best pc games

April 10, 2006

A Revolutionary Change In Gaming

For the last two gaming generations, little has changed. The seventh generation of video game consoles hasn't produced anything revolutionary compared to the sixth generation. While the processing power has increased and the graphics have improved, little changes truly exist between the Xbox and the Xbox 360, or the Playstation 2 and the Playstation 3. This has left many gamers wandering what is next. The answers may surprise you. In the future many of the best pc games will be developed by small companies.

Most media today is being made available online. Because of this, the methods for bringing content into the home is changing at a pace which few people notice. IPTV is rising in popularity and many people are already utilizing its capabilities. The way we view television is about to change. Many publishers are becoming more dependent on digital distribution. While this will bring many good things to the average consumers, gamers will be among the first to benefit from these advances.

About three years ago few people believed that games or entertainment could be sold in a digital form without the need for a CD or DVD. Apple changed this with the development of the Ipod and Itunes. The Ipod started as music player and has evolved into a device which is capable of playing a wide variety of different media, including movies. Without Itunes, many of the other online services we see today would probably be nonexistent. The best pc games don't have to be developed by large companies.

Long before Napster and Apple, independent developers would design games to be distributed via shareware along the internet. Gamers would pay a fee, and then use a registration code to unlock the game and play it. This model has been in existence at least 10 years before the arrival of Itunes. Now many large corporations are jumping onto the bandwagon, and they don't have much of a choice. Independent developers have the capability of challenging large companies via the internet.

Because many gamers are technically savvy, they have probably wandered what took the large corporations so long to get to this stage of developement. I believe the reason for this is because large gaming companies didn't have an incentive to use the internet during the 1990s. The connection speed was slow, and few people had access to it. With the arrival or broadband and P2P, large companies are now forced to adapt, or they could become extinct.

Independent gaming houses have been quick to take advantage of the internet. This companies could rise up to challenge the established companies, and they could offer lower prices due to a cheaper overhead.