The Future Belongs to PC Gaming

Yeah, time for yet another entry to the never-ending vortex that is the PC-console debate. In this article on ExtremeTech, Wild Tangent’s Alex St. John explains why PC gaming has the future.

ExtremeTech:…Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney, I’m sure you heard, put forth a very widely posted quote, “PCs are good for anything, just not games.” That was taken out of context; he’d been asked about mainstream computers that lack graphics and audio power. How do you react to that quote?

Alex St. John: I’ve known Tim Sweeney a long time, and he makes a very important point. To be clear, PCs are fantastic gaming platforms, in spite of Intel and Microsoft. And they should absolutely be pinioned for the stupid stuff they’ve done to make the PC not as good a gaming platform as it would inherently be without their help screwing it up.

And so the shame of it is, the PC’s a fantastic gaming platform, superior to anything anybody’s every imagined, superior to every console, and Microsoft and Intel put crap in the PC that make it not so good. And so if you see a PC that is not denuded by things interfering with it by Microsoft and Intel, in many cases like an Intel crappy graphics chip, or a bloated Vista operating system, it’s a fantastic gaming platform. And the shame is, if the low end of the PC market, the mass market PCs that everybody buys did not come with these crappy graphics chips on them and was not burdened with a fat OS, that the PC would be a larger contiguous gaming platform than all the next-generation consoles combined, probably would be clearly superior; the PC is the home of the most profitable game in history generating more revenue than the top 10 console games combined that’s World of Warcraft generating a 1.2 billion dollars a year in revenue, that’s a pure PC game.

So it is clear that PC gaming absolutely killed [the market] in terms of revenue, killed it in terms of consumer usage the average console gamer, according to Powers Associates, spends more time playing PC games than console games.

Spotted on RPGWatch.