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Asus' gaming study says 3D is not the future
HUGE GROWTH in online gaming stems not from CPU power hungry first person shooters with photo quality graphics but rather from simple two dimensional creations, such as Facebook's Farmville, unless you're with Asus, that is.
In a bizarre leap of logic, Asus corporate vice president Joe Hsieh concluded in his Computex 2010 speech that online gaming can only grow in one direction, super intensive 3D graphics that require enough GPUs to design a thermonuclear weapon. This comes despite his presentation data pointing to social networking games as being the most popular.
Online gaming software revenues alone are expected to grow from $33 billion in 2007 and reach $55 billion in 2014, and Hsieh went on to say that "social games are the new blood" of online gaming.
Yet he prefers the prediction of deathmatch massacres being the wave of the future and not the co-operation of encouraging online pastimes that have actually seen enormous popularity, based on his own data. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have a range of games that encourage cooperation and relationship building. These have a large female following, by the way.
Interestingly, Hsieh explained that 50 per cent of these social games are played on PCs while the other 50 per cent are consoles and mobile devices. He also went on to explain the blindly obvious about how digital distribution was good for both vendor and customer.
But on the issue at hand, gaming's future, deathmatch or Farmvile, is it that a corporate vice president can't follow his own sums, or does he simply want the facts to fit his view today, that everyone should buy Asus G51 3D notebooks? µ
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2D games and 3D games aren't mutually exclusive. People can enjoy both. The reason casual games like Farmsville are so successful, because people who aren't normally games were open to it. That's a huge untapped market like a new oil reserve.
Both types of games are needed and it makes no sense to say casual gaming will mean doom of hardcore games.
Anyone who wants 2D can have it on their iPad or iPhone or even the Blackberry. Who is going to waste their SLI, Crossfire, or otherwise potent single GPU Video card playing 3D like "Farmville" accept women? Thanks, but I'm a SIM Racer and my racing games are in 3D, so I won't be looking for any 2D racing games unless they are for my Blackberry.
Indeed. There is one fairly new 2D-game called "World of Goo", which shows that a cool, innovative idea is millions of times better than playing wolfenstein over and over again. But then, what will nVidia, AMD and Intel do if people finds out?
Gamers have been clamoring for over a decade for a return to classical 2D side-scrolling games, instead of the everything-is-a-copy-of-doom shoot em' up first person shooters, but the hardware companies are too busy pushing their money at the software developers for what the gamers want to have any impact.
Some games manage to make it through, but the surface of what's really possible when it comes to using modern hardware to make a killer 2D game hasn't even been scratched. Nintendo wasn't too far off the mark in incorporating some classical 2D gameplay and controllers into the Wii, maybe the next-gen systems will do it even better.