Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How eSports are saving the PC industry

hopesandfears.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 80 posts

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#31

Post by api »

saiya-jin wrote: post #18
api wrote: post #12

Design and education kept Apple alive through the dark years. I can see gaming doing the same for the PC industry through the dark years of Cloud ("Mainframe 2.0") until "PC 2.0" arrives.

don't worry about PC itself, all offices around the world will make sure this won't die soon even if all gaming went bust. Heck, even myself at home, I haven't yet met a good enough replacement of my do-it-all-super-fast desktop back home.

True but that won't keep the high end alive. You don't need a very powerful machine to do office stuff. Gaming will keep the "performance PC" alive until a few more years of Moore's Law and people start realizing that these high-end gaming PCs with neonz can run the same sorts of "big data" work loads you can presently only really run in the cloud. In 5-10 years a sub-$2000 performance PC will have 8TB of PCI-X flash, 16 CPU cores, umpteen gazillion GPU cores, and 128GB of RAM, and "wait why do I need Amazon Cloud when I can have it on my desk at 0ms latency?"

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#32

Post by Majestic121 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #18
api wrote: post #12

Design and education kept Apple alive through the dark years. I can see gaming doing the same for the PC industry through the dark years of Cloud ("Mainframe 2.0") until "PC 2.0" arrives.

don't worry about PC itself, all offices around the world will make sure this won't die soon even if all gaming went bust. Heck, even myself at home, I haven't yet met a good enough replacement of my do-it-all-super-fast desktop back home.

I would not be so sure about that.

Sure, there is a real comfort to work when you have big screens and a mouse/keyboard, but you don't actually need a PC for that, a tablet is enough.

Right now, PC are still way cheaper and the difference in power is still sensible, but I think this will change very quickly.

Of course, this is true for basic office work : if you need power, as a dev/graphist/whatever, a PC will still be the way to go.

However, most office job don't actually need that much power, and the flexibility offered by a tablet is huge : being able to work from anywhere, bringing your whole computer to take notes/read mails during a reunion, etc...

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#33

Post by kqr »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really weird that in inherently "networked" games (where there is a concept of a shared deterministic game-session physics-frame counter), the PC playing the game has to be the same PC rendering the game. You can recreate exactly the same view each player has from that player's outgoing network traffic! Thus, some alternatives to rendering on the user's own GPU come to mind: 1. instead of those HDMI-path re…

Lots of games used to offer "demo record" modes that did this - saving the data layer rather than the video. Or a "spectator mode". However, rendering it requires the exact same version of the game (including all mods) and typically there's no facility for high-fanout "spectator mode".

Demos were also rarely recorded with the same precision as the live rendering.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#34

Post by JetSetWilly »

Zikes wrote: post #25
daheza wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you about the steam link. It now allows me to play couch co-op games in the living room without having to drag my computer into the living room. The steam controller however does not seem to have as much use. I tried using it on several games in my library and was not satisfied with the amount of control I got. A wireless keyboard and mouse could give me a better experience.

I've had a bit of a mixed reaction with my Steam Controller experience. I find the trackpad approach innovative, and the configuration options have incredible depth, but that depth also creates complexity and a steep learning curve. I think it can be a viable replacement for controllers in certain genres, and it can make other genres "couch" viable which previously weren't (turned-based mouse-driven games, for instan…

Although I agree that the steam controller will make previously mouse/kb only games viable on the desktop and was probably designed for that, I've been surprised by how much more pleasant it has made gaming with games designed for a traditional controller.

For example, Dishonored plays fantastically well with the steam controller. You have all the advantages of a traditional controller, except the camera control is much more precise and mouse-like.

And although the steam controller may never compete with a mouse and keyboard for games like CS:GO, r/SteamController is reporting encouraging findings, with people claiming to be surprisingly competitive using a steam controller by utilising dual aiming (trackpad for large, coarse movements and gyro for tiny correctional movements).

The bottom line is that for me a steam controller is a massive improvement over a traditional controller, it is like it takes the best aspects of mouse+kb and game controllers and combines them in one package.

Console makers should take note, but unfortunately at this point outside nintendo the traditional console makers are very unwilling to innovate with the base controller.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#35

Post by kqr »

soylentcola wrote: post #23
duiker101 wrote: post #11

I think that the base concepts of this article are wrong. eSports is not saving PC gaming because the games require the best hardware. In fact competitve games have some of the lowest requirements possible. Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic. For…

I think another aspect that isn't always touched upon is the fact that many people will own some form of PC even as tablets and smartphones deliver more frequent updates and sales numbers. I've owned consoles in the past (last one I bought was an Xbox360 when it was on sale some years back) but I've always had a PC in the house. For all the talk of how expensive PC gaming is, for me it's always been the least expensi…

> But for anyone who already needs a laptop or a desktop

...which is basically anyone who is a white-collar worker or studying.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#36

Post by spacecowboy_lon »

daheza wrote: post #17
kin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point but all the best streamers absolutely need good hardware to be able to a stream high quality video feeds at a good frame rate. In addition, they get sponsored by hardware companies to mention what hardware they're using. There is no doubt eSports is selling hardware. Counter Strike is really not as popular in eSports nowadays as moba.

Sometimes these streamers are even buying a second box and using a capture card to send the video to their streaming PC.

Which is how Podcasters do it have a slave pc to run skype

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#37

Post by eterm »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really weird that in inherently "networked" games (where there is a concept of a shared deterministic game-session physics-frame counter), the PC playing the game has to be the same PC rendering the game. You can recreate exactly the same view each player has from that player's outgoing network traffic! Thus, some alternatives to rendering on the user's own GPU come to mind: 1. instead of those HDMI-path re…

Lots of games used to offer "demo record" modes that did this - saving the data layer rather than the video. Or a "spectator mode". However, rendering it requires the exact same version of the game (including all mods) and typically there's no facility for high-fanout "spectator mode".

HLTV does precisely that kind of proxying of demo data. You can view games en-masse in-client.

The data is usually 32tick which isn't as good as the live game (64tick or 128tick) but watchable.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#38

Post by serge2k »

kin wrote: post #16
duiker101 wrote: post #11

I think that the base concepts of this article are wrong. eSports is not saving PC gaming because the games require the best hardware. In fact competitve games have some of the lowest requirements possible. Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic. For…

You make a good point but all the best streamers absolutely need good hardware to be able to a stream high quality video feeds at a good frame rate. In addition, they get sponsored by hardware companies to mention what hardware they're using. There is no doubt eSports is selling hardware. Counter Strike is really not as popular in eSports nowadays as moba.

Selling hardware, sure. How many orders of magnitude less than the availability of steam?

I do think that twitch and the lets play community have done a lot though.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#39

Post by danielvinson »

ddorian43 wrote: post #28
eterm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-strike global offensive is actually one of the fastest growing esports. It gets more monthly viewer hours than DOTA (outside of The International, DOTA doesn't get many viewers), although is still some way behind LoL. However, CSGO majors viewing figures went from ~150k to ~300k to ~1mil to ~1.2m for the last few majors, so it's growing really fast.

I think you get (random?) items in the game when you view these events in CSGO, so many people are viewing with multiple accounts.

There is a small chance that a case drops for you which is worth $5-$40 depending on which map you are watching that contains "Souvenir" items for the event signed by the players.

You only get drops if your Steam account that owns the game is linked to a twitch account that is watching, and is IP restricted (you won't get more drops unless you watch from different IPs at the same time). View botting exists, but it requires a lot of time/money to do, and the Twitch viewership numbers are actually more accurate than you would think.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#40

Post by bad_user »

redml wrote: post #27

My biggest surprise is how this all runs on Microsoft's operating system and Microsoft does very little to nothing to facilitate this as a potential revenue stream. In fact they're just sitting by and watching as the biggest player, steam, is slowly taking their library off of windows and onto mac or linux.

Until now at least this has been one of the reasons for why Windows stayed the dominant operating system. I own a MacBook Pro with OS X on it. I also have an Ubuntu Linux workstation. But in my home there's also a Windows laptop for playing games, as I've got some favorite games that do not work on OS X or Linux. And it's not just because of popularity. Game developers prefer Windows as a target also because of things like Visual Studio or because of DirectX being technically superior and cleaner than OpenGL. And if they play their cards right, I don't see the situation improving as this has been going on ever since 1995.

Thing is Windows survived for so long only because it's been (sort of) neutral. I mean yeah, it has always been complementary to other Microsoft products or services, like Office, but Windows has been much more neutral or open than a console's environment, or more "modern" operating systems like, say, iOS.

But now you can see Microsoft introduce things like the Windows store, with the traditional revenue cut of course. You have to consider, for example, that Steam is pushing for Linux as a defensive move. And I tell you, if Microsoft goes even further then this, it will mean the end of Windows ;-)

Post reply on HN