Console gaming has always been the optimum gaming style for those recreational gamers until years ago. With countless introductions to immerse the player in the many forms of gaming, there are these days, the general landscape of gaming has become much more realistic and has opened a gap for high-skill sport-like events.
Gaming tournaments aren’t necessarily a new discovery, as they’ve been around since the dawn of gaming, with high scores being the original way of determining the best from the best back in the day. Now, games are incredibly complex, so much so that gaming tournaments are some of the biggest events of the year, hosting millions of dollars worth of prizes and attracting millions of worldwide viewers.
Platforms like Twitch and YouTube introduced the ‘streamer’ personality to fans and in the modern day, there are more viewers in these streams than you’d find on national TV programs. Not surprisingly, sponsors have flocked to get their products advertised via these types of streams.
Huge personalities such as xQc and Adin Ross are among the most popular, showcasing various games, surprisingly, with the most popular format being streaming live casino games like poker, blackjack, and roulette. Casino games have become incredibly sophisticated and much more enjoyable to play and watch, which popular streamers seem to take advantage of.
How can console gaming lose its’ race to dominate the gaming world?
PC gaming has always been a step behind console gaming for various reasons, such as the immersive feeling you get when you’re holding a controller or the fact that gaming consoles are solely optimized to play these games. That landscape is changing in real-time and when assessing all contributing factors, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
PC gaming 20 years ago was incredibly basic and while many of the games were available on all platforms, they didn’t give the same feel when trying them on PC. Keybinds were not available, controllers were not compatible and for a person well-versed on a console, acquiring a PC for gaming specifically wasn’t viable.
The introduction to Steam, the new hub of PC gaming in 2003, massively assisted PC gaming and gave eyes to all available games on the market. Steam is now by far the most used marketplace available for games online and has over 1 billion accounts registered which is truly remarkable. Pairing this with the current game count on Steam, which is over 50,000 outlines how popular computer gaming is.
Why has PC gaming become so popular?
In a vicious market of over 3 billion gamers worldwide, it’s hard to imagine why console gaming would fall in comparison to PC gaming. However, using a computer set-up allows the owner to tailor their PC, building and amending the system is relatively easy and parts are very affordable in the incredibly competitive gaming market.
Graphics cards are easy to come by and instead of having to buy steeply-priced newer additions of consoles, those that own gaming PCs are able to catch up to next-generation consoles with ease.
Upon the announcement of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, the demand for these consoles were sky-high, so much so that all editions of every console was sold out in the pre-sales and stock was extremely hard to come by, waiting lists for these consoles were being filled in minutes and a shortage aided this in processors required for both systems.
It wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that this shortage opened up the option for those gamers that missed out to simply revert to a gaming PC.
What about the older generation of consoles?
Due to the shortage in supply of next-gen gaming consoles, many gamers have had to remain with the consoles they already have, this being the PlayStation 4, or Xbox One. The most difficult thing to factor in is that the newest styles of games have been released with huge open worlds and increased player counts, some going for 64 players in a single game to double this.
Older generation owners, they’re stuck with the smaller count due to the console not being able to handle such large data packets.
With the newest generation of gaming consoles being out and of the higher price tag, gaming developers are aware of the fact the newest generation games must fit the price tag of the console they’ve purchased which means the bulk of the innovation will go to next-gen.
A great example of this would be FIFA, EA had introduced a new ‘HyperMotion’ engine that simply transformed the game to allow for a much more realistic setting.
Unfortunately, for old-gen players, the games have remained the same as previous editions with extremely minuscule upgrades in simplistic features and this is universal across all gaming developers, there’s simply no reason to innovate on older game systems that will eventually die out.