- People who want to play games have other, better options now.
- PCs have become worse game-playing machines than consoles.
Nothing new or revolutionary here – just thought it was worth writing up
Interesting discussion I read on Kotaku a few weeks back about what ails PC Gaming:
http://kotaku.com/5206876/what-ails-the-worlds-biggest-gaming-platform
As a former PC gamer (the Quake series, Age of X series), I moved to the xbox about 4 years back and never looked back and can identify with most of the reasons mentioned in the post. In addition, my opinion on what the decline of PC gaming can be attributed to is below:
1. The XBox: Once Microsoft stopped caring much about PC gaming, there isn’t as much big ad money and slowly, others stopped caring as well.
2. The rise of MMORPGs: World of Warcraft and others sucked the hardcore PC gamer market dry. After paying $5-15/mo for a single game, there isn’t much dough left to go around.
3. The FPS wars: When a reasonably new PC cannot run any game published in the past two years without upgrading to a $300 GPU, there won’t be many gamers left to buy your games
4. Flash games: Casual gamers have a zillion flash games to choose from. Easy, free and portable.
5. Laptops: Laptops just don’t make great gaming machines with their integrated GPUs, poor keyboards, trackpads and so on. Given that laptops make up the majority of PC sales these days, it’s understandable why PC gaming doesn’t appeal to a lot of those buyers.
So, to summarize: