considerable. Hand-held, including phones and phone-like devices, is growing even faster.

What's prevented consoles from fully conquering the desktop is a few key applications for which the PC is still a superior platform. One is ultra-high-performance graphics, especially when directed at enthusiasts, and the other is anything that requires a keyboard to be reasonably useful, e.g. strategy games and MMORPGs.

If the next generation consoles include a mouse and a wireless keyboard, the PC gaming market would implode in a matter of years.

Kids that have grown up with an XBox of PS3 aren't going to want to fiddle with drivers or find out how to patch their game using the "Downloader App" or endlessly wrestle with DRM. They won't bother to switch unless there's a very good reason, and every day there's fewer reasons.

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Give people pretty much anything that is turing complete and they will want to be able to play games on it.

PC's were never originally intended to be games machines anyway, my first PC didn't even have a soundcard (as was common for PCs in ~1993) yet id certainly did well with wolf3d on the PC.

Since people are currently doing their work on a PC/laptop and that is also what they are using for web browsing etc it makes sense for them to re purpose it into a gaming platform. This is especially true of either very casual gamers who just want to play farmville or a few flash games and don't want another device, it is also very true for techy types who enjoy building high performance systems for the purpose of gaming.

Of course this really goes down to how you define a "PC", I think of Steam as basically a games console implemented inside my PC. Let's say for example a system is released with high performance graphics than runs a stripped down Linux distro with only Steam + a few other apps. Is this a PC or a console?

On the other side of the fence , MS is making their Xbox more PC like. For example adding internet explorer.

PC gaming will only die when the PC itself does.

> Kids that have grown up with an XBox of PS3 aren't going to want to fiddle with drivers or find out how to patch their game using the "Downloader App" or endlessly wrestle with DRM.

Have you used Steam? It patches games automatically and you don't have to fiddle with DRM. My Steam client keeps dozens of games perfectly current without asking me. This is part of why everyone loves it: specifically because it makes it as close to painless as you're going to get.

Also, I'm guessing that a good number of current PC devs/gamers grew up playing a Nintendo console, and they still migrated over, somehow.

Steam is a great delivery platform which handles most but not all DRM issues. I've bought several Steam distributed titles that were very strict about re-installs, something only apparent after I'd bought them. Thanks Ubisoft!

Even as painless as Steam is, there's still the driver wrestling, yak-shaving that is maintaining a properly working Gaming PC. Some people enjoy the challenge. This is not going to fly with those used to the "put in disc, play game" crowd.

In time the "PC" will slowly fade away to be replaced by other things just as the precursor to the PC, like the "Minicomputer" and the "Mainframe", will become an anachronism. I'm not saying this will happen tomorrow, but you'll see a shift over the next ten years.

There comes a point where the performance advantage offered by the PC, which is considerable, is negated by the fact that developers can't make use of it. What good would a graphics card with 3,000,000 shaders be today? Why should you need a 256-core CPU to play games? If your equivalent console had only 1,000,000 shaders and 64-cores, which would surely attract scorn and derision, would you really be missing out on much in the scheme of things?

> Steam is a great delivery platform which handles most but not all DRM issues [...] Thanks Ubisoft!

aka it handles all DRM issues as long as you leave Ubisoft rotting.

The advantage of the PC is the ease of writing and publishing a game for the PC. With the exception of screen resolution graphics haven't really mattered for the last five years. It's creativity, good writing, and good gameplay. It's cheaper to take risks and innovate on the PC since it requires so little capital to make a game vs consoles. Only mobile is competitive on this front.

Unlike the situation with the PS3, the next generation of consoles are not going to be as powerful as their PC counterparts. And the current generation consoles have got keyboards and mice available, but have not imploded the PC gaming market. The future of gaming is going even more multi-platform anyway, as that is one of the few ways a game developer can avoid the whims of the games hardware market.

You can plug keyboards and mice into many of them , but you can't use them for games.

I was very annoyed when I couldn't play COD4 with keyboard + mouse on the 360.

My biggest grievance with FPS games is the stick controls not the angle of the camera like the mouse does, but the rate of change of the angle of the camera, one degree removed from actually moving it.

There are a few trackball controllers (http://trackballcontroller.com/) which promise to fix this, but I wonder about that. Most balls are removable for cleaning, and anything removable on a controller will end up underneath the couch eventually.

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