PCs Can Now Compete With Consoles Says St. John

July 24th, 2008 by Will Prusik in Business

While the war between console gamers and PC gamers rages on, one man has chosen to chime in with his somewhat amusingly uninformed opinions. Alex St. John, boss of online gaming network WildTangent, has said that this generation of consoles will be the last commercially successful one. While other industry figures have predicted that eventually console gaming will be integrated with home theater equipment, St. John is theorizing that laptops are the wave of the future.

Amusingly enough he states that we “now” have PCs that can compete with consoles. Of further hilarity is that he muses that they might not be able to compete with the Xbox 360 or the PS3, but can certainly beat out the Wii in terms of graphic capability. Someone should tell him that ‘Diner Dash’ isn’t exactly the height of PC gaming. As far as I can recall PCs have been equal/superior to consoles since the days of the Nintendo 64 or so. He states that the era of consoles is over because people aren’t as concerned with quality graphics these days. Isn’t one of the primary arguments in favor of PC gaming that computers can quickly outstrip the graphical capabilities of consoles due to the ease of upgrades?

While laptops are undoubtedly much more powerful than they used to be, I can’t recall seeing anyone sitting in a coffee shop playing Half-life. Consoles are wired up to the internet via the Playstation Network and Xbox Live. Sure, the Wii is a bit of a pain with the whole friend code system, but online play is still possible. People game at home. If kids are going to be gaming on the go, you’ll see them with a sleek, slim DS or PSP, not lugging around their laptop. Factor in the PC gaming industry concerns over piracy and the fact that a decent portion of video game sales are attributed to parents buying their children games and consoles as gifts and you’ll see a big trend towards consoles. Do companies want to put out a product on a platform that might only get 25% of what’s possible in terms of revenues? Does little Timmy’s mom want to buy him a several thousand dollar gaming computer that’ll be obsolete in a year or a $200-$500 console that’ll play every game ever made for it? While online distribution and casual games might be raking in money hand over fist, this only reflects the massive growth of video games and their popularity, not a moving away from more ‘hardcore gaming’.

Tags: Business