Why the PC has won the first round of the next-gen console wars

After only eight days of 2013 the PC has stolen a major lead on Microsoft's Durango and Sony's Orbis consoles.
In gaming terms, 2013 is already predetermined to be the year in which we finally see Microsoft and Sony unveil new consoles. We don’t actually expect to see or hear anything solid about these for some months yet, maybe during special press events, perhaps at the Game Developers Conference in March and almost definitely during E3 in June.

This new generation of console hardware comes an astonishing eight years since the last one. In silicon terms that is over five Moore’s Law based transistor doublings, and several generational leaps in gaming hardware. The Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 were launched into a world where PC gaming was at a low ebb, marred by everything from piracy concerns, woeful integrated graphics solutions, confusing configurations and a general reluctance of retailers to stock PC games.

For all intents and purposes the PC was dying as a gaming platform in 2005, a situation that has reversed spectacularly in the intervening period.

In 2013 the PC is in many ways the ideal gaming platform, catering for everyone from abuse-hurling first person shooter kiddies to their Freecell loving parents. PC graphics are light years ahead of those the current consoles can deliver, and even the most basic of setups can run most games competently, if not spectacularly (Intel was even showing off the integrated graphics on a 7W Core i5 processor running the touch optimised version of Civilisation V during its pre-CES presentation).

There are several areas in which we can almost guarantee that the PC will hold an advantage over the next generation of consoles. Most importantly, it is a platform in which digital distribution is the norm, thanks largely to games retailers abandoning the PC in favour of the cash cow that is the secondhand console gaming market (a market that basically doesn’t exist on the PC). But the other key factor is that it is an open platform, with a multitude of hardware and software companies that have vested interests in the vitality of the PC gaming landscape.

These two factors are important even without those usual reasons given by us avid PC gamers for the platform’s superiority over consoles. PC games look better, play more smoothly and no matter how many Halo games get made, the keyboard and mouse is still the superior way to control a wide swathe of games, from MMOs to first person shooters to RTSes.

For the past year or so, the PC has reaped the rewards of big publishers gearing up for next generation consoles. Take DICE’s Frostbite engine for example, which is being used by EA for a swathe of titles now. It is an engine that shines on the PC, and in many ways is overkill when used on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, but its early deployment means that EA’s development teams can get up to speed for the next generation of consoles. This means the PC delivers a superior experience in both gameplay scope and visual fidelity

Now that next generation consoles are getting close those with vested interests are making their moves to solidify the PC as a serious player again. Whereas once upon a time PC gaming was driven by Microsoft and its DirectX initiatives, this time around we are seeing other players step up and push the PC as a platform, almost in spite of Microsoft and its Windows 8 App store based move away from the openness of the past.

This manifested itself most wonderfully in the form of Nvidia’s pre-CES presentation, which was a slow tease towards the reveal of Shield. CEO Jen Hsun Huang started out with Grid, a fully integrated server product designed to enable cloud gaming functionality at the service provider level, touched on the previously announced GeForce Experience (GFE) software that is designed to enable automation of game settings, swung through the anticipated announcement of Tegra 4, and culminated in the Shield handheld. Most tellingly the event ended with the real meat of Shield – not the ability to play Android games (which oddly a lot of reporting and commentary has fixated on) but the ability to use Shield to stream fully fledged PC games to either the onboard screen or an external display.


Nvidia's Shield handheld brings cloud gaming to local networks.


This alone makes Shield a killer product. While there are software solutions that kinda work streaming PC desktops to tablets and the like none will be as slick and responsive as Nvidia’s solution, which leverages a h.264 decoder built into its Kepler GPU architecture. This turns Shield from a curious handheld to a force multiplier for PC gaming, where one’s beloved desktop PC is now accessible around the entire home.

Just think, you can now actually enjoy CODBLOPS II The Way Its Meant To Be Played, while sitting on the toilet. Or actually take advantage of the 1080P resolution of your television when violating American history in Assassins Creed III. Shield is a device that won’t actually run Crysis, but it will let you play it – in many ways it is the product we have really wanted since we first heard of the whole Cloud gaming craze.

It is no accident that Nvidia focused on Shield’s ability to run Steam. We shudder to think what the gaming landscape would look like if Valve hadn’t managed the deft task of building Steam into a distribution powerhouse while not being dicks about it. Steam has been the single most important piece of PC gaming software since DirectX, and Valve is going to be one of the core companies driving the PC forward.

We’ve been fans of Steam’s Big Picture mode since it hit beta last year, and right up until the Shield demo yesterday I was ready to throw out my PlayStation 3 and replace it with a dedicated gaming PC in the living room (now I just relish the ability to channel that cash into beefing up my desktop and getting a Shield for streaming).




Steam's move into the living room is central to the PC's newfound vitality


For those who don’t currently have a monster desktop (Streaming is set to require at least a GeForce GTX 650 GPU) Valve is still pushing its Steambox concept, an early sample of which has just been shown off at CES by Xi3. Dubbed Piston, this is the result of a direct investment from Valve and marks the start of something very interesting. There is little detail so far about Piston, but we fully expect this to be *a* steambox, not *the* steambox.

If Xi3 can keep the cost of Piston reasonable, then it could well be the most immediate threat to the next generation of consoles, at least amongst the more serious of gamers. But even more importantly, it presents a very tempting value proposition to publishers as well, who can sidestep the overarching controls placed on platforms by Microsoft and Sony. After all, it will likely be able to run any software currently supported by the underlying OS (rumours keep swirling about this being Linux, but the reality is that Steam is still a Windows gaming platform first and foremost, and any wholesale shift to Linux will take a while to happen), which means that even if it is covered with Steam logos, you should still be able to run publisher controlled software platforms like Uplay and Origin.

Both Shield and Steambox can demonstrate immediate benefits for PC gamers, and are likely already more powerful platforms than the in-development consoles. But the one thing we are watching very closely in the medium term is the Oculus Rift VR headset, which has been touted as the first viable consumer VR solution (when said touting comes from people like John Carmack and Michael Abrash, you sit up and pay attention). While this is inherently a new kind of display, which should theoretically work with anything capable of outputting HDMI, the Rift’s software requirements mean that it will initially be restricted to the PC. This is still a while off, with developer kits set to ship to Kickstarter backers soon and retail product still likely a year or more away, but it brings with it the promise of a truly unique gaming experience that is unlikely to find support in the next generation consoles.

We’ll undoubtedly see more PC gaming innovations emerge in the weeks and months ahead, as we move closer to the explosion of console information that will happen later in the year. But in our minds at least, the PC has won the first round of what is set to be the biggest year ever for gaming, and that makes us very, very happy indeed.