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Streamlining the PC Gaming Experience
by Alec Matias, May 09, 2005 7:51am PDTWith console gaming increasing in popularity every year, the PC gaming market is seen as either a declining or stagnant market. MSNBC took glance at the perils of PC gaming and at some of the initiatives being taken to streamline the entire process for consumers.
"We get it, we live it ourselves," said Dean Lester, general manager for Microsoft's in-house Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies Group. "If we could streamline the experience of playing games on Windows we really could get more people playing." ... Updates like an easy method to locate and install PC game fixes and patches; an improved architecture -- in "Longhorn" -- that shields gamers from having to worry about display drivers; the ability to use Xbox controllers with PC games; and game console-style easy installation where game files are placed in one games folder and not scattered throughout the operating system.
Comments
Consoles are for poor people, PC's are for everyone else.
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Most PC players are hardcore gamers to chell that kind of money down everytime a new GFX card or processor is out.
I will always stick to PC gaming becauseI can see it eveolving all the time graphically, where as on a console yor stuck for 5 .. oops MS now 4 years.
You just cant do some things on a console you can with a PC. And those things are what interests me more.
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A central "Games" control panel that would list all of your installed games, available patches for each, and settings for each (including video, audio, controller, etc) would be so sweet.
If there was also an easy "saved game backup" feature that would allow you to check which games you wanted to backup, and easily burn all the saves onto cd/dvd, or whatever.
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Will the high costs for new PC hardware justify casual gamer purchases? Possibly.
Will there be a product made to pre-test PC machines for specific titles? Doubtful.
Would making things easier on the PC for the end user help? Maybe.
Will Longhorn have anything like a "gaming boot setting" to help? Who knows.
Is the PC platform facing an uphill battle against the Xbox2? Definitely.
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How many of you would ditch PC gaming if your console was able to use a mouse/keyboard?
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Yikes. I'm Mr Doom and Gloom but I figured the bottom was hit last year and figured that we sould see only a single digit drop or maybe no growth.
http://philsteinmeyer.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8
Ofcourse with Gamestop buying EB games, and dropping pc games, thats 25% of the market that is unreachable now.
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Hey! NO! BACK, MICROSOFTIE!! GET BACK IN YOUR BOX!!
...and game console-style easy installation where game files are placed in one games folder and not scattered throughout the operating system.
Because we all want to relive the Sierra Utilities incident. All it takes is one misconfigured installer on a game that was rushed out the door and BOOM! bye-bye games folder. This is why I install games in their own directory in the root of the hard drive, and not \Games or \Program Files. It also makes it a lot quicker to run the game executable from the command line
Making Xbox controllers PC compatible is a good thing. "Dumbing down" games so they can easily be played with a controller is a bad thing.
I'm also really worried about putting even MORE middleware layers on the system. The whole point of DirectX is to "shield gamers from having to worry about display drivers." (Actually it's to shield developers from having to worry about display drivers...but close enough.)
My PC is like a finely tuned automobile. I could have left it stock, but instead I tweaked it, and made it run better than other people who bought the same thing. There's no 'generic' setting that work as well, but ever piece of middleware they throw it makes it harder to work with, and gives more oppurtunity to break.
And finally "easy installation where game files are placed in one games folder and not scattered through the operating system." Um, it was MS who screwed that up in the first place. Back in the 'old days' every program was selfcontained in it's own folder, and uninstalation was as easy as deleting the folder. MS came up with their broken DLL system and the registry "the worst idea EVER in this history of OS design" and everything started going to pot.
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What would ATI and Nvidia do if they don't have a PC gamers market? I know they are selling chipsets to console builders now but those are based on their PC development work. Also margins would keep going down and they would depend on another company to get profits (remember the Microsoft vs Nvidia Case). Same case for AMD and Intel.
Even Microsoft needs pc gamers. The most interesting points of their longhorn OS are the ones related to the PC gamming.
While I have money to affort it Ill keep being a PC gamer. I love FPS and RTS games and I find it really hard to play them on my TV. And Its not only the keyboard and mouse, its the whole PC gaming experience.
Nothing beats playing DOOM 3 at 1280*1024 with Max detail and my 5.1 headphones. Its like being there.
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Every game I try to play, I pop in the CD Rom, hit install, wait, then play the game. X2 - The Threat took some work because it had really weird audio codec problems that made the game freeze up all the time, but other than I haven't had much trouble running anything since the good 'ole DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat tinkering days.
Maybe my experience is unique but it sounds to me like people with newer systems have more trouble than I do, which I find odd. Could this simply be quality control, or the fact that the newer hardware is just much more complicated and thus has more room for problems?
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(classed as)
i kindoff agee for me anyhow as i love new hardware , i dont really like when a second version of a game comes out but still looks the same as the first version that came out a year or two earlier.
i wouldnt worry to much, this stuff always crops up everytime console launches come round, same ol doom and gloom, but it never happends, just the games slide to consoles for a while at start of their lives then go back to us once were ahead again, i can recall two console launches (back to n64) when this was the case
and besides the rts fps always stay sweet to us and umm massivly mutliplayer games aint gonna vanish from us either,,
also electoniques boutique etc, console users are more likely to buy games from them, where as most pc users are online and will buy their games off the net- out of 12 consoler i know only 1 is online with his console
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Where the average gamer will drop $400 on a system to play the latest games (Console)
With the newer consoles being able to do a little more than what they used to, the Average gamer that was a PC user is going to Consoles because they cant afford to keep the PC up to lastest game snuff.
Only the Hardcore that are willing to shell out the bucks will stick with PC Gaming, Unless the PC component market (Vid Card, Roms, CPUs, HD) decides to drop their profit margins and be competitive with the mass production of console, console will always be cheaper.
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and why do I get the feeling that this is going to make installing drivers more difficult for those who know what they are doing?
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In the registry you save all the common actions we see in all FPS and Racing games, like movement keys, open door, reload, fire, alt fire, duck etc. Then from the game that support this we could just click "Import from Windows default" or something and it would only display those left that are not common
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