Xbox and Nintendo have put up a respectable fight, but the history of gaming console sales point to an extended era of PlayStation dominance. In fact, PlayStation sits quite comfortably on the top of the podium, with the PS2 alone experiencing greater sales than both the Xbox and Xbox One combined. Over time, Sony has only widened the gap between themselves and the competition.
The spread in unit sales between PS3 and Xbox ended 1. In the following product cycle, Sony achieved only further dominance, with the difference between PS4 and Xbox One sales now sitting at Looking ahead, unit sale estimates for the PS5 range from million and the new console is set to outperform Xbox again—in line with past trends.
Gaming revenues have gone unscathed despite a pandemic, a retraction in economic activity, and the tightening of budgets for households in This trend could well be a result of video games growing as a form of stay-home entertainment. Video games possess an attractive disconnect in that they are an entertainment cash cow for gaming companies, yet gaming products also happen to be a huge cost saver for the consumer relative to other platforms and devices. The average cost per hour for gaming services is much cheaper than the cost of a book and even more competitive relative to the cost of entertainment giants Netflix and Spotify.
Consoles have transformed to being about much more than just gaming. For both the Xbox One and PS4, half of all gamers use their consoles for non-gaming activity. Another more notable form of transformation is the identity of the gamer itself. In the U. Furthermore, age demographics show a higher usage amongst men in the age group, relative to the cohort. PlayStation has momentum on their side, and a slew of new gamers exist today that will continue to help transform the market.
With a more digitally connected world, this new era will see gamers that play and compete with one another from all four corners of the globe. For gamers, this will be a thrilling experience—and for companies, a potentially very lucrative one. To put that scale into context, this visualization compares Apple to European indexes. While this was perceived as a colossal figure at the time, when we fast forward to today, that valuation seems a lot more modest.
To gauge just how monstrous of a figure this is, consider that Apple is no longer comparable to just companies, but to countries and even entire stock indexes. That means the company is more valuable than the entire economic production of these countries in a calendar year. Despite its many tumultuous turns, last year was a productive year for global markets, and companies going public in benefited. From much-hyped tech initial public offerings IPOs to food and healthcare services, many companies with already large followings have gone public this year.
I don't believe that's the best way to do it. I'd rather have people buy our games, direct to consumer through different e-tailer solutions. And then by doing that, they should get something more in the game.
I don't know…it could be early access or a boost pack for free or something like that. But piracy is definitely still a problem. Where do you see the PC gaming industry in five years? I think PC gaming is going to explode. Battlefield was founded on PC, so we feel very close to the PC community. Not that we're giving any less love to the console version, but the PC version needs to be true to its PC roots, and that's why we have PC-specific features, like 64 players.
That in combination with the rise of e-sport community is something that we strongly believe in as well. This is the future. We have e-sports on consoles as well. I'm not dissing that in any way, but PC is probably the major platform for the e-sports community. And this is just starting to grow from being a subculture to becoming something much, much bigger.
That's definitely going to be a kick-starter for PC gaming. There's also the fact that the PC gaming platform itself is getting so powerful that you can do a lot more on it than the consoles. I'm not saying the console cycle is ending in any way, but it's getting toward the end. We're getting close to the limit of what we can do. We know that there's more power to find when we do more optimizations and when we have smarter solutions.
We know by the end of console cycles that the games that were shipped at that time looked a lot better than games that were launched at the beginning of the cycle, and we're going to see that here as well. The closer we get to the end of the cycle, the games are going to run smoother, look prettier, and sound better.
The fact that the PC platform can do so much more now…in five to 10 years, it's hard to imagine what you can do on the PC. I would also argue that Apple is a force to be reckoned with because of their platforms. We don't have such a big core following there because they sell a lot of machines, but not all of them are powerful iMacs or the higher-grade machines. But I definitely think they are really catching up here, and I think we're going to see increased sales of their powerful machines.
And when they get into a state where people want to play not ported games but ones that are native to their platform, I think that's going to help diversify this kind of gaming. For us, as developers [working on] the PC and Apple platforms, the Apple platform is actually easier because you have the same input device.
Naturally, it's going to be a big challenge for us to get it running on a different operating system, but that aside, it's the same input devices. There's one other thing I will point out as well, and it's a reason why I believe in the PC's future, and it's what I like to call the rise of the indie developer.
I work for DICE, and we're a part of EA, but I'm really happy to see that there are so many indie developers that grow from being in a garage with one to two guys into a proper developer. The power that they now have to self-publish and do all of these kinds of things means the diversity of games on the PC is going to grow exponentially.
It's going to explode. You might even argue it already has exploded. And this goes for the PC and Apple's platform too. This will probably happen more on the console as well, but it's a bit harder for a new developer to get in there and start doing things. The rise of the indie developer on the PC is definitely going to lead the way for this as well…to gain more people and accumulate more players on the PC platform.
It's sometimes really hard to tell what the differences are between various markets. We've certainly never been able to make good decisions and say we're targeting this market or this demographic over another.
We always tend to be a little bit surprised. If you look at the relative mix of PC versus console with a game like Left 4 Dead, it was more console than we would've predicted. Portal 2 ended up being more PC than we would've predicted. So, it's a little hard to see significant differences.
There tend to be a lot of myths told in our industry about why one game is popular with one audience or another. The longer we're in the business, the more we just say "build good games and gamers are going to like them. What's the biggest threat to the PC games industry? Well, right now, the PC gaming industry is just doing gangbusters.
If you look at our business, it's growing hugely. Our business has always grown really well. We continue to be startled by just how much the PC side of our business has grown.
What's going to be true about the PC industry is that where it's successful is going to surprise the people who are already in the business…that it's not predictable. If it were, then everyone would go off and do that.
Nobody would've predicted Zynga before Zynga actually happened. What they're doing is astonishing. The biggest threat is the fact that we need leadership in the PC industry. The strength of the industry is the lack of any sort of authority that insists that everything be done this way…that you have to follow these criteria or go through this approval process.
That's also the weakness. It makes it hard for new technology to achieve critical mass, so it's really useful when different companies can take those risks on and push those things forward.
But if nobody does it, then we're going to languish and end up having proprietary closed systems that can use that to their advantage over the energetic chaos of the PC. Where do you see the PC games industry in the next five years? That's always a suicide mission to try to answer that question.
You always end up saying stuff that has nothing to do with what happened. There are certain things that you can plan on. Five years from now, PCs will be 32 times as fast. Graphics hardware will be times as fast. We'll have gigantic memory storage.
We'll be seeing plus gigabyte memory systems. Networking will be getting faster, but it will be getting faster slower than the client. And that will cause more people to put more intelligence at the edges of the network instead of centralizing it.
These are just the long-standing things that have been true for 30 years; identifying them is not any sort of huge leap. What people do with it…that's the interesting question.
What new opportunities does that open up? What kind of form factors emerge? There are other nifty features in the OS like improved stability and security, but for gaming related purposes, the relevant change has to do with memory addressing.
Both AMD and Intel currently have bit processors on the marketplace. While AMD has had bit processors on the market for a while now, users have had to either make do with running some flavor of Linux or stick with the good-ol' bit version of Windows. Intel is fairly new to the bit party only having just released its EM64T processors earlier this year, though for most users it took the release of XP x64 Edition to take advantage of either. As of yet, there are only a few games that have a native bit executable.
A bit patch for Unreal Tournament is said to be on the way, while patches for Shadows Ops and Far Cry are now available. We're going to take a look at what the bit version of Far Cry has to offer to see if a bit OS is relevant to gamers as of yet.
Most of the changes seem related to the Pier level in the game, though there are also two bit exclusive multiplayer maps that are included in the upgrade as well. Note that even though the upgrades are plastered with AMD64 logos everywhere, the bit patch will run on an Intel processor. All of the following screenshots were taken at x 4xAA 4xAF, and at the highest settings possible on the default rendering mode.
Also, we took both the bit and bit screenshots within Windows XP x64 Edition just so that there are no OS or driver differences. Before we get to the comparison shots however, let's take a look at a quick set of benchmarks. We ran the default demo at the highest settings a number of times via each version, both in XP x64 Edition to be fair.
It's a very small drop, but let's see if it's worth it. Now, on with the gameplay images If you look to the right you'll notice that the background doesn't begin to fog as early. You can also see terrain and foliage in the far off distance that isn't viewable in the bit version from here.
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