The death of PC gaming has been declared time and again and one could be forgiven for imagining this to be nothing more than the wishful thinking of a few execs at Sony and Nintendo. But while certain PC games such as Counter Strike: Source and World of Warcraft are still going from strength to strength, the increasingly sparse release schedules and dwindling number of titles available in stores suggest that the hobby may finally be headed for the big bargain bin in the sky. But why is this? The gaming industry is growing at a frightening rate and continually expanding into new territory, so either the competition [games consoles] must be getting a whole lot better or PCs a lot worse. These things are never simple and it probably won’t come as a surprise that both are at least partly true; owning a decent gaming computer has become a very expensive proposition and since the launch of the Xbox many seem to have been left wondering exactly what it is a PC has to offer that a £250 console doesn’t.

Ironically one of the main factors in the decline of PC gaming is closely linked to the very thing that has made it so attractive for so long, the pace of hardware and software innovation. Commercial exploitation of these innovations is what made the games and hardware of today possible, but shortsighted and exploitative business practices may be seriously threatening their future. The current situation really began in 1996 with the release of GL Quake, a port of iD software’s hugely successful FPS, which introduced support for dedicated 3D accelerators like the 3Dfx Voodoo. GL Quake completely blew away games on pretty much every other platform in terms of graphical quality but no longer could you just sneak into your Dad’s study to play it because you needed a Pentium processor and an outrageously expensive 3D graphics card. Up until this point a good gaming machine wasn’t anything more than a high specification generic computer and so could be seen as a good general investment. Of course the Pentium processor wasn’t just good for games, it made Windows 3.1 pretend to multitask a lot more convincingly; and you could just about watch porn if you had a fast internet connection. But, excluding a handful of people, most of whom probably worked for George Lucas, a 3D graphics card was at this point only of any use for playing the new 3D games.

This wasn’t actually that much of a problem, those short on funds or long on common  sense could just run the original [software rendered] version of Quake on very basic machines and it still looked great, not 3Dfx glide great, but pretty damn good. However, after the success of GL Quake and cards like the Voodoo, hardware manufacturers began to realize that there might be a significant number of people who were prepared to spend vast amounts of money turning their fancy word processors into dedicated gaming machines and this would have serious consequences for the future. Where the hardware went, the software followed, and although the cutting edge titles of the next few years like Quake 2 and Half-life were still quite capable of running on low specification computers, they looked stunning enough on the new high end hardware that the games and the gaming press began to act as the unofficial marketing department for the hardware vendors. In 1999 Quake 3 was released, and in addition to being phenomenally popular it became the first major PC game to require a 3D accelerator. This was completely unnecessary from a technical viewpoint, as Unreal Tournament 2004 proved some four years later, but what was important was that it was possible at all. Quake 3 marked a major shift from gamers wanting 3D hardware to make games look prettier to their accepting that they would need it in order to be able to play at all.

Over the next few years 3D accelerators became the norm and the increasingly programmable hardware became adapted to perform various non-gaming functions, such as video decoding. This gave consumers a few more legitimate reasons to purchase the things, but usually the cheap 3D graphics chips being integrated into motherboards were more than sufficient. These were just about adequate for basic gaming and their rapidly falling prices made them very attractive to OEMs and consumers alike. But while the integrated 3D chipsets were becoming ever more affordable, the top end hardware was growing steadily more expensive: On its release in 1998 the Voodoo 2 was the most expensive consumer 3D card available, costing £250. Roughly three years later the groundbreaking Nvidia Geforce 3 cost in the region of £400, and more recently the Geforce 8800 Ultra launched at a stunning £600. One has to draw a line between the innovative, the exploitative, and those products dreamed up under the influence of crack. It is to be expected that any high end or luxury computer product will be overpriced, but for a company to seek short-term profit at the cost of alienating their customers is madness. If the graphics card manufacturers began this trend then there are others prepared to take it even further. Ageia, a recent startup, have developed an add-in card which realistically (if rather slowly) simulates the interactions of objects in a game according to real world physics.
At the moment all it really has to offer are slightly more realistic rubble and explosions for a cost of £150.
The danger is that if game physics simulations were to become as detailed as Ageia promises, then it would likely exclude anybody who did not have Ageia hardware from participating at all. There would be no option of software rendered physics for those with older machines; they would be cut out completely. Some may relish the though of PC gaming becoming an exclusive pastime, but the more people that are prevented from participating, the less publishers will bother to release any games at all.

Over in console land, publishers had always managed to sell more games than their PC counterparts; Super Mario Brothers alone managed to shift over 40 million copies during the lifetime of the NES. But due to their long product lifecycles console technology tended to lag far behind that of gaming PCs. Additionally, beyond a few ‘in house’ releases most of the cutting edge 3D titles which did make it onto consoles were poor conversions of PC games like as Doom. With the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation things began to change, titles such as Goldeneye, Metal Gear Solid and Medal of Honor appeared, and they provided a comparable if slightly less polished experience to the 3D action titles on PC.

If the Nintendo 64 and Playstation had shown that consoles could do 3D action, then the Xbox and Playstation 2 showed that they could do it every bit as well as the PC. Halo and Grand Theft Auto 3 (on the Xbox and Playstation respectively) stunned gamers who had been expecting both to appear on PC first, something which had been the norm since the mid nineties. Months later, when the much anticipated PC versions finally came out, they offered little more than a few more control options and slightly crisper graphics. The perfect match for Halo was Xbox Live! It was the first really successful online gaming service for consoles and a major coup for Microsoft both because it helped to further popularize many Xbox games and because they were managing to charge a significant amount of money for something which PC owners could already do for free.

Halo and Grand Theft Auto 3 were not alone and most studios began to focus increasingly on console exclusives and cross platform games. The attitude of many developers seemed to shift from something along the lines of ‘let’s take advantage of the newest hardware’ to ‘let’s take advantage of the newest hardware - to make up for our badly optimized code’. These days the scalability of Half-life and Quake 2 is almost forgotten, and many recent PC games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Bioshock will simply not run on the majority of new computers. I am not accusing the developers of laziness; these are obviously economic rather than creative decisions. Games are becoming ever more complex and expensive to develop, and the increased focus on consoles has come about because they are the most profitable platform. However the lack of focus on PC titles, both a failure to release enough new and interesting games, and not optimizing those that are released well enough to run on older hardware is only going to perpetuate the problem.

Looking to the future things certainly seem rather bleak, between them the Xbox 360 and PS3 now offer RTS games, patches and updates, the ability to run Linux, and even the promise of mod support; In other words they are capable of doing almost anything which a gaming PC can. PC owners may retort that their machines offers a good deal of non gaming functionality, but this is missing the point than one can purchase an Xbox 360 and a good quality office machine for much less than the cheapest models in Dell’s Alienware range.

The one area of PC game development that stands out is the ever more successful independent developers. Due to the extortionate publishing fees levied by console manufacturers independent games development has never really been feasible on them, but things are somewhat different on PC. In fact very few independently developed PC games have ever met with much commercial success, but this may be beginning to change. With the launch of Steam, Valve Software’s online distribution platform and the flagship independent titles Uplink, Darwinia and DEFCON, independent PC game development has of late been enjoying a limited renaissance. While the success of these titles is nowhere near that of the Halo franchise, it appears to be gathering momentum. What makes them particularly interesting is that due to the financial constraints of the developers, these titles do not even attempt to compete with the latest high tech action titles. Instead, they tend to be much more creative and unusual, often appealing to more mature gamers and crucially, having only very moderate hardware requirements.

Finally, I think there is something that bears the consideration of every dedicated PC gamer. It is an inescapable fact that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 already offer 90% of what you might call the gaming functionality of a PC. They are both big, hot, and noisy, the hallmarks of every high performance
computer, and one can even hook them up to a computer monitor and play [at least some] games with a keyboard and mouse. In taking over much of the PC gaming market, consoles have become ever more ‘PC like’ and even the geeks amongst us may begin to wonder whether the death of the gaming PC would even be important at all.

 Dave Muhl-Richardson

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