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The death of consoles, the death of PC gaming...
Jimmy_Scythe
Member CommonPosts: 3,586
I recently had something of an epiphany. You see, I had to take my wife to an appointment at the eye doctor the other day and ended up sitting in a crowded waitnig room with nothing but my DS to keep me company. Unfortunately, I forgot to charge the damn thing and the battery died; leaving me with nothing to do but alternate between staring at the floor and staring at the other people gathered in the waiting room. After a few minutes, I noticed an awful lot of people playing games and "texting" on their cell phones. And then it hit me...
Most cell phones have that little D-pad thingie flanked by two buttons right above the number pad. If you've noticed, a lot of people are getting really, really good at typing with their thumbs as well. You could go a step beyond this and make a little ultrasound attachment (i.e. ye ole Nintendo Powerglove) to make the phone sense it's position in space. Now consider that you can download most games to your cell phone for around $5, and you can see some serious advantages to this system.
1) If you're going to get a cell phone anyway, why not get one that plays games as well?
2) The games are way cheap.
3) Direct distribution cuts out the need to buy shelf space at $$Wal-Mart$$, and also cuts out the price of packaging thus making the final cost of the game go even lower.
4) N-Gage may have failed, but cell phone games are booming and N-Gage proved that you can stuff 3D acceleration into a cell phone.
But this little speculation doesn't end with cell Phones. Why not stick a real CPU and a video card into a Tivo? You're going to pay for cable anyway, so you might as well get the digital service that gives you games "on demand." Most people don't even own their cable box; they rent it from the cable company. The cable remote is almost identical to the cell phone setup. You might want to exchange the 4way selector thing for an analog stick or a traditional D-pad and add a USB port to the bottom of the remote for a headset, but the potential for converging games with cable and stalite TV are there. Especially with most cable and satalite companies offering broadband internet services as well. I can't say that I like it, but this seems to be the probable future for gaming as a whole.
The question now is what impact this will have on MMORPGs? There will always be PCs, of course, but I don't think they're going to a viable gaming platform for much longer. The relationship of PCs to games will be in the developement for one of the generic cable and cell platforms that most people will be playing from. And with these platforms will come new business models as well as a whole new slew of gamers to make up the communities of MMORPGs. Good? Bad? Don't care? I'd really like to hear the oppinions of others on this trend.
Comments
Or you could just get a DS for $100, a few games for $25-40 each, and comfortability and battery life along with it.
"There's no star system Slave I can't reach, and there's no planet I can't find. There's nowhere in the Galaxy for you to run. Might as well give up now."
Boba Fett
When I can play Half-Life, EverQuest, and Civilization on my cell phone I'll consider the merit of the argument.
You can play Civilization on your cellphone
or was it Age of Empires?
Jimmy, I like your train of thought and how video games could/might progress into being enclosed into the cable boxes as a cable box/video game combo system. And I agree with that. it very well could happen.
But I disagree with that taking over primary video game consoles and taking over PCs. It won't ever happen in my minds view anyhow.
Why?
People will always want something that is designed specifically for one thing and that is VERY good at that. What I mean is that you are probably NEVER going to get a cable box that has the raw gaming power of a gaming specialized PC computer. Same with the phones. There are cell phone games sure. But they will never be up to par with the games you'll see on the PS3 consoles. Thus the price difference. It's exactly why cell phones games are $5 and PS3 games will be $60 or whatever. There is a HUGE difference in the quality of those games. And then again, typically any console game that is made correctly for a gaming computer will run smoother, better, and have higher quality graphics on the computer.
The thought is good but I highly doubt PC computer will go away any time soon. They are here to stay for a good long while buddy. They will get much faster, better, and high tech as the years pass on.
- Zaxx
I agree with you though, for the forseeable future I can't really see PCs or game consoles going anywhere but up.
Zax wrote:
People will always want something that is designed specifically for one thing and that is VERY good at that. What I mean is that you are probably NEVER going to get a cable box that has the raw gaming power of a gaming specialized PC computer.
People don't always want specialization. No, I wouldn't buy a TV with a built in VCR and DVD player, but I see those all the time at various electronic stores. Someone must be buying them. The Tivo is actually a kind of combination cable box and DVD recorder all in one device as well. And if you look at your cell phone, you'll notice that it also functions as a clock, a calendar, a calculator and it even plays games like blackjack, checkers and go. Even the iPod is branching out to play movies.
As for power.... If you take my approach and put game hardware into a cable box, you'd be right. If you take the other approach and build a cable box into an XBox 360 or PS3, you'd be dead wrong. I believe that the original idea behind the 3DO was that they were going to license the technology to other companies for use in their own multimedia boxes. That was, as soon as people started renting movies on CD-ROM (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk). It was a solid idea that was a little ahead of it's time. Now that most consoles are compatable with DVD ( I never bought a DVD player because I own a PS2 BTW) this isn't so far out there. This is actually a viable alternative to console manufactures who typically lose money on the console itself. With the cable companies paying royalties and renting the equipment to subscribers, you get a much larger user base and a quicker return on investment.
There are cell phone games sure. But they will never be up to par with the games you'll see on the PS3 consoles. Thus the price difference. It's exactly why cell phones games are $5 and PS3 games will be $60 or whatever.
Methinks you missed the point here. The name of the business game is volume. regardless of quality, you want the largest base of customers you can possibly have. By making games cheaper, you snare a larger segment of the market or, better yet, expand that market <gasp>!!! Even if the "on demand" games cost $20 a pop, they'd do a hell of a lot better than the $50+ games that I find myself passing over in favor of used games that had that same pricetag only 3 to 6 months before. Speaking of used games, developers don't see a dime of money from used games. With this system, there are no used games, only games.
And then again, typically any console game that is made correctly for a gaming computer will run smoother, better, and have higher quality graphics on the computer.
The gap between consoles and PCs is closing mighty fast. The dirty little not so secret of the gaming industry is that we are about to hit the glass ceiling of performance. Even if we could push beyond the physical barriers of the standard computing archetechture, it's unlikely that you'd notice much difference. The human eye sees the world at 60 frames per second. Most TV and film clocks in at 24 to 30 frames per second and we generally don't see the difference. Also, as polygon counts get to a certain level, we cease to notice the difference. It's easy to tell the difference between a 500 poly model on the PS1 and a 10,000 polly model on the PS2, it not so easy spot the difference between a 1 million and 5 million poly model in a feature length animated movie though. All the extra perks (bump mapping, aliasing, per pixel shading operations, volumetric shadows, etc.) have only given us a way to produce high end visuals in a way that is less computationally expensive than ray tracing. However, we've reached the end of those too and most developers are talking hard about physics rather than graphics. What we have now is parralell evolution. Our side, which has been totally hell bent on supplying a narrow demographic of males aged 10 to 19 while throwing new game hardware out every five years, and their side, trying to provide something for everyone while seeking standards that eliminate exclusivity (the bane of current console gaming) and boiling it down to matter of choosing quality of hardware rather than which franchise will be represented on which platform.
None of this will happen overnight. If you look at the video / computer gaming market, you'll notice that it's actually shinking by about 12% a year. 2005 looked a little bit better than that because of the release of 3 new systems (PSP, Nintendo DS and XBox 360), but the fact that it took three new systems should be heads up. You'll also notice that PC games aren't comming out as regularly as they used to. It's becoming insanely expensive to produce games for PCs and next gen consoles which is causing prices to rise and forcing the market to shrink. $40 for an XBox 360 controler? $70 for a PS3 game? Screw that.
It's those plastic things women hold to their heads while driving / causing more accidents.
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