The death of PC gaming

Last April, I was building myself a laptop (Dell if you must know) and I had one important requirement which I was not going to give up for the sake of price. That being, the graphics card that I was going to put in that machine. I settled for ATI Radeon X1400 256 MB, which was a low end choice for the previous generation of graphics cards (those that did not support Directx 10) I could have gone for Geforce 7600 but it cost 200$ more and my laptop was already hitting the 1100 $ mark. Although I must say that getting X1400 was a good choice, but now I think that if I had spent those 200$ more, I would have ended up with a card that could at least run games at medium settings.

Now, if you people have not noticed so far, the games these days are extremely beautiful. Playing them on low end or medium settings is a crime against the game developers and the gaming community. Since I vowed not to do this blasphemous act, I got myself an Xbox 360 and now I can say with a puffed up chest that I play games in their full High definition glory! But the question that arises is that, why get an Xbox 360 and not the 200$ card? The answer to that is really simple. Xbox is cheap (You can get the arcade version for 270$ or 270 Euros) and then it will last longer … at least 3 more years. And since its hardware is not going to change in the coming 3 years, this means that all games will use it to its full potential and will not go beyond its limitations, which is not the case with PC. With PCs, you need to change hardware every 6 months or so and if you are really trying to squeeze the money that you put in it, then 12 months. After that, everything is old and obsolete and you need an upgrade.

Apart from that, just look at the games that are coming out on PC. Almost every game, that is on PC is on a console these days. People had once believed that First Person Shooters will never be successful on a console, because of the weird joypad controls. Then came Halo 2, Halo 3, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and Resistance, and that thought took a back seat. These days the same is believed for Real time strategy games. That myth has now been broken by the success of Command & Conquer 3 and with the coming of Halo Wars, Supreme Commander and Universe at War to the 360, this is going to be a thing of the past.PC market nowadays is living only on the fumes of RTS and FPS games, which are slowly shifting to the console market. Crysis was the last game that made people want to buy a seriously expensive rig to see all the bells and whistles. But now that we are hearing that Farcry 2 is going to be made for Xbox 360 and PS3, we can see that the same developer is opting to move to the console market with their up coming games.

I have always been a proponent for the pc gaming for the amount of flexibility and ease of controls it provides. Another important thing to consider is the modification development that goes with every game that comes out these days. Console gamers can not get their hands on the different mods that are being released, but that also is going to change with Unreal Tournament 3 for Playstation 3, where the users are now able to get the user created mods running on their consoles. So, as far as the justification for a PC gaming platform is concerned, it is growing weaker with every passing day. There is no point is putting so much money in a PC that will be obsolete in a couple of months when we can invest the same in getting a console with all the accessories and still save up money.

So if someone asks me that he wants to buy a computer, I will recommend him to buy a laptop to save space and help in mobility. And if he inquires whether he should get a graphics card in it, I will still say yes because sometimes you do feel like playing something and if your computer does not live up to that, then it sucks. But, if the kid asks me whether to buy a full blown gaming PC or a gaming console, I will seriously recommend getting the console and save himself the money. PC gaming is dying.. it will not totally fade away however due to the RTS titles, but that’s the only lifeline I can see right now that can make it linger on for a few more years.