Four Reasons Why Consoles Cannot Replace PCs:
1) Storage
2) User Interface
3) Controls
4) Depth
There are two more, but consoles are showing signs of eventually overcoming them:
5) Patching
6) Community
Storage is the biggest item. The hard drive is not replaceable -- except by another hard drive. If a console includes a hard drive, it is no longer really a console-n-cartridge device any more, but a PC in another package. Hard drives allows users to do so much more. I can have as many saved games for my games as my space allows. I can sort and store them to my taste. I can take screen shots, and manipulate those for upload to the internet. I can write about the game, my strategies, my thoughts, my gaming experiences, and save all of these writings. I can keep copies of old patches, flip between windows and do other things while playing. I can take a break from work, which I do on the same machine, to play a quick game. No console would ever be worth my time unless it had equal storage power, in which case it would be a PC anyway, so what's the point? The previous poster, Rob, made the same point, and I agree with him. The future most likely lies in a marriage of console and PC, for them to become compatible. And, sadly, he's probably right that Microsoft will lead the way and make it happen.
User Interface includes I/O devices and monitoring device. HDTV? No thanks. Not for my computing needs. With my eyesight, I need even better performance than HDTV would provide. I'm one of those guys who paid as much for his monitor as he did for the rest of his PC combined. Consoles couldn't hope to touch that performance aspect unless, again, they became a PC in another package anyway. Mouse needs a flat surface? See previous comment. No way am I moving my gaming away from a desk, where I can sit in an ergonomic executive swivel chair comfortably for hours at a time, to go sit ON MY COUCH, for god's sake, and be squinting at my TV, having other people wanting to watch TV, bustling in, walking between me and the screen. I'm a diehard trackball hater. Real mouse or forget it, and that too requires a desk. My desk can hold a stack of CD's, pen and paper, additional controllers, and most importantly, is set up to support continuous hours of use. A console would have to become a PC to replace my PC.
3) Controls. I tried console gaming a decade ago, with friends who had both PC and console. We had a name for what happened to our hands after an hour on the console: Sega Thumb. OUCH. Are you kidding me? Those crappy little thumbpad hack-jobs are done on the cheap, to keep costs down, not to provide solid control or comfortable use. Maybe kids who grew up on those crappy things have developed some kind of immunity or tolerance for their low quality, but for me? No thanks. Give me real controls. Brad mentioned mouse and keyboard, but forgot the joystick. A top notch PC joystick has five axes: the stick has X and Y, like the console control thumbpad, but that's where it ends for the console, just like the old Atari 2600 joysticks. The PC stick has a twist, adding a Z axis, plus a thumb hat that amounts to a console thumbpad all by itself. Well, fancy console controls with two thumbpads can simulate that, so they can get up to four axes, but they still miss that fifth on the twist. PLUS, the joystick plants on my desk (again missing for the console) while my other hand has access to the keyboard. Consoles can't come close to matching that quality or number of controls. Console games cannot live up to the depth available to immersive joystick games. The mouse and keyboard are not dispensible, either. If you give a console a modern joystick, a mouse and a keyboard, put it on a desk with a high res monitor, and put a hard drive into it... you've got a PC!
Depth. Between storage, interface, and control, there is depth available to PC game makers. Depth that cannot be reproduced on the console. This isn't about "what PC games do better". PC's can do everything better, except simplify. That's the strength of the console: simplification. Plug-n-Play, delivered. Without storage, though, longer games are not possible. Without length, there is less depth to the game. When it comes down to it, aren't consoles the inheritor of the arcade game, rather than the PC game?
The arcades did not die out from the consoles in the 80's. They died out when PC's brought a more compelling game experience, with depth, to the market. Arcade games used to offer more depth than home console games: better controls, better graphics, and a sense of wider community, of competition, because of the high score boards. We paid as much for those as we did for the gaming itself. Posting the high score, or competiting to beat it, was a big deal to most arcade gamers. Consoles couldn't deliver that because they lacked storage! Atari 5200 and Colecovision were dinosaurs before they were even released. They thought they were capturing the essence of the arcade experience but in fact failed to do so. It was the Commodore 64 and ilk that finally took down the arcades, with the "IBM Compatible PC" to finish them off for keeps.
Have consoles finally caught up a bit? Yes. With internet connectivity, and access to mods and patches, and limited storage capacity, they have recaptured some of the bare functionality the arcade games used to have, which consoles of old never had, and so they took back some of the market that had, for years, gone over to the PC. Yet the depth is still missing, and will continue to be absent unless the consoles become PCs anyway.
The internet breathed new life into PC games in the mid and late 90's, but at the same time also sucked the life right out of PC games. What a nasty combination! Gamers, for a while, were so juiced by the increasing capabilities of PC hardware, they were willing, for a time, to go ahead and buy a new computer every two years, just to have the latest, to stay in the loop. That has faded out now, and PC game makers need to find their way to understand the new reality. PC's for a time were the only game in town. They enjoyed both the support of the depth-seekers and the eye-candy addicts. Now the eye-candy-addicts can get enough eye candy from console games. So why, oh please tell me why, are PC game makers abandoning the depth seekers who are their loyal customer base, to go chasing the almighty dollar they think lies with the eye candy seekers?
A console can download patches, but it can't allow for writing and posting feedback to the internet unless it turns itself into a PC. And any console that does not support patching will run head long into what someone else above pointed out: when they release a broken or incomplete game, they can't fix it. That's where attempting to put depth into a console game could backfire hugely. If the games they release are mostly broken and unfixable, there will eventually be a huge exodus back to the PC, if not outright, then by some console maker making a PC in a console's package, and attracting the lion's share of console business by offering some of the strengths of the PC on their console.
The PC game industry has lost its way, by and large. A lot of clones and formulas, as marketing jerks take over, as the soul of the industry has sold out, allowed itself to be dominated by trying to recreate the next version of the previous hit game, instead of nurturing creativity. The business model sucks for developers, as Brad aptly points out, but that is largely because so many small developers started up, the publishers had a buyer's market. And now that "production values" have raised the ante, a lot of good games that would have been made ten years ago are not made today.
I, at least, hunger for good games. Eye candy in some measure is fine, but how does the game play? Is it challenging? Is it fun? How much of my time playing is spent on strategy or execution, vs how much is make-work and tedium? Patching is not even an option on today's games. It's an absolute necessity. A good game needs a year's worth of patches to reach completion, and that's if the design team is skilled in weeding out the feedback they get, sorting the wheat from the chaff of player requests and bug reports. GalCiv has been a good game from the start, but six months in, still has a slew of issues to clean up in patching to deliver on all of its original promises. Gamers will stick with a company who sees that process through to the end. They won't stick with companies who promise too much and then do not deliver. That has been most game makers in recent years. They want to cut corners and expect us to keep on buying. Not going to happen.
I know a lot of gamers, and almost all the gamers I know are sitting around playing old games, polished versions that saw a lot of patching or the rare spectacular gem that needed only a couple of patches, and waiting. Waiting on the slew of crap coming out to be interrupted by something that bows down at the altar of fun, not the altar of eye candy and gimmickry. Word of mouth makes sales. I've brought a few sales to GalCiv, because I have a reputation among my friends. They know if a game holds my attention for any length of time, it's a gem. And I have friends I rely on for the same function. Somebody we collectively know will try almost every game with any degree of promise, and then comes the review. If it's positive, a few more will try the game and add their opinions. If the word is unanimous, almost everyone will buy. We are one heck of a smart pack of shoppers, and nobody puts one over on the whole lot of us.
Somebody here described 4X games as a niche market. Funny, that niche was pretty wide a decade ago, when the top games coming out were Civilization, Xcom and Master of Orion. What? All the people who bought those games dried up and blew away? I don't think so. We're still out here. Look at the anticipation there was for Master of Orion III. The customers are there. It's up to the game makers to GET IT RIGHT for a change. GalCiv could inherit the kingdom if Brad plays his cards right.
The PC game industry is on the decline because game makers have largely lost touch with the needs and wants of their core customers. Instead of filling the various niches and making decent money, they all chase the blockbusters in pursuit of the dollars of customers they view as a large flock of sheep to be fleeced instead of intelligent consumers. And on that score, I believe even Brad has it wrong here. I don't know what writing he's reading on the wall, but we must not be looking at the same wall. I for one will never buy a console, yet some day, many of those console gamers of the new generation will grow up and discover the richer, deeper world of PC games. They will graduate from arcade action to the thinking man's games. Plenty of money to be made off of adults, even though we have less time for the gaming than kids do. The very fact that we do have less time makes it critical that we get games that are polished, fun to play, and engaging. Substitutes and pretenders need not apply. We've banded together out of necessity; we listen to word of mouth and only pay for quality goods. Yet we WILL pay, and gladly. The market is out there, hungering, waiting, hoping.
And yet, not all of us have high speed internet. I don't, and you can forget me downloading anything over 10MB. I won't do it. I don't have the time to waste on that. For me to buy software, I've got to get a CD. Period. I'll support Stardock with direct purchase from now on, so they get the full profit, but I need a CD for every purchase. And as some pointed out, outside the USA, consumers have other concerns, too, when trying to buy American software. Then there's the fact that I now get an Object Desktop component loading on my PC as startup, when I have not purchased or desired that product. Part of the Stardock auto-downloader? I'm not sure. It caused one of my other programs to stop working, though, and sometimes interferes with yet more programs on boot-up. There's no excuse for that. It's sloppy. Computer users don't trust software companies. The wide variety of hardware configurations and drivers is a huge obstacle for designers, I realize, and I don't have easy answers for that. But every customer has their own considerations and concerns, and we all have a breaking point at which we stop supporting a product or a company. In my view, if Drengin.net is to succeed, they've got to do a good job of finding out what customers need and want and delivering that. Customers will go to the best overall deal. There is a huge dearth of good games on the market. GalCiv is a rare exception. It's a good game. That's why I'm here. That issue with the Object Desktop component is a minor drawback. So is the as-yet unpolished state of GalCiv itself. Brad and Stardock have shown a lot of promise, though, and seem to be more in line with my needs and wants, overall, than their competitors.
And yet the key difference for me in supporting Stardock is the intent to finish their game. Many game designs have a lot of potential, if work on the game continues after release. No game nowadays can possibly be all it can be upon release. When thousands of players get their hands on the game and finally play it, its shortcomings and flaws will be exposed in a way even the best beta testing cannot find. Therefore, the only companies who will ever again reach a fully polished game of modern depth and complexity are those fully committed to ongoing or occasional patches, to redress new issues turned up by the players over time, allowing at least a year for all such issues to emerge. Commitment to patching is, for me, the key ingredient. Lack thereof is likewise the fatal flaw. I won't ever again buy from companies who drop a lemon in my lap, take my money and run. And will consoles ever match that requirement? I doubt it. I don't even own a console and I do not expect that to change.
- Sirian
