Technology Feast

Gaming has driven the high-end PC hardware market for over a decade, but the gaming landscape is evolving at break-neck speed and the PC, once considered the apotheosis of gaming power, is fast becoming a casual gaming platform.

I used to have a saying - new game, new graphics card. I remember a time when hardware could barely keep up with the demands being placed on it by games, and I was buying new graphics cards almost as fast as I was buying games simply to keep at the cutting edge. This furious pressure on hardware came to a head with the hit first-person shooter Crysis. Here was a game that you could throw all the available high-end hardware at it, and it would still laugh at you. If memory serves me right, it took about a year before there as a graphics card powerful enough to allow you to play the game on a large screen with all the dials and sliders turned up to the max.

But …

As you can imagine, creating and releasing a game that no PC could play to the max (and that many PCs - even quite powerful mainstream systems couldn’t play at all) isn’t a recipe for commercial success. Hardcore gamers loved it because, well, we like tinkering ad spending money on hardware, but regular gamers found it frustrating.

Then everything changed. Nintendo’s Wii games console, which was released about a year before Crysis hit the shelves but had been kept in check by constant shortages, really started to gain traction and capture the market. The Wii was unlike any console we’d seen before. Not only as the wire-free Wii Remote unique, it also turned gaming on its head. Rather than appealing to the hardcore gaming fans who wanted ever more realistic explosions and blood splatter in their games, the Wii opened up gaming to a whole new audience that had never previously thought of themselves as gamers. Casual gamers who might have previously played a few hands of Solitaire or Freecell now had a console specifically aimed at them.

But things don’t stand still.