I think he's completely off base to be honest, I think in the coming years Surface like devices will replace the traditional desktop, and unless Linux moves quickly, there's no way that space will be anything but Windows dominated.
With Windows 8.1 out soon, which improves Windows 8 massively, I see it continuing to dominate into the future where desktops become increasingly marginalised.
Tablets are the future and Windiws 8 will dominate. Got it!
Can't help thinking there's a Linux kernel based OS by some internet company already out there that's selling on a few tablets. Obviously it can't be selling as many tablets as the continuing-to-dominate Windows so it must be an aberration. And there's another unix based OS out there doing even better, from some company in Cupertino I think. What are their names again?
Never mind, Windows will continue to dominate. On tablets. Right!
I don't have an android device, but from the looks of things it's like the iOS app - the store is there but it's only to shop for PC games. You can't install anything. I could be wrong, though.
I'm ignoring whatever steam actually offers; I'm only talking about the capabilities of android. You can easily install third party stores, so it's a much better situation than iOS or Metro.
I wasn't referring to the the market that Android and IOS are competing in, as this post was about traditional non-touch games I was talking more about the desktop/laptop space and the associated products.
In that regard I do think Windows will dominate, and in the future Surface devices will probably replace laptops in their market.
You're talking about two completely different market segments. There is a huge difference between the requirements of "casual" gamers (I.e., I play games primarily on my phone/tablet) and "real" gamers like me. I don't see myself playing WoW on a tablet anytime soon, if ever.
While your point is valid, I wish you had worded that better.
Yes, a modern tablet device could never compare to an equally modern desktop PC in terms of power and capacity. They're in entirely different leagues. The sorts of games able to run on the latter could never run on the former, i.e. you won't be seeing a game like Beyond: Two Souls or Destiny on a tablet for many years to come, not without some serious stripping of features, content, and graphics performance.
Not sure what was wrong with my wording, but you're still missing the most crucial bit. It's not simply a matter of horsepower. I don't care if you beef up a tablet to perform as well as my custom desktop; playing complex games on a tablet is just impractical and always will be.
Take WoW again as an example; I need a keyboard for my many (many) keybinds, a mouse for movement (because keyboard turners are just bad), and, really; an 8" monitor? Please. Tablets are simply a non-starter for complex (in terms of input and required reaction speed) games.
Tablet gaming is for my Mom and myself when I'm bored waiting at an airport. Sure, it's a huge market, but not all gamers are satisfied with Candy Crush.
As an aside, I would love for you to enlighten me as to how my first post could be improved.
The distinction between "casual" and "real" gaming is entirely facetious, and can actually do more harm to the credibility of your statements than anything. Games are games and come in all shapes and sizes.
I also have to disagree with your dismissal of horsepower as the root of the issue, because I can currently hook up any keyboard, mouse, or even game controller I want to my phone or tablet. Additionally, some portable devices are capable of hooking up to a larger screen via a microHDMI port. Their only limitation, then, would be the internal hardware components that ultimately add up to their "horsepower", with the added advantage of portability.
It's not facetious; there is a huge difference between people who primarily play mobile games and people who build machines for serious gaming. The represent completely different markets. If you were actually trying to sell games with your mentality you would fail miserably. You have to know your market.
Also, if I have a tablet with as much horsepower as my desktop then it would necessarily be more expensive than said desktop. So, you're proposing that I buy a tablet which is more expensive than my desktop and hook it up to all the peripherals I need so that I can... wait, what is the advantage here exactly?
You say that I gain portability; right, as long as I bring along my keyboard, mouse, and a monitor. Now that's what I call portability! Certain games just don't work without a large screen and more advanced input devices. Again, completely different markets.
As an aside, since you obviously took exception to my terminology, note that I put quotes around "casual" and "real" for a reason. I don't mean to look down upon the casuals, but to believe that they are basically one in the same is just ignorant. Those in either segment have very different tastes and want very different things from the games they play. I want games with depth that I can sink endless hours into. My girlfriend wants an occasional distraction. You're never going to sell us on the same marketing lines. We want different things.
Whether or not the distinction between "real" and "casual" gaming is real, there is undeniably a distinction between the sort of games that Microsoft currently seems to be trying to sell through their App Store, and the sort of games that Steam sells.
Surprising to very few, this distinction just so happens to align pretty damn close with the alleged "casual"/"real" divide.
(Also, you've been able to dock laptops for years, that isn't some sort of neat "Surface-like-device" trick, yet all the "real" gamers that I know still own dedicated desktop machines. Their screens, keyboards, mice, and controllers are all bulky. Their setup is already the antithesis of portable, going through all that trouble just to use a docked underpowered device just doesn't make sense.)
Tablet games have terrible controls, even when they are implemented as well as possible. There are certain types of games that are well-suited to touch, like Angry Birds, but most games are really awkward to play without a mouse/keyboard or a gamepad.
I remember saying something similar when the GameBoy launched.
Yes, the touch interface sucks for hardcore gaming. But it's not implausible that somebody would figure out the least-obtrusive way to add good gamer-friendly controls to a tablet and a big vendor throws their weight behind this. Then what happens? Then suddenly the big difference between a tablet and a PC gamer is hardware, and tablet gaming suddenly eats up the indie market and starts moving north.
Sure, a PC can push a lot more polies, and so will always have a certain market of core gamers... but look at how Blizzard has always done well targeting aging hardware. The lion's share of the market doesn't have a bleeding-edge video card.
Really? The Surface has been a complete and utter failure. Not to mention, the ARM version of the Surface won't run Steam, and games for Windows RT are far fewer than for proper Windows 8.
Fact is, the best interfaces for serious gamers are either keyboard + mouse, or a game pad. Even if touch was the next big input, Linux has it, and Canonical is talking about merging Ubuntu touch into Ubuntu desktop in 14.04.
My bad, I should've really explained it better in the opening post.
How I see things going, though of course I could be wrong, is that at home you'll probably just have a monitor, with your KB/Mouse setup of course, and you'll just plug your Surface like device into it.
I think the Console ideology this gen also supports my point somewhat, they didn't go all out for power with a big complicated architecture, they're just using x86 with a low power processor designer.
Plus with the tapering off with graphics gains that we're seeing you'll be able to create a fairly similar experience to the high end on lower power devices, which I think will benefit that type of device.
Also I also think Windows RT was a bad idea, they should've just gone all in with the Surface Pro, which I think is the future honestly.
This may be the future. Ubuntu is already going this direction, with Ubuntu on Android, Ubuntu mobile, the desktop of course and it's all going to be merged together...
Meanwhile, didn't Ubuntu recently, rather publicly, fail a crowdsourcing campaign because they couldn't find enough people who actually care about their mobile proposal? Yeah... I'm just not seeing that stuff as the future.
Maybe this will seem like a very foolish comment in 3 or 4 years, but I doubt it.
They failed to pre-sell a large amount of expensive smart-phones. This doesn't mean anything concerning Ubuntu's success on phones in general, never mind their place in the computing landscape...
That was them putting forward their best effort, right? I mean, they wouldn't intentionally start out with "Plan B"... All of their market research said that plan was the most likely to succeed, so at the very least they demonstrated their inability to accurately judge what people want.
I think the failure of that campaign says a lot more about the viability of Canonical's dreams than many are willing to admit.
The Ubuntu Edge wasn't their primary phone plan. Ubuntu Touch (developer preview) images were already available, for example for the Nexus 4. Ubuntu were already speaking to carriers (http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/carrier-advisory-group) but the Ubuntu Edge had nothing to do with that side of things.
Had they sourced out a phone they could sell for 400 dollars, and maybe bumped up the delivery time to around Christmas, and used Kickstarter instead of Indiegogo, I think they could have been very successful.
For myself, and I'm sure many others, spending 800 dollars on a product I won't see for nearly a year is a bit too much...
I think that interfaces aren't necessarily the issue here, as I could easily hook up a PS3 controller or a keyboard + mouse to my current tablet or phone if I wanted to.
I think it will come down to a few things:
1. Price - How much is a Windows 8/8.1 license these days? Why would a games console manufacturer want to bring on that additional cost?
2. Performance - Microsoft is too busy tripping over its own feet and supporting legacy enterprise applications and environments from decades long past to be able to tackle performance issues in a serious manner.[1] There's a reason the Xbone switches from Windows to an "Xbox OS" to run games.
3. Portability - Install a Linux flavor of your choice on your Raspi, phone, tablet, Steambox, Nvidiabox, whatever. The limitations will ultimately be upon the hardware, and the OS can get the heck out of the way and just let the games run.
What exactly do you mean by "Surface-like" devices? You mean more touch-oriented devices? In that case, I'm pretty sure Android will be the one dominating:
If you're talking about "also having desktop mode", Microsoft is only going to push that into the background with each new version of Windows, until desktop mode becomes like DOS - dead and buried.
The very first version of the Surface Pro can run most Source engine games fairly well at the moment, and that's a situation which will improve rapidly if they keep iterating.
As to input mechanisms and screen real estate, it's still a Windows PC, that means it comes with all the advantages of one.
Here's the problem Valve faces - All the major tablet platforms (iOS, Google Play, KindleFire/Android, Win8 RT) have app stores dedicated for that device. Some allow side-loading but that freedom could quickly disappear.
This means a number of things: 1) Valve is late to this game and is fighting entrenched existing app stores that sell tons of games 2) Pricing is an issue as these app stores don't really have high ASPs on games - tablet users are cheapskates compared to PC gamers 3) The form factor is wildly different, making it tough/nearly impossible for Valve (and devs) to port. 4) The freedom to side-load for those platforms allowing it may lose it at any time (see: google play services)
All of these mean that tablets are not exactly fertile ground for Valve/Steam. As far as they're concerned, the PC (and Linux) is where it's at (I still think they could out-do Ouya/PSVita with a steambox, but seems like the idea is either a non-starter or ahead of it's time).
how would surface like devices ever replace the traditional desktop? they allow no upgrades and pc gaming without a physical keyboard/mouse is just impossible.
You're missing the point. Most people don't have a dedicated computer to play pc games. They have one machines that they use to browse, email and play. The argument is that in the near future virtually all of those systems will have touch as part of the UI (not necessarily to replace the keyboard and mouse entirely, but as an added feature).
Because Windows 8 is a significant step forward in touch based UI, when you buy you're next laptop/desktop you will be installing Windows 8 on it. You definitely won't be installing linux.
The kind of gamers that Valve courts are the sort of people who still build their own PCs, and who still interact with their computer through game controllers and keyboard/mouse. You aren't going to replace TF2 or Skyrim input with touch-based input. Notta gonna happen.
Just look at the games that Microsoft is currently peddling with their App Store. This stuff is not a competitor to Steam. It isn't even in the same market.
Yeah... you're focusing on the world of Candy Crush and <insert crappy in game purchase model game here> type games. Sure, huge market, also completely and utterly separated from the world of real gamers by a massive void of nothingness. There is of course overlap, but I'm not playing mobile games on my PC and I'm certainly not playing Arkham Origins or FFIV on some tiny tablet.
This isn't about "most people". This is about pc gamers, who still build their own boxes and are even borderline fanatical about their hardware. They aren't going to Best Buy and coming home with a touch UI by mistake. They are ordering parts from Newegg and building liquid cooling rigs in their basement.
You're going to be running cutting edge games on a Surface? I don't think so. Perhaps in 5 years you could stuff enough electronics in a box the size of a tablet to run current games of today at max settings on something like an Occulus Rift. But then what about the new games 5 years from now? PC Gaming is an arms race which has always required expensive and significant hardware to enjoy at the top level. I don't see tablets replacing that anytime soon.
> You're going to be running cutting edge games on a Surface? I don't think so.
You can run some pretty decent games on the hardware that ships on the Surface Pro. Sure, you aren't going to want to play BF4 or whatever Bethesda comes up with next, but as hardware cycles continue the playable-game-gap between desktop/laptop/tablet is only going to shrink.
I game today on a 1.5 yr old HP laptop with an ATI 6750M card inside, and it's more than adequate for stuff I've thrown at it. Sure, I'm not gaming on ultra, but my FPS is just fine at low/medium. These days games look just fine at those detail levels, although maybe it's just that I used to play Doom on a 33Mhz 386 and had to shrink the screen size to about a 2x2" square to get decent frame rates.
"With Windows 8.1 out soon, which improves Windows 8 massively, I see it continuing to dominate into the future where desktops become increasingly marginalised."
Why?
Why does anyone care what it runs?
Why would OEM's want to try to sell it?
With Windows 8.1 out soon, which improves Windows 8 massively, I see it continuing to dominate into the future where desktops become increasingly marginalised.