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Valve: Why the PC is the future Article
PC Article by Oli Welsh
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He's backed up by an actual indie, Audiosurf creator Dylan Fitterer. This one-man development, created without financial backing - impossible on consoles, due to the cost of development kits - was the best-selling game on Steam full-stop at its release, outclassing many big-budget titles. "I didn't have to ask anybody if I could release it, except for my wife," Fitterer says. "It took a few years, and I was pretty darn tired by the time it was ready. Something like certifications? No thanks." He also points out the tight limitations of console servers versus PC servers for online gaming; Audiosurf's scoreboard for every song ever recorded would be out of the question on a closed platform.
Holtman argues that Steam and Steamworks - the suite of free tools it offers - revolutionise the environment for developers and publishers. The auto-updating system means that a game can be developed right up to release and beyond. It eases painful crunch times, and allows game makers to respond to their audiences, publishers to develop their titles as continuously evolving franchises rather than finite products.
"All of a sudden, PC games become this thing that's reliable and up-to-date," says Holtman. Team Fortress 2 designer Robin Walker weighs in, noting that the PC version of the shooter has had no less than 53 updates since its release last year - something that certification cost and time have prohibited for on console - and that this "ship continuously" ethos is a key component to the success of the best multiplayer titles. Steam, he says, makes that process fast and transparent.
"I don't want anyone between me and my customers," says Walker. "I want to write code today and I want all my customers running it tomorrow." Possible on the PC - Steam in particular, naturally. Not possible on consoles. For his part, Fitterer added achievements to Audiosurf in a total of two days. This constant iteration creates a feedback loop between developer and customer that, reckons Walker, can only improve the quality of the game. "The more I talk to my customers, the better my decisions will be. Without a system of talking to my customers, I will make bad decisions."
Crysis' low sales and endemic piracy was interpreted by many as a death knell for the PC, but Valve thinks it could have been avoided.
The implication is a striking one: sporadic, excessively controlled updating means that console multiplayer games will never reach the heights of their PC counterparts. There is a counter-argument - that PC games descend into a poorly-defined, indistinct mess of constant patching - but it is effectively squashed by the fact that, if you look for a multiplayer game with the longevity and massive popularity of a WOW or a Counter-Strike on console, you won't find one (with the very arguable exception of Halo).
Auto-updating is the reason Valve created Steam in the first place. It's the reason it now finds itself in an odd position for a developer: semi-publisher, leading distributor, market analyst, agony uncle and technocrat - not to mention defender of a platform that's still being proclaimed dead, when all signs point to the very opposite.
At the end of the day, PC gaming's health - and its trickiest challenge - comes down to a bottom line that even the format's detractors can't refute: there are just so many of the damn things. "We think the number of connected PC gamers we are selling our products to dwarf the current generation of consoles put together," states Newell. "There are tremendous opportunities in figuring out how to reach out to those customers."
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Well if you can afford to constantly upgrade your PC then yes, they could be the future. For me I think they are trying to talk the game up. Most gamers use consoles becasue they are easy to use and can't or won't pay £300 for grahics card just to play a game.
Yes the hardcore will use PC's for certain types, but mainstream, I think Valve are way off the mark. |
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I kinda agree with you Gamefan, but at the same time, there are a lot of games on steam that will play fine on a 3 year old desktop system, or a laptop, etc.
The games on Steam are one of the few things that make me think about getting a "PC" again, having totally excised Windows from my life a year or two ago. |
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Here's a basic rule - if you can't run Peggle, I think it's time for a PC upgrade. I used to think Steam was all about controlling content, but I now see it's both a valuable tool for communities and a handy way of games distribution.
I think there's a little something for everyone on Steam. Even the ancient 566mhz Celeron with 128MB memory and on-board graphics could run Deus Ex, a really good game. My PC may not be my primary gaming machine, but it's nice to know it's sitting with access to all these games should it take my fancy. |
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I'm so pleased that this article (and the press meeting from which it was spawned) addresses so many issues regarding the PC as a gaming platform - and addresses them so well. It basically consolidates all my thoughts of the past five years, from Crysis situation to WoW, and all with the incessant console war babbling noise in the background.
Where others see impossibilities and improbabilities, Valve see opportunity. (I'm sure there's a famous quote there somewhere.) I just hope they aren't alone. |
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Well if you can afford to constantly upgrade your PC then yes, they could be the future.
*sigh* Yes the hardcore will use PC's for certain types, but mainstream, I think Valve are way off the mark. Which mainstream audience are you talking about? The mainstream audience that has 360s and PS3s? the much bigger mainstream audience that has Wiis? The just as big, if not bigger mainstream audience that buys gazillions of games on PopCap? |
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Console players constantly talk of the price factor but this is another red herring created by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. The cost of ownership of a PC is high but the additional cost of the elements that allow a standard PC to play games are not. So if you are buying a PC for home use the better graphics card, additional RAM and slight faster processor usually amount to the same price as a PS3.
Add onto that the lower cost of the games, I bought Race Driver: Grid off Steam and after the exchange rate it came to £23. Thats nearly half the price of the PS3 version. This is similar story with most games. Also one other thing that no one seems to mention is the portability of Steam. If I go to a friends house for the weekend and they have a pc that is a sensible spec I can install Steam, log into my account and play all the games I have bought on Steam. For free. I moved from Mac to PC solely to play games and even though I have a PS3 and a Wii my PC is the best platform and the one I get the most value out of. Gamefan is way off the mark. |
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RazorObsession
27/06/08 @ 10:49
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if money was no object, i'd have to agree with valve.
Unfortunately, for me, it is an object, thus i disagree. When or if it is no longer an object, i shall agree again. |
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Steam being all great as it is I find that a lot of people that come into my work have never heard of it or don't really know what it is!! ... This smells of hardcore gaming to me! ... (though I'm constantly logged in)
Kind shows how there are great digital channels for pc but the mass still don't know of them! Unlike Live or PSN that seem to be shouted about all the time! .. where am I going with this?!?! |
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lets get this straight a 8800gt is around £120-150 it plays crysis on high, and no game is going to make it struggle for a long time. There its cheaper than a wii and you can use it till the next consoles come out.
and you can use PicLens (http://www.piclens.com/) and i love valve!!!!!!!!! |
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Muddtallica
27/06/08 @ 11:01
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I don't much care about where the future lies, as long as it brings Half-Life 2 Episode Three sooner rather than later. Valve, stop talking and get cracking!
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PC's are expensive because they arn't limited to gaming!
You cant run MS Office on the XBox, you cant surf the web (with exeption to the Wii), you cant play flash games. PC's have much more variety than consoles, and i'm guessing almost every person that has said "PC's are way too expensive" have got a PC of some sort in there household, just that my PC is a XBox and a PS3 as well as everything else that a PC can do! and as the people above me have said, you can get the new ATI Graphics cards that came out this week for under £150 .. they will play any game out at the moment on high graphics and would out perform any consoles.
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most recently on 27/06/08 @ 12:03
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IronCladChicken
27/06/08 @ 11:03
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> Well if you can afford to constantly upgrade your PC then yes, they could be the future. For me I think they are trying to talk > the game up. Most gamers use consoles becasue they are easy to use and can't or won't pay £300 for grahics card just to play
> a game. Here we go again; I'm currently using a three year old PC (AMD dual core 4400+, NVidia7900GTX, 2GB ram, X-Fi sound card) I have no problem running the current games on through my TV (using a $1.50 DVI-HDMI cable) at >360 graphic quality levels (thats running at true 1080p btw, not an upscaled image ala Halo3, GTA. This means I will be able to continue playing games at at >XBox360 quality for as long as I like... I would need to upgrade if I wanted to run say, Crysis with all the settings maxed, but I I have no problem running it to my TV's limitations, so I dont bother. On top of this, I use my PC for web browsing, emailing, instant messenging, sorting out my finances, booking holidays, programming (work), web development (work), watching some TV (BBCi & the Sky download service), etc.. it also does a great job at upscaling DVD's. I do own a console (Wii) which I play to death (Super Smash Bros. better be sitting on my doormat when Iget home tonight!) But the idea that you constantly need to upgrade to play the lastest games is complete bunkum. |
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I upgrade my PC maybe once every 3 to 4 years. Last time I completely rebuilt it, because I wanted a new bit of everything. Cost me about £600 and now it's blisteringly fast.
So that's about £150 to £200 a year for upgrades. Complaints about upgrade costs are usually from people who buy their PCs ready made from manufacturers (in my experience). Being able to build your own is initially off-putting (as the learning curve is pretty steep), but it makes it a lot easier to keep costs down. Edit: And quoting £300 for a graphics card is a bit silly when you can get something like an 8800GTX with 768MB of video RAM for less than £200. Unless you're trying to impress someone with your 'uber-card', it's easy to get great graphics performance from a card costing less than £200.
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I completely agree with the posts above. Most people these days have a PC for internet access, work or whatever. The incremental cost for turning a PC bought in the last 2-3 years into a decent gaming PC is much less than the cost of a console; most probably it just needs a graphics card upgrade and you can get an 8800GT for less than £100 now and plenty of games don't even require that.
Steam is a great system that's really come into its own - and I admit to being very sceptical at first when I had to install it to play Half-Life 2. The age old problem of piracy must be a concern for developers and publishers, but if they make it easy enough to download a game legitimately and for a price that looks like good value versus the retail box, then I actually think they'll win over most people to doing the right thing. Downloaded PC games don't suffer any of the problems console game publishers have been up in arms about with the second hand market so surely the two factors must sort of balance themselves out. Buying retail space and real-world promotion must also be more expensive than an online launch, advertising campaign and distribution model, so there's another way to balance out the costs of piracy there. I certainly hope and expect to see a rosy future for PC gaming and it's a market I'm very glad I bought into ahead of getting myself a PS3 or 360. |
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Well if you can afford to constantly upgrade your PC then yes, they could be the future. For me I think they are trying to talk the game up. Most gamers use consoles becasue they are easy to use and can't or won't pay £300 for grahics card just to play a game.
Yes the hardcore will use PC's for certain types, but mainstream, I think Valve are way off the mark. That's just bullshit. Don't you people that spout this crap all the time care that it's not fucking true? Btw, what's mainstream exactly? What makes up to date console gaming more mainstream than Solitare? |
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I totally rebuilt my system, PSU, fan, AMD X2 4400+, 2 GB DDR2, Coolermaster Case, motherboard... for under £200. I've got a x800GTO2 in the machine at the moment left over from my old build (cost me £150 about 2 1/2 years ago) which has been more than enough for the Steam games that I play and if I was to get a new GPU, it would be about another £100 on the stuff I've already spent. PC's cost £400 to play a game is a myth that can be filed alongside "the PS3 has no games" and "all 360's RROD".
Its so easy to get a system that is decent enough budget without being obsolete within months. Bar Crysis, is there anything of recent that has been stretching PCs? The 8600 nVidia series is running stuff at console spec at the moment, whack one of those in your system and its cheap... and should last some decent time. PC gaming only becomes expensive when you obsess over having every single slider set at max for every single game that comes out. |
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"PC gaming only becomes expensive when you obsess over having every single slider set at max for every single game that comes out."
Exactly. And that is their prerogative of course. But if you are happy with medium-high settings there will be no need to upgrade a PC bought within the last 9 months, say, for several years. And as has been pointed out, PCs do more than play games! Something that is often forgotten. God I love Valve. Bring on a Steam OS! ;) |
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my current card was 69 quid two month's ago , (oc'd hd3850 512mb) and will play any game on max settings at 1680 x 1050 (apart from crysis which it will still play on high shaders at that res).
Graphics cards are now so cheap and powerfull . The hd4850 will set you back around 120 quid and its an absolute beast of a card (slightly quicker than a 8800gtx) I could build a beast of a pc for 300 quid (same as a ps3) |
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So I touched a nerve on the £300 for a graphics card and upgrades. So the cards cost less, so I apologise.
This could soon become another PC v PS3 v 360 debate which is not the point. I used to play games on my PC, but these days prefer the 'simplicity' of the consoles. How many COD4 were sold on PC? Nowhere near the 'mainstream' of the console markets. Oddly, Crysis have now stopped PC development. Valve are a great developer and I think they just have a dislike of consoles (PS3 only?). It's thier business and they can chosse to support whatever platformt they want. |
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" How many COD4 were sold on PC? Nowhere near the 'mainstream' of the console markets. Oddly, Crysis have now stopped PC development. "
No, not as many as the console versions. It still sold VERY well. Crytek haven't stopped PC development. They said they are no longer going to make PC games -exclusively-. |
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If only i could get my drivers to play nice together and not have the PC lock up after 10 minutes of playing something unchallenging like Guild Wars (And yes I'm tech savvy and built the machine myself for a few hindred quid a couple of years back). At least with a console I get to put a disc in and it works (usually). I don't want to have to set sliders to trade off performance vs looks, I want a developer to have done that balancing for me. Having said that I do think services such as Stream are a fantastic step in the right direction, and good luck to them.
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PlugMonkey
27/06/08 @ 11:31
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Just to echo what everyone else has said about the 'cost of pc gaming' myth. The prices have come down so much now. I just completely rebuilt and it cost me just over £700 including OS, and it will run anything on max detail - and anything on PC means comfortably in advance of PS3 and 360.
It only came to £700 because I decided to treat myself to some luxury 'silent' components and case, without which it would have been more more around the £600 mark, would still have run anything and would still have been as quiet as either of the consoles. Admittedly, that's a bit more than a PS3, but it also works much better as a web-browser, media server, ipod hub, word processor, CD burner and so on. If you only wanted something that would be as good as a PS3, I reckon you could easily build it for less than £400. Also new games only cost £30 instead of £50, through digital download it can be even cheaper, and there's just so much choice. I'm currently playing Alien Shooter: Vengeance. Not exactly cutting edge, but it's a great blast. A bit like a PSNetwork or Live Arcade game, except it only cost me £2.50. Digital download is the future. The PC is the only system equipped to cope with it already. The future's bright for PC, unless you only count retail sales, but if you do that I'm afraid you're living in the past. |
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Well said Valve!
I spend much more time, and get much more enjoyment from gaming on my PC than my 360 & Wii, and always will. What Steam really needs, in my opinion, is more publishers on board! Imagine if EA (for Spore) or someone of that size put their catalogues on... Plus, we need to know what's coming! I've bought several games physically that have then come out on Steam inside a few weeks... would like to have known that I should have waited :) |
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I've said this before, PC gaming is like buying a car that requires mechanic skills just to get it to run as it should. As long as this does not change, Valve can philosophize all they want, the market for PC games is never going catch up.
And the horribly fragmented target platform is annoying as crap for developers too, even if Valve is not going to admit it. Just to name one example that aggravates me personally, there is NO way for a developer to prevent screen tearing on all computers and configurations, even in simple 2D games that need vsync badly. Me, I'm anxiously waiting for the day when console homebrew becomes as accessible as PC homebrew is. I upgrade my PC maybe once every 3 to 4 years. Yeah, and when you're past the half point of one of your upgrade cycles, new games start coming out that aren't optimized for your PC anymore and run like ass. And that's if you bothered to upgrade everything to top-of the line! Within my 5-6 year console cycle I can be sure that the games I play are always completely created around my specific piece of hardware. |
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canIdoyabombsforya
27/06/08 @ 11:45
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"the consoles have gotten more and more computer like over the last couple of generations, and it doesn't look like it's an evolution bound to stop "
No they havn't, the PC has become more like a console since day 1. The original and most popular home compters were just consoles with keyboards, hard drives and modems (Apple Atari etc) with custom sound chips, custom colour graphics on board. The PC was a Green screen monster, bleep bleep sound, for doing spread sheets and word processing. At the beggining of the 90s when the Mega Drive and SNES ruled for gaming, PCs didnt have custom graphics chips, custom sound chips, never mind stereo sound, or joysticks joypad etc. Mid 1990s when the PS1 was released, a P100mhz PC was around £1,000, it still used an internal speaker for games, sound cards had just become affordable but 3D card was a luxury. The price of PCs have also come down to console like levels, the only advantage PCs owners have is making use of ongoing increase in power, at a price. |
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Also, has anyone else noticed that the upgrade cycle for PCs seems to have slowed down?
I remember when you had a 486 or a Pentium, and when the first 3D cards came out, and the first few generations of 3D cards, and you could really notice the difference after an upgrade, and almost all your games pushed your system to the max. You had to upgrade frequently to get ok performance in most games. But for the past 5 years or so, performance is just getting cheaper and faster at a faster pace than games can utilize it, and you don't need to have a bleeding edge machine to play most games. Sure, there's the occasional system hog like Crysis that pushes the envelope, but the absolute majority of games will play really well on mid-range systems. |
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Oh, one other thing I keep hearing from PC proponents is the ridiculous argument of "you can do other things with it like web browsing and word processing and listening music". Yes, and I can do that with a PC I got on a yard sale for 25 quid, too! Quoting such widespread and common functionality as an argument for a particular platform is like saying "my toy is better because it can do my laundry as well!"
Wait, that may not be such a bad idea... |
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Apart from the whole directX 10 debacle Microsoft has done a good job in creating a standard video cards adhere to, creating a far more stable upgrade path. The manufacturers have also done well to create drivers that cover wide ranges of cards; when I upgraded from an ati x1900 to a 3870 I didn't need to change any drivers (and it works with the other x1900 to drive four monitors flawlessly)
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"as consoles become more and more complete media thingies and can actually display proper HD resolutions all the time I think the PC will become more and more marginalised. " You could of course make an interesting counter-argument, and say that consoles will basically become more and more pc-like, until the two are basically inseparable.
interesting discussion vaguely along those lines
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most recently on 27/06/08 @ 13:00
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If PC gaming is dying then it's not just because of the expense of upgrading, it's also because people don't want the hassle of trying to get the games running properly in the first place. Why does this game keep crashing? Is it out-dated graphics drivers, some other incompatible hardware driver or a conflict with some other software I'm running? Why is the game keeping juddering... why does it keep asking me to insert the original disc when it's already in the drive, etc., etc.? Why doesn't this game run as well under Vista as it did XP? Who knows, sometimes it's a nightmare trying to get some games working fine and I'm an experienced PC user who runs a clean machine too.
With consoles you just slap the game in the drive and you can play it straight away (well except for PS3 owners with those increasingly commonplace mandatory HDD installs); no wonder people are turning their backs on the PC for gaming... I pretty much did the same thing!!! Apart from the odd game, I rarely bother playing games on my PC these days, it's used solely for emailing and browsing. |
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JohnnyWashnGo
27/06/08 @ 12:03
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I don't buy into the price argument. As many posters have pointed out - a pretty decent gaming PC can be hand for a whiff over £600 these days.
That being said, I am a believer in every device having its purpose and ecshew the use of todays one-device-for-everything machines. My PCs are used for development and for serving content. Sure some of them could run game reasonably well, but thats why I have games machines, to play games. I feel the PC as it stands at this point in time, is the clumsiest way of playing video games. This of course doesn't take into account that most games players using a PC are playing by themselves staring at a 24 inch monitor in a dark room. I prefer to play my games in the living room where the missus can have a laugh at me when i muck up and die or where other people can join in if they fancy a round on smash brothers. The solo gaming experience, for me, died when I left uni in 2000. These days, I enjoy a more social gaming experience. |
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"If PC gaming is dying then it's not just because of the expense of upgrading, it's also because people don't want the hassle of trying to get the games running properly in the first place. Why does this game keep crashing? Is it out-dated graphics drivers, some other incompatible hardware driver or a conflict with some other software I'm running? Why is the game keeping juddering... why does it keep asking me to insert the original disc when it's already in the drive, etc., etc.? Why doesn't this game run as well under Vista as it did XP? Who knows, sometimes it's a nightmare trying to get some games working fine and I'm an experienced PC user who runs a clean machine too. "
But if this is the reason PC gaming is apparently "dying", why is this only suddenly a concern now? PC games have infinitely fewer problems than they used to. Do you remember trying to get a game like Dark Forces to work? You'd spend ages fiddling with the sound card settings in a big blue set up screen. IP DME bla bla bla 192. You sometimes had to make boot disks etc, go into some windows config file and fuck about on a command prompt for ages. None of that anymore. It is very rare to have problems when running a game under vista these days, and you certainly don't need to spend ages fiddling about. And, you know, as console games move closer to PC games they are starting to have problems too. It's not like console games don't crash, nor require patches ;) edit: again, none of this explains why the PC is still far more popular outside of the US and the UK. And I don't believe that we're just too stupid in these countries to understand how PCs work!
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The problem with PC hardware upgrades is not (mostly) the cost. It's having to know. I'm a technical guy, but I zoned out of the hardware side of things years ago - I couldn't tell you what speed CPU I have without checking. Most people don't want to think about CPU speed, RAM, GPU capability, just to play a game. That's one reason PopCap games do so well - if Windows works, then the game will work too. For high end games, the consumer has to do way too much thinking.
Whereas, a current-gen console means that with no thinking, any game you buy, will Just Work. The other problem is this: console gamers don't want to play games sitting at a desk. Sure you *can* plug a PC into an HDTV, but it's not what the developers have in mind, and it doesn't give you a seamless experience. |
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farticusmaximus
27/06/08 @ 12:14
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I believe that children are our future, not PC's. Teach them well and let them lead the way.
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@Nikanoru
Valve can philosophize all they want, the market for PC games is never going catch up. err, did you even read the article? You want figures? There are 260 million online PC gamers, a market that dwarfs the install base of any console platform, online or offline Explain how the PC needs to "catch up". |
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