PC, Flash, and bits on a disc

 Posted by (Visited 9050 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Feb 272008
 

At the Luminaries Lunch, I made the comment that PC gaming at retail is in dire straits. This is not a particularly controversial comment in the industry — everybody at the table agreed, though Chris Taylor went further, saying  “PC gaming as we know it is dead.” Sales for PC titles at retail are not very good, and have been trending downwards for a long time. The saving grace is WoW, and other MMORPGs — but even WoW is moving towards forms of digital distribution. I also made the comment that Flash seemed to me to be the next console.

Of course, this led to a massive pile of commentary and articles on the web, including many many negative comments in the discussion threads, which I will attempt to answer here:

Common Sense Gamer argued that

I’m going to have to agree that physical media for PC gaming is going the way of the dinosaur, however; I can’t see physical media going anywhere anytime soon…especially with high definition media such as Blue Ray staring us in the face. What happens with that market in PC gaming? How do you deliver high-def PC gaming to the user? With the emergence of high-def, the PC game industry is going to want to get into that and without a larger internet pipe to deliver that content, they’re going to need physical media that can support it.

Blu-Ray has a lifespan of only a few years. We just aren’t very far away from everything that you would want delivered on that disc to be streamed to you instead. I am probably not even going to bother buying any Blu-Ray discs; I watch most of my movies streamed these days, and if it weren’t too much hassle, I’d rip all my DVDs to hard drive.

Does it mean perhaps a step back in quality? Yeah, maybe. But I, like many consumers, bought my TV a few years ago, when 1080p was not common and commanded a high price premium. I buy a new TV every five to ten years. By the time I get a new one, will I still be buying discs? I don’t honestly think so. My disc usage has already fallen by 3/4 from what it was two years ago.

Are games far behind? Well, consoles are already moving towards more digital distribution with smaller games (smaller meaning “entire games from last gen,” in fact). You could set up streaming games onto modern consoles with hard drives, no question.

Might there be a temporary backwards step in visuals? Yeah, maybe. So?

Many reacted to Chris’ comment as well, saying things like

While i admit that digital distribution is probably going to increase a great deal in the next few years, that doesn’t mean that “PC Gaming as we know it is dead”. Retail will still be the main source of revenue for many publishers. 

I think the “as we know it” part specifically references the heyday of the PC, where the biggest and coolest games were on the Windows platform — stuff like what Peter Molyneux and Chris Taylor used to make: the Black and Whites and Total Annihilations. Bluntly, retail revenue for big budget PC games sucks. Sales are just low, low, low for the vast majority of titles. This is why the big budget extravaganzas are on console these days.

Just as clearly, PC gaming as a whole is far from dead, and may well be the most thriving sector in a lot of metrics. Just not necessarily from a commercial perspective. Many folks in comments cited things like STALKER and The Witcher doing quite well at retail, as well as a few other shooter games. But it’s notable that the lion’s share of sales for both these titles happened in Eastern Europe for a markedly lower price than here (950,000 of the 1.65m claimed for STALKER were in Russia and the other CIS countries, for example, and Witcher has a similar story), and that most of the games cited cluster around high-end graphics shooter games with online play. It’s not a broad-based market. Heck, the list includes The Orange Box, which was digitally distributed via Steam.

Of course, the question of whether Flash specifically is the new platform is a valid one, given the current lack of business models, a point Neil Young made during the luncheon as well. As one commenter puts it,

Yes flash is pretty much at saturation point but, you can’t charge someone to download a flash game. This is why games that are free like N the ninja, every extend etc. etc. are moving to consoles. The economy isn’t there on the PC because no-one will pay you for even the best of flash based games.

I played N+ on XBLA last night for an hour and a half. 🙂

As we can see from stuff like The Sims Online turning into EALand, “free” can lead to other business models. The fact that right now people mostly do not monetize Flash games does not mean that Flash games cannot be monetized. And after all, Flash is just a technology, not a game style. It’s basically a rendering engine. N+ does not look significantly different in HD, and it’s worth 800 points on a TV, but not on a PC? That’s a business model issue, not an issue with Flash. Perhaps levels could be sold, extra lives, who knows. There’s plenty of opportunity to experiment, and plenty of other browser-embedded experiences have managed to monetize very nicely.

The commonest complaint I hear is that “the games are too simple.” Usually this is expressed with curse words and derision. But again, game simplicity is not a function of the rendering engine. Especially not in an online scenario where the complexity lives on the server. Someday you will run something like Crysis in a browser. Heck, we’re already up to Quake III, right?

  33 Responses to “PC, Flash, and bits on a disc”

  1. Flash is the next console,” he posited. “It’s pointing its way to the future more than the next generation of consoles,” with capabilities increasing dramatically over the next 12 months. […] Raph’s Website :PC, Flash, and bits on a disc

  2. so, something i’ve said for years now about the whole dvd/high def/downloadable thing:

    the move from vhs to dvd solved a consumer pain point — no rewinding.

    the move from dvd to high-def dvd does nothing about pain points. better visual acuity is not a pain point.

    the move from disc-based media to downloadable media solves a consumer pain point — instant access.

    in this world where people equate the crappy-compressed hd video that streams from cable as “HD”, upscaled dvd looks just fine.

    now, if only something came along where i didn’t have to store a bunch of physical copies of my kids’ movies somewhere where they don’t get scratched and picking a movie to watch was convenient… man, that’d be nice.

    m3mnoch.

  3. I agree with the above poster, It is my belief that the industry created BR/HD DVD because they lost control over DVDs. They do deliver a better picture, but like the above, it isn’t the negation of rewinding. I don’t know that a better picture present a real utility to upgrading like rewinding did with VHS to DVD.

    One of my new years resolutions was to not purchase any DVDs, nor upgrade to BR or HDDVD this year. I am solely going to either utilize XBL, Netflix account (physical rentals and streaming) and Comcast’s download on demand (I don’t torrent movies). We rarely watch any owned DVDs more than 5 times on my favorite movies and I only see the price point for streaming/dl’ing options dropping as the tech gets better. The only movies that I think we will watch multiple times in the near future are movies my daughter will watch (Disney and the like) and most of those are older animated movies where I am not sure the difference between 480/1080 matters as much.

    As for PC Gaming, i think there will always be a section of gamers who will pure PC game, but it will move to hobbyists-realms.

    I also think in the next 3 years I will download what I consider an “A-list” title on a console, in conjunction with xna/xbla games. I think MS know this and hence why I can go buy a 250+gig 2.5″ Hard drive for less than $100 but a X360 20g HD costs $100 and a X360 120 gig HD costs $180.

  4. Flash is currently great for casual games, but I do think the platform has a future for more serious gamers as well. It’s really about accessibility, and when the platform has matured even futher, and gamers are more used to it, it will grow. And paying for flash content? Just a matter of time.

  5. The next generation of Flash is going to use shaders close to GLSL, or so I’ve read, so the gap is closing. The problem is getting people to pay… advertising is so… disturbing.

  6. […] https://www.raphkoster.com/2008/02/2…bits-on-a-disc/ “PC gaming at retail is in dire straits” – Raph Koster, Gaming God […]

  7. Games, Movies and Audio get compared to each other a lot. Its too easy to lump them all together and draw inferences. The market has basically proven that people care more about video quality than sound quality. Nobody bought into SACD or DVD-A because they couldn’t perceive a quality difference. People buy mp3s from amazon because they can’t perceive a quality difference.

    The video world is different; people are buying $1500 TV sets because they can see the quality difference. Many consumers pair these systems with speaker systems that cost under $300. The reality is that HD discs offer a quality that can’t currently be matched by downloads in the US – our infrastructure simply isn’t there yet.

    Eventually downloads will rule all information, but you’re still looking at 5 years out. The way technology changes, its almost silly to plan that far ahead. Maybe somebody will invent a $1000 holographic TV that requires a terabyte disc to deliver the content. Maybe TV technology will stay the same and the next president will unveil a new broadband inititiative that delivers fiber to every home.

    As for games, I think lots of people really just don’t like their PC. They’d rather put that $1500 TV to use with a $500 console than try and tweak .ini settings so some game will boot under DX10 on vista only to find out that some part of their system is incompatible.

  8. I’m no longer buying PC games for 3 reasons

    I got fed up with ‘CD in the drive’ stuff after installing. I got fed up with windows. I got fed up with drivers, tweaking, unreliable network software and terrible lobby systems.

    Steam solved the first, but when I stopped buying (and switched away from windows completely, my remaining reason for having XP gone) there wasn’t really enough there.

    I’d suggest developers and designers stop worrying about downloadable content and casual games as the problem/solution. Think about *where* people are gaming. I see three markets – Living room (Ruled by the Wii and other consoles), Den/Bedroom/Home Office (previously ruled by the PC, losing out to the 360 – because of less unreliable multiplayer mechanisms) and ‘floating’ – laptops, office machines, handhelds – where the flash games rule. (Vaguely ‘Family’, ‘FPS-MMO-Hardcore’ and ‘Short-Simple-Casual’ – but with noticeable bleed-over and the dominant difference is more the technology than the demographic).

    Then see what technical approach favours a given market – downloads apply most to the final case, the middle requires large amounts of assets (or the existing buy-a-disk model enforced by consoles). The first in the case of the Wii has pitiful storage capacity, and really very poor for the PS3 and 360 unless you throw money at it.

    Of course I have no evidence at all to back this up other than anecdote and gut instinct 😉

  9. There are two things keeping the PC alive for me. The mouse and the keyboard. All of this generations consoles are perfectly capable of having a USB mouse and keyboard attached to them but no one is willing the make the leap for fear of requiring “specialized” hardware or offending the core console market.

    The second someone wises up and starts making console games that require input devices a bit richer than 6 buttons and an analog stick then that’ll be one more nail in the PC coffin.

  10. Though I expect digital distribution of content will someday end up replacing physical media, I won’t be comfortable with the transition until the issues of DRM and ownership are resolved.

    I don’t want content that is crippled by DRM, and I don’t want to feel like I’m paying for something I don’t own: I can’t loan protected content to my friends; I can’t sell it to strangers; I can’t move it to a different device without the publisher’s permission; I can’t use it if the publisher goes out of business, or after the publisher’s contract with the copyright holder expires, etc.)

  11. The market has basically proven that people care more about video quality than sound quality. Nobody bought into SACD or DVD-A because they couldn’t perceive a quality difference. People buy mp3s from amazon because they can’t perceive a quality difference.

    Moving pictures without sound is far harder to pull off than sound without moving pictures.

    The average person could not perceive a quality difference because there’s more than formatting to consider. You need high quality decoder/processors, receiver/amplifiers, and properly placed quality speakers. MP3s are specifically designed for the average person not to notice the compression, taking advantage of quirks of the human ear. If I want to relax and watch a throwaway movie, I’m not concerned about the visual and aural clarity. If it is in my collection, thats a very different story. If I want some stuff to listen to in an incredibly vast and convenient form, iPod time. If I wanted to delight my ears, even the $80 headphones I listen on aren’t going to cut it like a professional sound system, so the format isn’t the whole problem. I’m going to need to be in front my stuff at home, or a performance venue (maybe I’m mixing it! bwahaha).

    One is not better than the other, they serve a unique set of needs hierarchies. The present question, then, is which distribution formats are suited to given needs?

    The one I’d ask after that is, “are all the offerings going to cater to the biggest need pool exclusively?” because I’m tiring of watching it happen endlessly :9.

  12. The BIGGEST ISSUE is not that we can have 100% digital distribution, or HOW!
    But is it Feasible or Realistic?.

    DO we eliminate all users who are not in large cities, which have small service footprints?

    A lot of reasons why people do not have Internet access is that it is not avail or dial up only and this is due to cost of placing the equipment that will reach these users is not recovered due to the smaller number of potential customers!

    Still that is millions (approx 31 million) of people who no longer can drive to a store to by a game, do you know many games that sold/distributed 31 million copies, or could afford not to sell 31 million copies (tell me which company can say ah 31million copies not us we do need those 31 million customers, if you can I have the deed to a lovely little bridge…you may of heard of it? a little bridge in Brooklyn)

    And people are moving away from cities because of crime, noise and pollution is concentrated in there, where as “the country” or town, or even village (yes village) may not have high speed Internet but DO have peace, tranquility and heavens forbid space to move an breath! Without intruding on their neighbors 5’x5′ back yard of the townhouse that they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

    OMG you say this house with 5 acres of land is only 5 hundred thousand, that is less than my 2 bedroom condo in glorious downtown (Insert city name here!!!).

    People are taking advantage of the privacy and space that Canada and the US offer which is only a dreamin London England.

    So give me my damn game on cd/dvd/etc and let me have my peace and quiet and clean air, while you have to live in your online world because there is more space in there than the closet you live in.

    Think I am making it up… check these sites for reasons why 1/3 of Americans Don’t have Internet access (with reports from 2006-2008)!


    Reuters:
    Many Americans see little point to Web: survey(Mar 2007)

    and

    Internet World Stats – United States of America – Internet Usage and Broadband Usage Report Especially the last sentence or two of the first paragraph!

    Disclaimer

    I do live in a city and still have a backyard, although most people think my city is more a town (myself included) and some countries would consider it a town as well due to the small population size. I have used online stuff and greatly Anticipate Metaplace. I play in SL, and spent a large number of hours in vSide! As well I do have highspeed internet (I am a tech junkie who’d a thunk it based on this post!)

    But I love books and will never completely read online books (usually I print stuff I really want to pour over and absorb into my brain!)

    Also I do not and never have owned the deed to the Brooklyn bridge I stole that from Bugs bunny and Timmy’s show.

    So long live the physical media and medium
    – to quote (or misquote) somebody famous…

    Nothing compares to sitting down to read a good book…

    (sorry for the really really long post(it was originally short))

  13. The log just under the surface is the looming recession in the States. Take Argyle’s URI for Reuters and figure in a loss of buying power among the very markets the online industry is targeting and the predictions get a lot harder.

    In a recession or loss of income, what were becoming necessities are seen as luxuries. It comes down to choices between them, so given shrinking income due to rising prices does a family get rid of the daily newspaper (a cheap item overall for depth of news), the multiple cell phones (one per child), the car for the teen-agers, the cable TV, yoga classes for Mom, violin for the daughter, math tutoring for the son… or their broadband Internet connection with the attendant fees such as subscriptions to World of Warcraft?

    It isn’t that the web industry will collapse. The question for sales is will it expand at the current rate because that is what the marketing group uses for budget given that businesses tend to live on future income, borrow for current expenses, and have to very carefully monitor the time from bid to sale to cash receivables.

  14. If there’s a recession, the internet is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. People will put off buying new TVs, go to movies less, out to eat less. But the internet will continue to be a big part of their lives, maybe even bigger.

  15. It could work that way but the costs of broadband aren’t as cheap relative to scales of income as one would like. That very much depends on locales and these can be quite small or large. As I said, it’s a more complex problem than one wishes.

    What keeps them from dropping the Internet altogether if nothing else is not entertainment though. Entertainment fuels growth and as a driver is subject to recessions. This is across the board, not just the Internet. Movies take a hard hit, restaurants, bands, etc. The library picks up where the cost of gas isn’t the issue. TV picks up. Cable may take some hits but again, it is a slow down in growth, not a bubble burst.

    Sustainability is in the infrastructure, the ‘got to haves’. For example, I got along without broadband (really didn’t need it) until my son started university and many of his classes require him to work online for tutored instruction, turning in assignments, etc. That’s a ‘got to have’ because there were no alternatives. For others, access to for example, licensing departments, means they need Internet access if not broadband.

    So again, the Internet won’t burst a bubble as it did in 2001; growth will slow in some segments and that affects time-to-revenue calculations. Given couplers among businesses (the law of the keiretsu), effects can be surprising in locales if predictable from 50000 feet.

  16. You know, I am about 90% more likely to buy a game on Steam than go look for it in the store.

    Now if I could get the same near instant gratification with hardware I would be all set.

  17. We went Wii, it offers more appealing options for my wife and I to play together, and it’s cheaper. The graphics are fine.

    I like PC games, but don’t buy them much; probably can’t run half of the new ones anyway even on my kickarse Boxx dualcore/quadro laptop, and I’m willing to wait for the price to go down. When we see ‘monthly fee’ we just keep walking.

    I’m a sucker for paypal though, hit my needs for $19.99 or less on a download and you’ll have me. If someone ports Heroes of Might and Magic to Flash, Metaplace or Wii, my wife will buy it. What happened to “hotseat” games?

  18. Quick comment I’ll say more later.

    A lot of this I think has to do with where the games are being released. The vast majority of games are being released to the consoles and If there is a PC version the PC version is released 6 months to 1 year later. So big name games get little attention on the platform as many people who have gaming PC’s also have XBOX 360 or PS3’s. So if your looking at a game such as Assassin’s Creed. Well are you going to wait or are you going to get the version you can play now?

    Part of this whole thing seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy if you ask me. Anyway I’ll post more later, need to run atm.

  19. Chris Taylor went further, saying “PC gaming as we know it is dead.”

    This man is an idiot.

    The whole “PC gaming is dying, long live the console” meme is just another symptom of the far too common phenomenon of hardcore gamers sticking their heads in the sand and pretending they still rule the market. Traditional computer games, the ones aimed at serious gamers, may well be moving en masse to consoles, but that movement is outweighed by the growth of the casual gaming market. And casual gamers are PC gamers. Well, except the ones who are Macintosh gamers 🙂 (And probably iPod/iPhone gamers soon.)

    Casual console games, by definition, don’t exist. At least, anyone who’s prepared to spend several hundred bucks on a piece of hardware specifically to play games is a hardcore gamer by any definition I’d be prepared to take seriously.

    (Raph, for one, seems to be well aware of this. There may well be a console port in Metaplace’s future, but that’s obviously not anywhere near their top priority.)

  20. I have a few points to add

    Concerning digital media: I’m not sure about everyone else but over here our ISP have placed download and upload limits on most high speed connections (20 gigs download and 10 upload). Subscriptions cost twice as much if you want to have a limitless connection. I don’t work in networking but from what I have read, the companies in Canada had to implement those standards in order to ward off future network problems.

    Concerning Blue Ray: personally, I have a TV in the living room, I use my secondary monitor as a TV in the basement and I have a television in my exercise room. If I like a movie, I am likely to play it in any of those 3 setups and I am not inclined to upgrade all three for obvious reasons ($$$). It’s not really a plus to play more for a disc which you can only enjoy with a setup worth over 2000$.

    PC gaming *as we know it* is dead: it might seem weird to say this but I sure hope so. One thing that the Wii and WoW should have taught by now is this: high end graphics from a big budget game is not a requirement. Whenever I read something like ‘4 people were assigned to make the water effects for the entire project’ (Bioshock), I groan. Yes, I will enjoy the effect but it will fall short if the basic elements of the game are not on par (fortunately the game was fun, so it worked out well). Graphic elements aside, I have a lot of fun revisiting old games such as Star Control 2, System Shock 2 and Knights of the Old Republic 2. The graphics on those are not amazing but the story, game play or replay value were.

    The only time when I thoroughly enjoy work on pushing the limit of technology is when it adds functionality. Supreme Commander’s engine must have taken a lot of work but the benefit of a full map zoom is out of this world (so much that I have a lot of difficulty replaying old RTS). At any rate, I hope that the industry stops trying to invest a lot of money in pushing the boundaries of technology and focus more on the game itself instead of reinventing the wheel each time. That’s just my 2 cents.

  21. I marvel that anyone could argue about this point when reality stares you in the face in every Gamestop and Virgin Record outlet in America.

    Walk into any one of these stores, where teenage boys huddle around the X-box demo consols and the Guitar Heroes. They keep trying to get the guy behind the counter to buy their old PC games so they can purchase the new X-box games — and he’s not buying. My son has to sell his used games to Chinese and Russians for their own countries now because the Gamestops won’t buy.

    The used PC game shelf now is bulging with really marked-down boxes nobody is buying — in fact “shelf” isn’t the word, as “bargain bin” with everything dumped in together is how Virgin does it now.

    And I speak as someone who not uncommonly will have to go to see about 6 of these game stores all over New York on a given Saturday in search of, say, a cheaper used Halo. The new PC game shelf looks to me about as thin as the shelves at Barnes and Nobles are for books on Russia these days. And to think “Soviet Union” used to take up row after row, and now it’s all filled with books on the Arab world.

    There’s no question that unless you are yearning for a used copy of “Deer Hunter” or really really love the nth Sims game, you are not going near those PC shelves.

    And for me and some of my relatives and kids, the bit about the Sims is sad. But the problem is, we can’t get the damn Sims to work on the new Vista computers no matter how much grovelling in folders and rewriting shortcuts with -w etc etc we do. So they’ve lost our $50 until they figure out how to download that or at least make a CD that works.

  22. This man is an idiot.

    You say that, then go on to agree with him. 🙂 He was making substantially the same argument you are; not arguing for the console, but for things like Peggle.

  23. Bah, IE crashed and Raph said pretty much what I was about to. Anyway…

    “that movement is outweighed by the growth of the casual gaming market. And casual gamers are PC gamers.”

    The casual gaming market (let’s not nitpick the terms “casual” and “hardcore”) is a new beast, and definitely nothing like “PC gaming as we know it.” However, there’s very little in the nature of casual gaming that ties it to home computers. Right now, yes, that’s where they thrive, but if you think about it, the main point of casual games is not “PC”, it is accesibility to content, to the experience, and to payment. Everyone has a PC, the PC has a mouse and a web browser, and people now regularly pay on the Internet. Is that purely a PC thing? No way.

    I don’t think mobile games have reached critical mass (in quality of experience) yet, but they will. Everybody has a phone, and everyone knows how to use them, so they have three major aspects guaranteed: availability, usability and and established payment system.

    Casual games on consoles are different in the details, but not so much in the potential; things like XBLA are just the beginning, the equivalent of pagers compared to today’s SMS explosion. The Wiimote has the ease of use of a mouse, and it is undeniable that many Wii owners are not hardcore gamers. Convincing non-gamers to buy an extra device for gaming is not easy, and the Wii may ultimately fail to be the one that brings the true casual masses to the living room, but to me it’s enough of a hint that the potential is there. The business model for the console manufacturer still relies too much on the classic pattern and I’m not sure any of them will be willing to really push the casual market, but then, I don’t think the current venues of PC casual gaming are a solid mass-market business yet.

    In fact, if I had to say, the biggest hurdle to console casual gaming might be the fact that it has to physically compete for the use of the living room, with other forms of entertainment (TV, movies, hardcore gaming, music) and even other activities (conversation, reading, whatever).

  24. …. we can’t get the damn Sims to work on the new Vista computers ….

    I wonder how much damage Vista has done to PC gaming.

  25. NYT Article…

    Nintendo devised a marketing breakthrough: Rather than show the game, show the players.

    Wow. I never realized that until now. That is just amazing, because one of the barriers into gaming is understanding how it’s done. Moms look at their sons at the computer, and the boy has maps on the wall, dual monitors, he’s swearing into his headphones, and so on. That’s not something that Mom can relate to. Then she opens up “Good Housekeeping” and sees a family of four sitting on a couch with big happy smiles on their faces with “Wii” in big teal letters above their heads. This makes sense to her, it’s something she can relate to, AND it shows her what she needs to be doing while playing the game. She doesn’t think about the headphones she’s supposed to understand, or the dual monitors she needs to get accustomed to. Nintendo says “Sit on the couch with your family. Pick up the remote control. Smile and laugh.”

    Geez. My mother plays Hoyle Slots on her computer. Watching her play, there’s a stiffness to it, like she’s afraid the computer will do something weird at any moment. She enjoys the game for hours and hours, but she never relaxes with it. It’s a computer, and those things can be scary.

    Interesting.

  26. Re: Flash, it certainly has a lot of potential as the next “console”, but I think that’s a fairly recent development, and more importantly it is not Adobe’s priority by a stretch. No 3d hardware support, a lame sound API, and no UDP. Of course there are plenty of games that do not need this, but these are obviously severe limitations. Furthermore, from accounts of what the next version will offer, this isn’t going to change soon. Even once/if they get around to these things, it will be a while before that version gets the market penetration neccesary (which is the only real advantage Flash provides.)

    Not that I think things are all that dire, I am working at a Flash game company after all 😉

  27. re: Wii,
    We met up with some friends while at a festival on Sunday. One of them had told the others about the bowling game on Wii Sports; we ended up with 5 people at the house laughing at each other while going through the games. Just creating Miis for the new people was a good time. That’s pretty impressive.

  28. @Makaze:

    The second someone wises up and starts making console games that require input devices a bit richer than 6 buttons and an analog stick then that’ll be one more nail in the PC coffin.

    What consoles do you play on that only have 6 buttons, by the way? The current generation consoles (Xbox360 and PS3), like both of their predecessors (Xbox and PS2) have TWO analog sticks, EIGHT buttons plus a four-directional dpad (which many games use as additional buttons), plus TWO analog triggers. Oh, and both analog sticks are clickable, so they can be used as an extra button.

    If you squint the right way, you can treat that as a controller with two omnidirectional analog sticks and SIXTEEN buttons. I always laugh when a PC gamer calls the console controllers simplistic, seeing as how they have more buttons than a PC gamer has fingers!

    Anyway, I played FPSes and simulators and such on keyboard and mouse for a good ten years. I’m done with that and I’ll never go back. The console control schemes are different, but by no means inferior. I argue that they are more standardized than even the WSAD-based FPS control schemes. Nearly every console game I’ve played since 2005, I could pick it up and figure out the controls in a minute or two. The same can not be said of PC games for any genre except perhaps FPS.

  29. […] completely agree with Darren about the idiocy of de-incentivizing long play sessions, and Raph with the death of physical media and content delivery platforms. The hundreds of millions of PCs out there are a ripe platform for […]

  30. “I always laugh when a PC gamer calls the console controllers simplistic, seeing as how they have more buttons than a PC gamer has fingers!”

    Are you implying that a console gamer has more fingers than a PC gamer has?

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