http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece
8/19/2008 10:11:59 AM
in 12 years i'll still be struggling to play Crysis on max settings
8/19/2008 10:22:00 AM
^
8/19/2008 10:31:06 AM
^^ Ha, I don't actually think it's possible to run Crysis on max settings.Which raises another point. When chips can produce photorealistic graphics, how will graphics card companies keep convincing people to shell out a few hundred dollars every couple of years?
8/19/2008 10:37:42 AM
i would rather see a push for really good stereo tv.
8/19/2008 10:41:18 AM
Good for some games. But when I'm running the mines in Doom 5 slaughtering demons at breakneck speed, I see no way for me to ever notice or care about that level of detail.
8/19/2008 10:52:11 AM
i hope by then we'll see the CPU/GPU combo chips that were talked about when AMD bought ATIi think it'd be pretty awesome have a quad-core chip in which 2 of the cores are CPU and 2 are GPUor, rather, it'd be great to have motherboards that have upgradeable GPU chipsets and dedicated video memory banks...that way, you could pop in a new GPU and upgrade your memory yourself
8/19/2008 10:52:12 AM
Look at Larrabee and Nehalem. 12 years from now I'm thinking 128 cores baby!
8/19/2008 11:05:16 AM
I think it will be bittersweet to see the end of graphics advancement. On the one hand, you won't have to upgrade your PC nearly as much, and consoles will probably have a MUCH longer life cycle.But on the other hand, you will never again watch a game trailer or look at a preview and be amazed and in awe of what you see. I will miss that if this ever comes to pass.
8/19/2008 11:10:44 AM
do you think the price of games would get to a hundred bucks? or even a few hundred then?
8/19/2008 3:30:52 PM
^ that's a good point...this technology is far from free
8/19/2008 3:44:07 PM
do you think the price of games would get to a hundred bucks?Inflation + 20 years.
8/19/2008 6:27:36 PM
Even with inflation games have just now gone to $60 after being $50 for at least a decade and a half.Plus 2020 is only 12 years from now.
8/19/2008 6:51:38 PM
I'd rather see multi-monitor support for current and future games. Some games have it, but I'd want to see across 3 or 4 monitors.
8/19/2008 8:11:13 PM
im not really concerned about that so much. /shrug
8/19/2008 8:12:13 PM
^^ problem w that is the separation of the monitors... i wouldn't be able to focus on anything (lazy eye when it gets tired or i focus with the other, etc) though it would be cool i admit.as far as that animation:
8/19/2008 9:50:01 PM
3 monitors with the matrox parhelia was awesome back in the day, too bad it couldn't beat the cheap geforce 4 ti 4200.
8/19/2008 10:20:21 PM
at first, i was about to say i hate speculative articles that predict we will do X by the year Y. they provide little insight, and belong in the editorial section. then i read the article, and watched the video. wow.
8/20/2008 10:26:39 AM
Why would you need multimonitor support unless its a flight sim or something?Dell/Samung 30">2 smaller monitors.I really don't understand the obsession with high end graphics. Gameplay is far more important.There are nintendo games better than most of the garbage they make now.Almost all PC games I play are on the Source Engine and even my measley X2 4400 and X800 can run those.God forbid anyone play PC games with a midrange system.
8/20/2008 10:19:52 PM
Leisure Suit Larry will get a lot more interesting
8/20/2008 11:32:19 PM
I bet the return on investment for these kinds of games won't be worth it. Even if the graphics are there, the physics and gameplay won't improve commensurately. Simple, fun games aimed at the casual gamer dominate. Why should a company spend a $100 million making this future game that may or may not be a hit when it can make a dozen casual games where only 2 or 3 have to be a hit to make it worth it?-----As with many things on the internet, the sex industry is going to drive photorealistic games![Edited on August 21, 2008 at 12:10 AM. Reason : .]
8/21/2008 12:05:05 AM
8/21/2008 12:49:00 AM
8/21/2008 8:12:09 AM
My point was exactly that. Most PC gamers tend to be obsessed with graphics. Instead of the gameplay.I know very little about how the programming of games,etc is done. But I would guess that PC games with super high end graphics don't cost nearly as much as games like the new GTA.Besides, can't they just create an engine that supports these "photorealistic" graphics and then gamemakers can license the engine?EDIT: Apparently crysis cost $22M and they created the engine from scratch right?So if they weren't morons and made an engine that could actually run on computers that cost less than $5k...they could re-use the engine and/or license it.It seems reasonable to me that if graphics do become time(and money) consuming, then you will see one or two game engines emerge that almost all PC games are based on.[Edited on August 21, 2008 at 10:12 AM. Reason : addition to post]
8/21/2008 10:06:01 AM
8/21/2008 8:10:50 PM
Alienware will have a panoramic monitor out this year, supposedly before Christmas. It was announced way back, possibly even last year.The article is stupid. Computer games will never be photorealistic. It has little to do with the hardware capabilities, as Moore's law will ensure we get to the capability to handle photo-realism in a decade or two.The problem is the human element. jgnelsonjg is dead on with his post. The most popular PC games (WoW) aren't photorealistic and don't attempt to be. The ROI for photorealistic games is slipping more and more, and won't get any better.Look at the comparison between a game like Brain Age, versus Gears of War. BA took 9 months to develop at a cost of a few 100k. GoW took 4-5 years at a cost of millions of dollar. BA sold ~13 million copies. GoW sold about 3.5 million and was deemed a runaway hit.Look at the breakdown by title. Every first party Nintendo title for Wii has sold over or right near 10 million copies. Only one "photoreal" game even came close, Halo 3 a ~8mil. After that the next closest is GTA4 at 5+ million, and it's not exactly photoreal either.The problem is, visually real, elaborate games are approaching movie studio budgets, but without the movie studio audience. They are becoming more and more of a niche market with limited returns. Much like movies, the majority of people want a game they can play for an hour or less, at their own pace, and then do something else.
8/21/2008 11:44:06 PM
the thing is, a lot of people play video games to get AWAY from real life. I dont care incredibly much about graphics.
8/22/2008 12:01:18 AM
8/22/2008 2:11:55 AM
^^^Only Wii Sports and Wii Play, both bundled games, have sold more than 6.5 million, so Halo 3 has any true Nintendo first party game beat easily.And Gears of War sold 4.7 million, a bit more than Twilight princess.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#Wii
8/22/2008 10:13:58 AM
We'll never have photorealistic games. I'm calling it.
8/22/2008 3:37:55 PM
^except war games.Just look at Call of Duty 4
8/22/2008 3:45:34 PM
WII Wii Play 10.5360 Halo 3 7.5WII Super Mario Galaxy 6.25360 COD:4 6.15WII Mario Kart 6WII Super Smash Brawl 5.75WII Fit 5.15 WII Mario Party 8 5.15360 GTA4 5.1WII LoZ: Twilight Princess 4.45360 GoW 4.4WII Mario & Sonic at the Olympics 4.15PS3 GTA4 3.65360 Assasins Creed 3.6WII WII Sports 3.1PS3 CoD:4 3WII GH3 3360 GH3 2.75360 Oblivion 2.5PS3 Assassins Creed 2.4WII Rayman Raving Rabbits 2.2WII Super Paper Mario 2.1WII Links crossbow training 2.1WII Big Brain Academy 2.1
8/22/2008 6:48:48 PM
8/22/2008 6:59:10 PM
even if they upsell the downloaded content to every single owner of GoW, the ROI for Brain age is multiple times higher.They spent less than 1/10th the cost of GoW and made 1/2 the profit. That's insane.Wii Play, Wii Sports and Mario Kart also had extremely small budgets and development times in comparison to Halo3, CoD4 and GoW
8/22/2008 7:54:45 PM
8/22/2008 8:09:33 PM
If I spend 1$ and make $10 profit and you spend $20 and make $40 profit, who has more money at the end of the day?
8/22/2008 8:49:52 PM
As terrible as it looks like the Wii will be for the future of the games industry, I still have a slight hope that it will end up positive.The Wii is attracting millions of casual gamers, who play cheap, short, casual games. However, the games we all started with were casual games, 90% of NES and SNES games could be completed in a couple of hours and were accessible to anyone.So I'm hoping that most of this crop of new "casual gamers" will eventually mature into real gamers like we all did, and making real games will again become a worthwhile use of time and money.[Edited on August 23, 2008 at 12:31 AM. Reason : .]
8/23/2008 12:31:20 AM
yeah, and the term gamer now loosely applies to a much larger audience compared to a decade ago. Big shift of where everyone is playing games now, instead of just the nerds. Frat boy's used to be the ones pissing on the nerds, but now they are becoming part of the gaming culture. I just find it funny that a decade ago, I'd get made fun of for playing computer games by one of my HS buddies who was on the football team (essentially a big jock). Now he's into WOW and plays more PC and console games than me.Whose laughin' now?
8/23/2008 3:28:40 AM
^^They didn't turn into serious gamers. They stopped playing.People don't seem to realize that the overwhelming majority of the population DOESNT WANT to be a serious gamer. The market for casual games hasn't DECREASED the sales of traditional games, it's actually helped it quite a bit.But the casual market is HUGE in comparison and growing rapidly, where the traditional market is pretty stagnant.
8/24/2008 9:16:31 PM
8/24/2008 10:48:34 PM
8/24/2008 11:07:24 PM
^right, but there's now different classes of "gamers" instead of just being a "gamer". The original meaning and classification of just the word gamer is a lot more expansive. "Everyone is a gamer" now day's, but the level of involvement is now the deciding factor. It's nothing more than any other kind of hobby with different levels of lifestyles.Just look in the late PC Gamer magazines and you'll see they are catering to a large audience from frat boy's to hardcore gamers.
8/24/2008 11:37:11 PM
8/25/2008 2:39:24 AM
saying the traditional gaming market to be stagnant is really showing how dumb you are as an analyst. True, the gaming industry has grown significantly with a big jump in casual games, but the real industry setting games are still the big box office games. I mean you getting a huge shift of where it's now a lifestyle to be a gamer. Not only that but you have an influx of cross branding and multiple mediums to showcase or present the games, everything from movies to comic books, we are seeing more with games than 10 or 20 years ago.Sure the Wii is a neat little toy and has some innovative games of where it's just going after the casual gamer market. The Wii is also much more then that too. You also have the casual gaming markets on cell phones and iphones/ipod touches. The other handheld devices like the gameboy, DS, and PSP or the likes don't have the real potential of what current cell phone gaming market has since there are millions and millions of cell phones on the market. Although, ring tones is their real first and biggest thing on cell phones.You can say what you will about spending millions on making a game, something like GoW or the Halo series, but their brand is going to be strong and something as enriching as halo 3 will bring a lot of fan following towards it. Think of other products that goes with Halo, you have your accessories, posters and possible movie deals to go with it. Of course, lets just hope it doesn't go sour like Hitman did. That had a great series and the movie just sucked.Another good example are the Tomb Raider series and movies. I mean you have them creating dolls and selling to little kids like barbie. Even the Mario series have little cheap toys like that. It's really nothing new, but it's just getting bigger.
8/25/2008 4:54:42 AM
8/25/2008 7:08:29 AM
I think the most interesting aspect about the gaming industry are the MMO's. They are pretty interesting and most have a decent business model over a decent gameplay, but it just amazes me that so many people are willing to pay a monthly fee to play a game. I mean wow has 6+ million players... that's just crazy!
8/25/2008 9:02:58 PM
8/26/2008 1:35:33 AM
^I agree with most points there, but you did just shoot yourself in the foot with the response to the traditional games being just stagnate. 5-6% growth a year is it is still growth and not stagnate. It's still much slower growth than casual games on multiple platforms (specially the iphones/ipod touches). I commend apple for actually releasing the applications store and has a great business model to expand exponentially, but they are a small fish in the cell phone market.I didn't say that the industry was shifting, just point out that casual gaming is expanding. The gaming industry is just expanding as a whole. I don't think the large production games are just an exception to the rule, I think they are really the ones setting the base line for the industry to follow or move off from. There's just a few games in gaming history that set the stone and those tend to be the big names (although there are some that are small named ones that make it).I mean you see a lot more A+ title games on the market these days that it just seems like it over saturates the gaming market. Granted, there's less and less innovation in traditional games, but they are still growing and I think their market segment is still growing and finding new avenues to reach new prospects. I do agree that putting all your eggs into one video game is a poor business choice between consoles specially now when a lot of games are ported over. I do think the Halo series seemed to alienate a lot of gamers, but through all the hype, it was an industry setting game/series. You will always have the big games on tap with any mediums, but I do agree that in terms of game play and innovation, the traditional games are stagnate, not in growth or sales.And I said earlier, this is nothing new, it's just on a much bigger scale.
8/26/2008 2:04:25 AM
5% growth is stagnant, because inflation is 3-4%.
8/26/2008 2:30:06 AM
^right, but how many cell phones are there in the world? compare that with iphones/ipods touch's.I also didn't exclude out saying only big budget games make the cut to be industry setting games.
8/26/2008 2:37:55 AM