Does PC Gaming Have a Future?

Editor's Note: The following is a guest column from Dennis Fong and Adam Boyden of Xfire.

Recently, Dennis was chatting with a friend, who started going on about how "PC gaming is dead" and "consoles are the future." When Dennis asked him whether he actually played any PC games, the answer was, of course, "well, no, not really..."

Now, we can't really blame him, as the media is constantly going on these days about how wonderful the new generation of consoles is (or will be), how ground-breaking the games are, how they will change our lives forever, and, of course, how PC gaming rigs are now superfluous. As with most things in life, the truth is much more complex, though, and much more interesting as well.

Every time the consoles go through their five-year metamorphosis, it is accompanied by innumerable articles pronouncing the death of PC gaming. Usually they come from industry analysts who always seem to forget that their doom-laden predictions have never come true in the past. This time, however, more than with previous console technology launches, PC game sales appear to be shrinking rapidly. For example, Informa Telecoms & Media predicted in October 2005 that PC game software sales will shrink from $4.31 billion in 2005 to $2.95 billion in 2010. Reading this prediction, you would think that the PC games industry might as well chuck in the towel and follow the lemmings off the cliff.

These predictions, however, all contain a major flaw: they are based on projections from retail store sales, which completely ignore the rise of alternative revenue sources in the PC gaming industry. These include monthly subscriptions in the MMORPG world, digital distribution via systems like Steam, and the sale of equipment and avatars in the Asian games market.

Consoles are designed for one thing and they do it really well. But while the technology has improved, these units still predominantly rely on the game pad as the principal input device. Console titles are uniformly aimed at the mainstream, and therefore must rely upon the lowest common denominator of equipment. Game pads, however, are not optimal for shooters, strategy games and MMORPGs. And before everyone starts bleating that consoles now have Halo 2 and Call of Duty 2, remember that all major world gaming championships involve PC titles.