I think that the base concepts of this article are wrong. eSports is not saving PC gaming because the games require the best hardware. In fact competitve games have some of the lowest requirements possible. Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic.
For the pros too it's not about the hardware or graphics, many use the lowest possible settings to make sure they get a decent performance. I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. We are talking about games where a few ms can make a difference.
What is selling hardware is not eSports. It's all those games that look amazing and perform the best on great hardware. Skyrim(or even GTA V) for example, on a console will never look as good as on a PC. A recent controversy was that on PC Watchdogs was "downgraded" before release to look more like the console version because they weren't powerful enough.
Here's another thing that is saving the PC industry, the mod community.
If there is one thing for sure is that phone gaming wont destroy PC gaming.
> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement.
Not anymore. There are plenty of pros playing at 1920x1080 with all settings on high + MSAA. High-end video cards are common as a result (as the target is ~200-300fps on 144hz monitors)
I think the reasons for this are a combination of that's what this generation of pros grew up expecting AND the rise of twitch streaming. Better looking streams attract more viewers.
There have been some investigation of settings and high vs. low generally doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage either way.
Definitely agree. I would argue that streaming has had the largest impact both because, as you mention, it makes for a better audience experience and it demonstrates the capabilities of PC gaming graphics-wise. Streamers and Let's Players have probably helped expose more games to a larger audience that would have previously not seen them.
Even still Counter Strike GO is not a resource intensive game. No one needs a top of the line PC to play that game at max settings. Also pretty much any tournament is not broadcasting from the players computer but have dedicated observers that will always run the game at max settings. Plenty of CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratios, but their games would be broadcast in HD.
>There have been some investigation of settings and high vs. low generally doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage either way.
Yes and no. In a game like Starcraft where cloaked units give a slight glimmer when moving, pros universally optimize settings to enhance this glimmer as much as possible, and low graphics is one of the settings they use. More so though pros just stick to what their used to regardless of objective performance. It's why so many CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratio.
> Yes and no. In a game like Starcraft where cloaked units give a slight glimmer when moving
Sorry I wasn't clear, I was specifically talking about CSGO. Seeing through smokes & fires isn't any better at low vs. high settings.
> It's why so many CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratio.
Hmmm I disagree. Many of the current CSGO pros using 4:3 AR came from CS 1.6 and I think they just never felt like changing. There's no competitive advantage to it. If anything it's a FOV loss and thus a slight disadvantage but it's so minor as to not matter most of the time.
CS:GO is a terribly optimized game (a hack of the L4D2 engine ported from Xbox to PC!), and requires 300 in-game fps in the Source engine for competitive play. 300 fps is the sweet spot for no mouse acceleration and smooth mouse movements, as well as no frame drops on a 144 Hz monitor. CS:GO perf is CPU-limited, and my i7 2600 can only go up to 250 fps on all low settings, so I'm upgrading to a Skylake 6600k.
Blizzard has done a much better job with SC2; one of their goals from the start has been to optimize for low-end computers.
You make a good point but all the best streamers absolutely need good hardware to be able to a stream high quality video feeds at a good frame rate. In addition, they get sponsored by hardware companies to mention what hardware they're using. There is no doubt eSports is selling hardware. Counter Strike is really not as popular in eSports nowadays as moba.
Counter-strike global offensive is actually one of the fastest growing esports. It gets more monthly viewer hours than DOTA (outside of The International, DOTA doesn't get many viewers), although is still some way behind LoL.
However, CSGO majors viewing figures went from ~150k to ~300k to ~1mil to ~1.2m for the last few majors, so it's growing really fast.
There is a small chance that a case drops for you which is worth $5-$40 depending on which map you are watching that contains "Souvenir" items for the event signed by the players.
You only get drops if your Steam account that owns the game is linked to a twitch account that is watching, and is IP restricted (you won't get more drops unless you watch from different IPs at the same time). View botting exists, but it requires a lot of time/money to do, and the Twitch viewership numbers are actually more accurate than you would think.
I'm pulling numbers out of my ass but I would really be surprised if more than 100,000 of those viewers are duplicate accounts. To do the duplicate viewer thing you need to own multiple accounts with a copy of the game on each one.
You too make a good point but again, not all streamers are in eSport, take PewDiePie or any minecraft streamer. Streamers(and sponsors on teams/players) I would say are more of a medium of advertising space more than something that you see and think "I want it because it's going to make my life better". The only case in which the "product placement" makes sense is for peripherals, a good keyboard/mouse and other accessories can make a difference.
Obviously not everything is black an white but I think that the reasons why "the PC industry is being saved" are way more that just eSports.
I find it really weird that in inherently "networked" games (where there is a concept of a shared deterministic game-session physics-frame counter), the PC playing the game has to be the same PC rendering the game. You can recreate exactly the same view each player has from that player's outgoing network traffic! Thus, some alternatives to rendering on the user's own GPU come to mind:
1. instead of those HDMI-path recorder middleboxes, you could have an Ethernet-path renderer+recorder box and put all the heavy GPUs there. (Note that, if you don't care about streaming precisely "live", the rendering and recording no longer need to be dataflow-synchronous; you could play the whole game, buffer the network data into the rendering pipeline, and then it would sit there rendering the results for however long you wanted to give to achieve a desired "quality" bound. Effectively, you're doing the same thing as people who stream their commentary of a finished match by rendering off the replay-file the match; but in this case, the "replay file" is streaming to the renderer as it's being created.)
2. You could have an in-game option to asynchronously stream the session data to a cloud GPU instance and render the game there. (Or, y'know, if any of the game infrastructure providers really knew what they were doing with the Internet, they could offer those instances themselves, for a profit.)
3. Or, with the game studios' cooperation, just throw the whole edifice of local rendering away, capture the "replay" data for every match to the studio's data-centers, and then provide a service for cacheable just-in-time rendering of any replay data. Effectively, the game studio would say "whenever you play a match, we render a video from each player's perspective and post it immediately"—but without the need to actually do that (or keep said videos around long-term), because the video is entirely "computed state" that can be recreated from the replay files at any time.
4. One step more: a sudio could even provide an HTML5 "enhanced viewer" interacting with such a render-farm-backed CDN, that let people change perspective of the action themselves, to switch between the perspectives of the players and other views, sort of making such a viewer into an HTML5 thin-client for the game engine on the renderer instance (but without game-state-manipulation logic.) Imagine such a viewer as an embeddable iframe, like a YouTube video. A replay commentator could walk through a session as they would in-client to store a camera-movement-record on the server, get a permalink to the embeddable "video" for that, and then feed it to MashupTwitch along with commentary audio. Presuming the thing that gets embedded is an iframe of the same rendering service, though, any given player could "break out of" the commentated-on view to look around at what else is happening in the game at any time (pausing the commentary mash-up and starting up an extra renderer), and then, when they're done, restart the commentary (terminating the renderer instance and resuming the parent session from where it was.) All the control of being a spectator for a physical sport; all the convenience of a DVR.
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Mind you, with such a shift, you no longer get "for free" the compositing of the game session video-feed with other things going on on your PC, like voice/webcam recording. But it's simple enough to create a "mash-up" site that plays a raw video-stream from a game-renderer service, and then syncs and overlays a much-more-diminutive 96kbps audio stream from the user's own computer. Twitch would likely grow to serve that market that if the components were in place.
The important thing about this change, though, is that with remote async game-session rendering, you could actually stream games on a less-than-stellar internet connection (you'd still need low latency to play at all, but high bandwidth would no longer be a concern.) So many of my friends living in rural, under-served-by-ISPs areas wish they could stream, but can't.
Lots of games used to offer "demo record" modes that did this - saving the data layer rather than the video. Or a "spectator mode". However, rendering it requires the exact same version of the game (including all mods) and typically there's no facility for high-fanout "spectator mode".
> rendering it requires the exact same version of the game (including all mods)
It feels like (most) studios are really dropping the ball on this one. Event-sourcing through "rules engines" isn't that hard; you can have a client that "remembers how to be" every past version of the client, network-sync/replay-sync wise. You just need to go into the game architecture phase knowing you're building a networked game.
As a free bonus, when you build a game engine this way, you can also "audit" ladder/tournament matches by (asynchronously!) running through the game physics on the server after the match, before letting the match determination influence each player's ranking. (And doing your cheat-detection post-match really eases the requirements on the client sync protocol!)
It's harder with mods, unless your mods are also cleanly separable into "presenter-level" and "rules engine" parts. Not that I've seen this particular innovation before, but if the "rules engine" parts of mods are all in some common bytecode, the particular "house rules" required to run a replay could be embedded in the replay itself, along with package URLs for fat clients (and renderer instances) to pull down the presenter bits as well.
I think another aspect that isn't always touched upon is the fact that many people will own some form of PC even as tablets and smartphones deliver more frequent updates and sales numbers.
I've owned consoles in the past (last one I bought was an Xbox360 when it was on sale some years back) but I've always had a PC in the house. For all the talk of how expensive PC gaming is, for me it's always been the least expensive way to play video games. On the surface, a PC (of any stripe) will look more expensive than a game console at $500-1500 for a typical computer versus ~$400 for a game console. But to me, a game console is an additional $400 that I'd be spending for another box just for playing games.
I think for a while, the growing popularity of laptops and fewer desktop sales might have affected this balance since notebooks were generally more expensive for equivalent hardware and often lacked the GPU power needed for even modest gaming. But now I see even more modest laptops with integrated graphics that can handle at least some level of game performance as well as a crop of reasonably priced ($800-1000) notebooks that come with some sort of dedicated GPU.
I'm sure that for a lot of people whose computing usage can be handled solely with mobile-grade hardware (tablets, phones) the game console is a cheap and easy way to keep playing video games on a screen larger than 5 or 10 inches. But for anyone who already needs a laptop or a desktop, the cost difference to add a bit more RAM and a decent video card is less than the cost of a game console and even the base level specs are getting to the point where you can expect at least a decent level of gaming capability.
I guess the tl;dr version is: eSports help and more powerful phones/tablets may be cutting into the desktop/laptop markets but at the same time, desktops and laptops continue to improve and even mainstream PCs can handle games now (even better if you put an extra $150-250 into RAM and GPU).
As has historically been the case, the PC (whether a $600 Asus or a $2000 Macbook) is the gaming platform many people already own so it stands to reason that many will continue to use it as such.
> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement.
I can't say for sure with CS but I know it's definitely the case with StarCraft. I saw it firsthand when I was in Vegas for a competition and had the chance to spectate behind some of the competitors irl. All that I saw were on the lowest graphics settings.
This was a big thing in Counter Strike 1.6 due to it giving you in-game advantages. For example, all leagues eventually started requiring you to use 32-bit graphics because people were using 16-bit graphics to be able to see through smoke grenades. If you ran the bare minimum settings, you would be able to minimize the distractions and increase the contrast between players and the level, letting you focus on winning.
The main reason pros will use lower settings for CS:S or CS:GO is because it is incredibly important that the game runs perfectly smoothly so that it reacts consistently to their input. Since everyone is on 144hz monitors now, that means they will need to stay above 144fps at all times.
Now, most CS pros who are sponsored will have good hardware and can do this on 1920x1080, but the problem is that at LAN tournaments in foreign countries, it is much less common that hardware which can do this is available. So the pro players will purposely use something like 1024x768 because they know 100% that the computer they will be given at any tournament will handle that, and changing something like resolution would take a few days to get used to and they won't get that chance.
When I played CS:S in CAL Open, I saw a lot of people putting the graphics all the way down so their vision wasn't obscured by dust in the air, or fluffy bushes, or sun glare, or particle effects.
I never played seriously enough to go as far as finding out if it made a difference. I just liked to play a pretty game.
Former professional Counter-Strike player here, can confirm. A lot of the top players still play on 1024x768 even on widescreen monitors (some have it stretched, some have black bars on the side). While I can't explain the technical reasons behind it, from experience I can definitely say the blocky nature of low-resolution gives you does feel like it's easier to get headshots. I always performed better at low resolutions, even with a gaming PC more-than-capable of running at 1080p 200FPS+.
My understanding is that low settings used to make stealth units easer to see in SC2 (and heroes of the storm, which is on the SC2 engine). Supposedly they've patched it in newer versions, but I'm sure people who've logged a ton of hours in low modes still prefer it.
In HotS some of the ability effects show through the fog of war, and supposedly that's easier to spot on low settings still. It also reduces the business on the screen when everyone in the game is teamfighting in one area.
> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. We are talking about games where a few ms can make a difference.
While this is true pros still have very high performance pcs because there is an advantage to playing at 300 - 400 frames per second.
Not so much, while you are right that the requirements of the games has more than been met in most competitive games. Go try and stream that game in HD using twitch - and now you will see why its saving the PC gaming market. To stream a mid-level detailed game in HD takes a ton of performance, more than you'd think.
the mod community for XCOM has been very active and for the most part the developers don't try to stop them. If anything features in the next version of the game show a lot of requests for what previously had to be modded are to be added.
With regards to eSports and the sites that cater to them, I would like to see them impact on game sales as well as the hardware used to run them. If anything watching others play a new game is a great way to determine if its even worth buying
Did anyone ever believe PC gaming was dieing besides those who wrote hype headlines? CounterStrike/Starcraft have been dominant eSports for over a decade and that was when PC gaming was "strong". They gave headway to the MOBA genre with LoL and DotA but they never really dwindled. Year after year gaming grew but so did the other platforms. People assumed PC gaming was dieing because console/mobile markets flourished? Its not a 0-sum market
I think a lot of people really did believe it, but they vastly underestimated how much Steam was displacing vs. consoles displacing in the major stores like Best Buy and whatnot. Like, you'd go to the store, see rows and rows of PS3 & XBox 360 games and practically nothing for PC games. It's not a big leap to say pc gaming is dying based off of that, as obviously stores are going to sell what people are buying.
Digital distribution is obvious NOW but back in the day there were a loooot of people scoffing at paying the same price for the digital version and making fun at people for not getting the obviously superior physical version.
My friends and I were very excited when we could start a download to get a game instead of have to go to a physical store. None of us thought of this as a change for the worse.
Digital distribution was obvious back then; it took about half a decade for them to get it right though. Steam was plagued with all kinds of issues, and in the early 2000's broadband wasn't quite ubiquitous in the speed we expect from it today. I remember it took a full day to get Half-Life 2 downloaded.
StarCraft was only ever big in Korea, StarCraft 2 is more so the opposite but that didn't come out until 2010. Counter Strike died in the mid 2000s and only in the last 2-3 years has made a big comeback.
eSports historically has gone through bubbles and we are currently in the 3rd one. No eSports has ever been dominant for a long period of time.
Dota/CS:GO are a couple of my favorite games, and excel in eSports because they have impeccable balance, a huge fanbase, and extreme depth of play/recurring novelty. I think eSports wise both franchises are in for the long haul; the real challenge is to deal with the game-release-mediated ebb and flow of relative popularity.
There's also a ton more investment in the quality of the games themselves relative to console/cross released titles. The Battlefield and CoD series are great examples of titles completely incompatible with competitive play: there's hardly any balance, no spectator mode, games and DLC churned out every year, distant/apathetic devs/producers, made to be 100% approachable rather than engaging for people who invest more time, and buggy as shit without exception. Valve has found ways around these problems, and that is why they excel at eSports titles.
My biggest surprise is how this all runs on Microsoft's operating system and Microsoft does very little to nothing to facilitate this as a potential revenue stream. In fact they're just sitting by and watching as the biggest player, steam, is slowly taking their library off of windows and onto mac or linux.
Until now at least this has been one of the reasons for why Windows stayed the dominant operating system. I own a MacBook Pro with OS X on it. I also have an Ubuntu Linux workstation. But in my home there's also a Windows laptop for playing games, as I've got some favorite games that do not work on OS X or Linux. And it's not just because of popularity. Game developers prefer Windows as a target also because of things like Visual Studio or because of DirectX being technically superior and cleaner than OpenGL. And if they play their cards right, I don't see the situation improving as this has been going on ever since 1995.
Thing is Windows survived for so long only because it's been (sort of) neutral. I mean yeah, it has always been complementary to other Microsoft products or services, like Office, but Windows has been much more neutral or open than a console's environment, or more "modern" operating systems like, say, iOS.
But now you can see Microsoft introduce things like the Windows store, with the traditional revenue cut of course. You have to consider, for example, that Steam is pushing for Linux as a defensive move. And I tell you, if Microsoft goes even further then this, it will mean the end of Windows ;-)
Microsoft have the biggest IP that could turn into an esport (Halo) and all they would need to do is put it on PC and Xbox one for free, throw in cosmetic microtransaction ala CSGO and they would make billions. But they will never do it.
The professional matches wouldn't be played on xbox obviously. I understand Esports probably better than you do, I am on a team in ESEA Open (We aren't good though)
Halo was an eSport but lost the qualities that made it a good eSport. The oringinal and Halo 2 were incredibly competitive games, but Halo 3 and especially Reach killed these aspects in favor of casual gameplay features.
CS GO was dead in the water eSport wise on release and took major core gameplay changes for it to get to a point where people were okay with it, but 1.6 is generally considered the better ompetetive game.
The idea that companies can just make a game an eSport is incredibly flawed. A game needs the qualities to become one. It's why the Gamecube version of Super Smash Bros, Melee, destroys the brand new one in tournament viewers despite Nintendo promoting the new game as an eSport.
Yes, you obviously can't just do a direct port of halo with autoaim and put it on pc and hope it will be a popular esport. My point was that Microsoft has the resources to MAKE halo a good esport title but they wont.
Not really. Halo is a game designed around a ten-foot controller experience. There's a decent amount of sticky aim and banana bullets to compensate for the relative lack of accuracy in thumbsticks, and the aim reticle is 1/3 of the way up the screen, instead of the dead center like you'd expect in a PC FPS.
> Not really. Halo is a game designed around a ten-foot controller experience. There's a decent amount of sticky aim and banana bullets to compensate for the relative lack of accuracy in thumbsticks
Most of your arguments here are based on the fact that halo is only released on console. It's obvious then that it would have these console shooter features. If it were released on PC it obviously would not have aim assist.
> and the aim reticle is 1/3 of the way up the screen, instead of the dead center like you'd expect in a PC FPS.
This is something people would easily get over.
There are still people playing Halo 1 for pc online (Even after microsoft shut down the servers) and there is an even larger community playing a reverse engineered Halo version that was released in russia as F2P. (http://www.reddit.com/r/haloonline)
> Most of your arguments here are based on the fact that halo is only released on console. It's obvious then that it would have these console shooter features. If it were released on PC it obviously would not have aim assist.
Its a much much bigger deal than you think. Not only is player camera movement effected but the entire flow of the game - all the weapons, the chokepoints, areas to balance all become REALLY different when you change the targeted control scheme. Go into games like Titanfall and CoD on a console and then try them on PC - PC players are MUCH more aggressive and use the map and weapons quite differently because their control scheme allows it, while on console people are much more likely to be slower and methodical in their play.
I think Valve are getting games onto mac and linux in anticipation of an xBox store, or a locked down version of Win 10 with an xBox store coming in the future.
The original impetus for developing their own hardware and Linux-based OS was because of the imaginable threat of Microsoft locking down Windows in a post-app-store world. It's a last-ditch contingency plan as well as a way to assert their intent to Microsoft. Of course, I'm still very happy that it has the side effect of drastically improving the gaming landscape on Linux even if none of the worst-case Windows scenarios ever come to pass.
Just wait until gamers start interacting with VR en-masse. The massive framerates required to make a transparent viewing experience (60-100 FPS) combined with the ultra-high limits on resolution perception at that FOV means that electronic entertainment enthusiasts will have big boxes in their homes for another decade or so at least.
> Defense of the Ancients 2 (1,262,612 daily players)
Curiously, "Dota 2" is not actually an abbreviation for "Defense of the Ancients 2", the full name of the game is just "Dota 2". Valve did this because they weren't capable of trademarking the term "Defense of the Ancients", whereas they were eventually able to procure the commercial trademark for "Dota" (which caused a stir in the greater community at the time, which had been using the initialism in a general capacity for ages).
I still don't see exactly how they were able to "own" the trademark. They didn't create the mod or the game, they just hired the 3rd developer who was mostly doing balance improvements during his tenure. There was a whole community around DotA that suddenly had to migrate to "official" channels.
Design and education kept Apple alive through the dark years. I can see gaming doing the same for the PC industry through the dark years of Cloud ("Mainframe 2.0") until "PC 2.0" arrives.
don't worry about PC itself, all offices around the world will make sure this won't die soon even if all gaming went bust. Heck, even myself at home, I haven't yet met a good enough replacement of my do-it-all-super-fast desktop back home.
True but that won't keep the high end alive. You don't need a very powerful machine to do office stuff. Gaming will keep the "performance PC" alive until a few more years of Moore's Law and people start realizing that these high-end gaming PCs with neonz can run the same sorts of "big data" work loads you can presently only really run in the cloud. In 5-10 years a sub-$2000 performance PC will have 8TB of PCI-X flash, 16 CPU cores, umpteen gazillion GPU cores, and 128GB of RAM, and "wait why do I need Amazon Cloud when I can have it on my desk at 0ms latency?"
Sure, there is a real comfort to work when you have big screens and a mouse/keyboard, but you don't actually need a PC for that, a tablet is enough.
Right now, PC are still way cheaper and the difference in power is still sensible, but I think this will change very quickly.
Of course, this is true for basic office work : if you need power, as a dev/graphist/whatever, a PC will still be the way to go.
However, most office job don't actually need that much power, and the flexibility offered by a tablet is huge : being able to work from anywhere, bringing your whole computer to take notes/read mails during a reunion, etc...
I meant you don't really need the power of a PC to work with a big screen : a tablet has/will have enough power to handle it, all you need is a dock for your tablet and and a cable between the big screen and the tablet. Same goes with keyboard.
The upside of a tablet is that while you can dock it and have basically the same comfort you have with a regular PC (minus raw power), you can also unplug it and use it pretty much anywhere.
PC doesn't need saving. ESports has the penetration it does because of a saturation of hardware in the market and slower upgrade cycles. ESports is benefiting more from the PC market than vice versa.
As a former pro gamer (CS 1.6 and CS:Source), I'm happy to see eSports become more mainstream. However, I think there's still a lot of work to be done as far as general viewership and standardization.
Twitch and Youtube Gaming I think validate eSports as an emerging industry.
Given their work with the Steam Link and Steam Controller, I think you have a valid point. Steam Link supports DualShock and XBox controllers, and can stream via network from a PC located elsewhere in the house, making PC a viable competitor in the "couch gaming" space that consoles have thus far dominated.
Erm. When you play Call of Duty on PS/xBox, you're playing with controller against other people with same controllers.
When you'll join a PC server with your steam controller, you will have 0 kills and 20 deaths, because everyone is playing with a mouse.
That is not fun.
Steam controller helps with, I don't know, 10% of the gaming - the single player. And if you're casual and single player is 100% of your games - hell, buy a Wii U, because PC has zero split screen games.
There are plenty of games besides Calladoody that are playable on both PC and console, many of them even non-competitive. I'll be especially happy to be playing Fallout 4 at 60+FPS on my PC instead of 30FPS on my PS4, and now I don't have to choose between playing it at my desk or on my couch.
That is very fun.
As for local co-op on PC, it could use some improvement, but there are already more local co-op PC games on Steam than Wii U.
There is a lot of user customization possible with the steam controller though. e.g. This guy is trying out layering inertial control on top of the touchpad for aiming. Generally I do prefer using a mouse to aim instead of a controller for first person games, but I will try this out:
For all the innovations in the hardware, it was the software that really blew me away. The amount of customization available is staggering, along with the ability to share profiles online and see which ones are the most popular for a given game.
If any of the popular game consoles were to implement something similar for their own controllers, it would be considered a "killer feature".
I agree with you about the steam link. It now allows me to play couch co-op games in the living room without having to drag my computer into the living room. The steam controller however does not seem to have as much use. I tried using it on several games in my library and was not satisfied with the amount of control I got. A wireless keyboard and mouse could give me a better experience.
I've had a bit of a mixed reaction with my Steam Controller experience. I find the trackpad approach innovative, and the configuration options have incredible depth, but that depth also creates complexity and a steep learning curve. I think it can be a viable replacement for controllers in certain genres, and it can make other genres "couch" viable which previously weren't (turned-based mouse-driven games, for instance).
I think it will find its own niche, overlapping some of the games which were previously keyboard/mouse exclusive as well as some of the games previously XBox/DualShock controller exclusive.
Although I agree that the steam controller will make previously mouse/kb only games viable on the desktop and was probably designed for that, I've been surprised by how much more pleasant it has made gaming with games designed for a traditional controller.
For example, Dishonored plays fantastically well with the steam controller. You have all the advantages of a traditional controller, except the camera control is much more precise and mouse-like.
And although the steam controller may never compete with a mouse and keyboard for games like CS:GO, r/SteamController is reporting encouraging findings, with people claiming to be surprisingly competitive using a steam controller by utilising dual aiming (trackpad for large, coarse movements and gyro for tiny correctional movements).
The bottom line is that for me a steam controller is a massive improvement over a traditional controller, it is like it takes the best aspects of mouse+kb and game controllers and combines them in one package.
Console makers should take note, but unfortunately at this point outside nintendo the traditional console makers are very unwilling to innovate with the base controller.
Steam and the indie game community. No longer do players have to pay $50 to MAYBE get a playable game, they can pay $10 and get just as much game play from an indie dev.
I agree with this. Steam has hundreds of titles that are worth the $5 or $7 they charge. You could never bring a title like that to a console without jacking up the price.
Lately people in my social circle have been getting together on a weekend afternoon and playing a cheap game. Usually they don't have much depth, but if I get four or five hours of play out of a game that cost $4 I'm happy.
"H&F: Do you see the PC gaming market being eclipsed by mobile or console any time soon?
JG: I think mobile has it since the install base is massive and people have a lot of spare time sitting around where they have their phone right with them. Mobile has a fantastic growth opportunity."
For the pros too it's not about the hardware or graphics, many use the lowest possible settings to make sure they get a decent performance. I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. We are talking about games where a few ms can make a difference.
What is selling hardware is not eSports. It's all those games that look amazing and perform the best on great hardware. Skyrim(or even GTA V) for example, on a console will never look as good as on a PC. A recent controversy was that on PC Watchdogs was "downgraded" before release to look more like the console version because they weren't powerful enough.
Here's another thing that is saving the PC industry, the mod community.
If there is one thing for sure is that phone gaming wont destroy PC gaming.