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[Enter the Dragon Punch]

Mother of god, my wife would probably leave but I want that train case in my life

wives are a dime a dozen
train cases are one in a lifetime

 

[wildfire]

Because they think they can charge more for it if it looks overdesigned.

That's not true at all. The chassis market is quite varied in style at each price segment.

 

[Saty]

All of that is true. However, when I was talking about 20% being on PC versus console, that wasn't necessarily lumping all the consoles together. If you take a typical AAA next-gen title and release it on PS4, Xbone and PC, your overall sales first-3-months sales breakdown is likely something like 50-35-15, respectively. Or 45-35-20. Individual platforms generally still win out against PC in the short term, when margins are their highest. It isn't until factoring in the longer lifecycle of the product that PC meets, and eventually exceeds the other platforms. And by that time, the average revenue per sale is way, way down. I only lump together consoles when talking about what's more profitable. Because your margins for PS4 and Xbone are roughly the same, so any sales between the two will ultimately contribute to your revenue in the same percentages.

It's too bad we can't have data for the console version SKUs to see how everything stacks together since the start of the current generation. Anyway, you can also look at it so if the PC version is getting the least attention and money spent on it that means it can recoup costs and be profitable faster, even before larger discounts. It can be seen like 'free money'. Your AAA game is going to sink or swim based on the performance of the console versions so on one hand PC skus won't be attributed as the reason and on the other you can rack up the sales and have it a no-brainer decision to keep making those PC versions.

I don't know if 'holding back' is the term I would use. In most cases, publishers with PC-exclusive IPs are in genres that don't perform well on console (RTS, MMO, Sim) rather than shifting focus off of console development in favor of PC. I'm not saying AAA publishers completely ignore PC development; only that for the majority of their major franchises, PC is secondary to consoles even when the versions are marketed together and released simultaneously and giving a list of reasons why that is. Because console development is, on average, more profitable - for the reasons I listed earlier: harder to target with marketing vs more concentrated audience, multiple geographic and cultural boundaries vs primarily NA/EU, smaller margins and long-term sales vs larger margins and front-loaded sales, huge library of competition vs small library of competition, and difficulty with compatibility vs single spec.

Well, these are still resources that are being spent not on making console DLC or the like but instead are being directing to PC games even though the publishers won't see front-loaded sales.
While i might agree with how the PC version is treated, at the end of the day the PC gets the games on the same date and they prove to be the best version so whatever that treatment is it's doesn't show on the final product. As long as both sides are happy and they keep coming and more games are coming than ever before and more franchises are joining the platform, i'm good.

 

[charlequin]

How much money did Sony earn through Blu-Ray royalties and such because the PS3 won the the Blu-Ray/HD DVD battle?

An amount orders of magnitude smaller than the losses they took on overpriced PS3 hardware, according to what numbers people have dug up.

I love these things. Before my current system (assembled in 2013) the last new computer I'd actually put together was in 2004, so until I looked around I kind of assumed the state of the art was still awkward placements and garish designs. My box is in a Define R4 black, and my wife's is a tiny but capable thing in the Node 304:

 

[Renekton]

This is thinly veiled console leaning armchair analysis drivel 101.

The bolded part about unpredictable permutations of configs is not wrong.

Try camping in GAF PC HW and game performance threads for a day and solve every question that comes up.

Even installing .Net framework in different order can fk things up for some games.

 

[Mohonky]

Quite easy to spend $1500+ on a PC also depends where ya from too

While true, but at $1500 you are smashing console performance, not matching or slightly bettering it.

 

[SmartBase]

Nothing really surprising here.

Of course PC hardware revenue is going to surpass consoles as long as the two are even remotely close in number of consumers. Even a mid-tier PC is going to run around the same price as a console or more. But the 'mainstream' market is only about one third of PC gamers. The rest of the market is spending $1000+ on their rigs, when you include monitors and peripherals. So that's really just common sense when you consider all the variables.

But publishers still don't target PC for the most part. Why is that? Well, first is that it's much harder to target and market to PC gamers. When 'enthusiasts' and the like are almost 60% of the consumer base, they demand higher quality products and lower price points. A PC game can't be 'just as good' as its console counterpart, it must be better. Yet, the vast majority of PC sales don't come from the first few months when the game is $50-$60. (Or as low as $35-$40 at discount digital stores) They come over the entire lifetime of the product when it's selling for $20, $10, and $5. So even if a game sells as much or more on PC, the publisher actually makes significantly less revenue and profit from PC sales. The math is pretty simple. What's better, selling 3m units at an average consumer price of $45 or selling 6m units at an average consumer price of $15? Don't bother answering that, because it's not common for a PC game to sell double it's total console numbers, even over the entire lifetime of the product. Your typical AAA game sees somewhere between 50%-20% of their total sales from PC, even after a few years of $10-$5 sales.

Plus, PC gamers are spread out everywhere. The largest PC market is actually Asia, whereas the biggest console market is NA/EU. And what works for everything from marketing, to business models, to design standards in Asia doesn't necessarily work in US or Europe.

And, there is near-unlimited competition. If I release a game on PS4, I'm competing against other PS4 games - which is, comparatively, an extremely limited number of titles (even if you were to consider I'm also competing against, say, Xbox One games as well, it's still a relatively short list). If I release on PC, I'm competing against nearly every PC game ever made, many of which are $5 or less. I'm competing against League of Legends and World of Warcraft, as well as nearly every AAA port, as well as hundreds of thousands of indies, as well as free to play games, as well as games from 3, 5, even 10 years ago. The market is not only spread out geographically, but also across every genre, style and type of game. Consoles are a much more focused and cultivated market.

Then there's also compatibility and testing. With a console, you are targeting a known specification. On PC, who knows what the hell kind of a Frankenstein configuration the user has.

And until all that changes, or becomes easier for a publisher to swallow, PC ports are going to remain a secondary concern for most major AAA publishers.

Most of the bolded part is just wrong. It's a ridiculous assertion that marketers somehow don't know how to target PC gamers, and the rest of the paragraph doesn't even mention the high price elasticity of demand of videogames. AAA games appear to be the exception here, but probably not.

 

[ForsakenLotus]

The question that I'm most interested in, and I know there's likely no real way to get an answer, is what are the comparable sales and profits of the relatively major multiplatform games on consoles versus the PC? Take the 20 biggest, AAA games that release on consoles and PC, and tell me what the sales data is. Not that I'm insinuating other games don't matter or anything else other, nor that I have an idea at all what the comparison is like. I just feel like to the average gamer, that is what keeps them invested in the medium, and if console sales and/or profits are still skewed towards dedicated gaming platforms, then it does diminish the argument that PC gaming will overtake console gaming to the point where the console market will become niche.

It's great to see a thriving PC market though!

 

[Momentary]

I don't think these are elegant at all, they are just less obnoxious than the extremely loud stealthesque designs you see a lot.

Honestly, when it comes to design PC manufacturers can learn a lot from a company like apple. Not so much to their technical solution of course, since PC's need the flexibility to cater different systems. But if you're talking truly elegant it should be able to fit in in a place like this:

or this:

You must be ballin son.

What is that corsair case?

 

[Psymatiq]

i went console gamer only back in 2007 and i havent looked back. The hassle of broken hardware and upgrading all the time totally messed up my experience and killed my economy. I never got a RROD on my x360 but got a e74 i think it was called. Still i can sit down and just play...not thinking what hardware my friends have so we cant play specific game but just freaking play after a hard days work. And with the new family sharing thing on XB1 my best friend got all the same games as me...its perfect.

 

[Usobuko]

Asia on a rise is definitely a good thing for PC gaming and people who are multilingual

 

[algert]

i went console gamer only back in 2007 and i havent looked back. The hassle of broken hardware and upgrading all the time totally messed up my experience and killed my economy. I never got a RROD on my x360 but got a e74 i think it was called. Still i can sit down and just play...not thinking what hardware my friends have so we cant play specific game but just freaking play after a hard days work. And with the new family sharing thing on XB1 my best friend got all the same games as me...its perfect.

I'm sure everyone's happy that you're happy.

 

[BennyBlanco]

You must be ballin son.



What is that corsair case?

pretty sure it's the 550d

great case

 

[magnumpy]

wow, I had no idea how much the market has turned around. make me wonder how things will look in 5 years. will there ever be a PS5 or XB2?

 

[Momentary]

i went console gamer only back in 2007 and i havent looked back. The hassle of broken hardware and upgrading all the time totally messed up my experience and killed my economy. I never got a RROD on my x360 but got a e74 i think it was called. Still i can sit down and just play...not thinking what hardware my friends have so we cant play specific game but just freaking play after a hard days work. And with the new family sharing thing on XB1 my best friend got all the same games as me...its perfect.

What was the point of this?

 

[Momentary]

wow, I had no idea how much the market has turned around. make me wonder how things will look in 5 years. will there ever be a PS5 or XB2?

Yeah. I'll just access their storefront / gaming clients on PC.

 

[Enter the Dragon Punch]

What was the point of this?

PC threads with positive news see those kind of posts every now and then.

 

[MutonCommander]

PC threads with positive news see those kind of posts every now and then.

It's a shame. PC gaming is doing well, console gaming is doing well, why was this necesssary?

 

[Mivey]

It's a shame. PC gaming is doing well, console gaming is doing well, why was this necessary?

Tis' the cost of freedom. Some men cannot abide when their fellow men, instead of giving into comforts, rather choose to live their lives on their own terms, with all the dangers and uncertainties that might entail. Their contempt is nothing but thinly disguised jealousy. Our very pursuit of happiness is a thorn in their eyes, and nothing would make them more cheerful then seeing us join them in their defeat.
Shall we ne'er give in to the very idea of oppression and tyranny which is console gaming!

Spoiler

Am I doing this right?

 

[Renekton]

PC threads with positive news see those kind of posts every now and then.

The original link is actually not a positive news.

The news is about PC OEMs facing sales deadend after a projected brief respite from gaming gear sales.

 

[Nzyme32]

How much money did Sony earn through Blu-Ray royalties and such because the PS3 won the the Blu-Ray/HD DVD battle?

That won't appear in a profit report strictly talking about the gaming division, and is frankly so muddled I wouldn't even know where to begin.

They actually reduced their expected earning massively because its growth was no where near what they had predicted due to the increased popularity of digital distribution, which they expect to see continue - http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5670786/sony-earnings-adjustment-impairment-charges

 

[Enter the Dragon Punch]

The original link is actually not a positive news.

The news is about PC OEMs facing sales deadend after a projected brief respite from gaming gear sales.

PC gaming is expected to continue growth as per the article. It's the non-gaming OEMs that are suffering.

 

[hooijdonk17]

Considering the state of console gaming, hardly surprising.. I completely skipped on this generation, and with a GPU from 2012 I can still play most games at console level graphics (or even better, in the case of Bone).

 

[Renekton]

PC gaming is expected to continue growth as per the article. It's the non-gaming OEMs that are suffering.

Asus and Gigabyte do lots of gaming HW, but they are not spared.

 

[bj00rn_]

The original link is actually not a positive news.

The news is about PC OEMs facing sales deadend after a projected brief respite from gaming gear sales.

Did you even read the article?

unlike the broader PC market, which continues shrinking, gaming PC sales are projected to increase

The broader PC market has been in a decline for years. PC gaming sales has been on the rise for years, and then flattened out for a while during the last recession, and now expected to increase again.

 

[Renekton]

Did you even read the article?



The broader PC market has been in a decline for years. PC gaming sales has been on the rise for years, and then flattened out for a while during the last recession, and now expected to increase again.

Yes but it is cold comfort for the OEMs which Verge's article is focusing on.

Whether gaming provides a shot in the arm for these companies or not, it promises to only ever be a temporary solution. As Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's one-time mobile chief, once said of building Android phones, the action is akin to boys "peeing in their pants" for warmth in the winter. He's been proven accurate by the passage of time, and there's now an analogous situation for PC makers, who live and die by selling increasingly large volumes of devices, but are facing a consumer preference shift toward mobile devices. Even if the present push for gamers' attention triggers a full, global upgrade cycle, what will Acer and Asus do in a year's time when everyone's got a still-perfectly-capable GeForce GTX plus Intel Skylake combo in their machine? That water-cooled ROG GX700 laptop isn't the answer, it's just a sign of growing desperation.

 

[Nzyme32]

Asus and Gigabyte do lots of gaming HW, but they are not spared.

As the article says, the leading companies have not ever been so focused on gaming. Their original market which provided the brunt of their revenue was the standard consumer market of PCs, which is in continual decline, whereas the PC gaming hardware side of things continues to see growth - but that isn't likely to be anything more than a temporary help for these companies in the long run since competition comes from more and more gamers are happy to build their own machines, something that wasn't an issue in their previous general consumer market focus.

 

[MutonCommander]

The original link is actually not a positive news.

It shows that PC gaming doesn't follow the overall trend of the PC market.

 

[Renekton]

It shows that PC gaming doesn't follow the overall trend of the PC market.

That's only a setup to the actual main story.

 

[alexandros]

That's only a setup to the actual main story.

Which is that normal PC sales are declining while PC gaming hardware is on the rise. This is why traditional PC makers turn to gamers to boost their sales. Correct?

 

[Renekton]

Which is that normal PC sales are declining while PC gaming hardware is on the rise. This is why traditional PC makers turn to gamers to boost their sales. Correct?

That's the setup.

 

[Kinthalis]

An amount orders of magnitude smaller than the losses they took on overpriced PS3 hardware, according to what numbers people have dug up.



I love these things. Before my current system (assembled in 2013) the last new computer I'd actually put together was in 2004, so until I looked around I kind of assumed the state of the art was still awkward placements and garish designs. My box is in a Define R4 black, and my wife's is a tiny but capable thing in the Node 304:

I want that node! Would a 970 fit in there?

 

[DPB]

I want that node! Would a 970 fit in there?

I've got that case, it should fit any 970 as long as it doesn't have a triple slot cooler. The only thing you need to be careful with is the size of the PSU, it's best to use one that's 140mm deep.

 

[alexandros]

That's the setup.

So what is the main story then?