[duiker101]

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 Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic.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 the pros too it's not about the hardware or graphics, many use the lowest possible settings to make sure they get a decent performance. I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. We are talking about games where a few ms can make a difference.

What is selling hardware is not eSports. It's all those games that look amazing and perform the best on great hardware. Skyrim(or even GTA V) for example, on a console will never look as good as on a PC. A recent controversy was that on PC Watchdogs was "downgraded" before release to look more like the console version because they weren't powerful enough.

Here's another thing that is saving the PC industry, the mod community.

If there is one thing for sure is that phone gaming wont destroy PC gaming.

[kllrnohj]

> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement.

Not anymore. There are plenty of pros playing at 1920x1080 with all settings on high + MSAA. High-end video cards are common as a result (as the target is ~200-300fps on 144hz monitors)

I think the reasons for this are a combination of that's what this generation of pros grew up expecting AND the rise of twitch streaming. Better looking streams attract more viewers.

There have been some investigation of settings and high vs. low generally doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage either way.

[blakeshall]

Definitely agree. I would argue that streaming has had the largest impact both because, as you mention, it makes for a better audience experience and it demonstrates the capabilities of PC gaming graphics-wise. Streamers and Let's Players have probably helped expose more games to a larger audience that would have previously not seen them.

[edias]

Even still Counter Strike GO is not a resource intensive game. No one needs a top of the line PC to play that game at max settings. Also pretty much any tournament is not broadcasting from the players computer but have dedicated observers that will always run the game at max settings. Plenty of CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratios, but their games would be broadcast in HD.

>There have been some investigation of settings and high vs. low generally doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage either way.

Yes and no. In a game like Starcraft where cloaked units give a slight glimmer when moving, pros universally optimize settings to enhance this glimmer as much as possible, and low graphics is one of the settings they use. More so though pros just stick to what their used to regardless of objective performance. It's why so many CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratio.

[kllrnohj]

> Yes and no. In a game like Starcraft where cloaked units give a slight glimmer when moving

Sorry I wasn't clear, I was specifically talking about CSGO. Seeing through smokes & fires isn't any better at low vs. high settings.

> It's why so many CS pros still use 4:3 aspect ratio.

Hmmm I disagree. Many of the current CSGO pros using 4:3 AR came from CS 1.6 and I think they just never felt like changing. There's no competitive advantage to it. If anything it's a FOV loss and thus a slight disadvantage but it's so minor as to not matter most of the time.

[mafuyu]

CS:GO is a terribly optimized game (a hack of the L4D2 engine ported from Xbox to PC!), and requires 300 in-game fps in the Source engine for competitive play. 300 fps is the sweet spot for no mouse acceleration and smooth mouse movements, as well as no frame drops on a 144 Hz monitor. CS:GO perf is CPU-limited, and my i7 2600 can only go up to 250 fps on all low settings, so I'm upgrading to a Skylake 6600k.

Blizzard has done a much better job with SC2; one of their goals from the start has been to optimize for low-end computers.

[kin]

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.

[eterm]

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.

[ddorian43]

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

[danielvinson]

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.

[moistgorilla]

I'm pulling numbers out of my ass but I would really be surprised if more than 100,000 of those viewers are duplicate accounts. To do the duplicate viewer thing you need to own multiple accounts with a copy of the game on each one.

[duiker101]

You too make a good point but again, not all streamers are in eSport, take PewDiePie or any minecraft streamer. Streamers(and sponsors on teams/players) I would say are more of a medium of advertising space more than something that you see and think "I want it because it's going to make my life better". The only case in which the "product placement" makes sense is for peripherals, a good keyboard/mouse and other accessories can make a difference.

Obviously not everything is black an white but I think that the reasons why "the PC industry is being saved" are way more that just eSports.

[serge2k]

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.

[daheza]

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

[spacecowboy_lon]

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

[derefr]

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 recorder middleboxes, you could have an Ethernet-path renderer+recorder box and put all the heavy GPUs there. (Note that, if you don't care about streaming precisely "live", the rendering and recording no longer need to be dataflow-synchronous; you could play the whole game, buffer the network data into the rendering pipeline, and then it would sit there rendering the results for however long you wanted to give to achieve a desired "quality" bound. Effectively, you're doing the same thing as people who stream their commentary of a finished match by rendering off the replay-file the match; but in this case, the "replay file" is streaming to the renderer as it's being created.)

2. You could have an in-game option to asynchronously stream the session data to a cloud GPU instance and render the game there. (Or, y'know, if any of the game infrastructure providers really knew what they were doing with the Internet, they could offer those instances themselves, for a profit.)

3. Or, with the game studios' cooperation, just throw the whole edifice of local rendering away, capture the "replay" data for every match to the studio's data-centers, and then provide a service for cacheable just-in-time rendering of any replay data. Effectively, the game studio would say "whenever you play a match, we render a video from each player's perspective and post it immediately"—but without the need to actually do that (or keep said videos around long-term), because the video is entirely "computed state" that can be recreated from the replay files at any time.

4. One step more: a sudio could even provide an HTML5 "enhanced viewer" interacting with such a render-farm-backed CDN, that let people change perspective of the action themselves, to switch between the perspectives of the players and other views, sort of making such a viewer into an HTML5 thin-client for the game engine on the renderer instance (but without game-state-manipulation logic.) Imagine such a viewer as an embeddable iframe, like a YouTube video. A replay commentator could walk through a session as they would in-client to store a camera-movement-record on the server, get a permalink to the embeddable "video" for that, and then feed it to MashupTwitch along with commentary audio. Presuming the thing that gets embedded is an iframe of the same rendering service, though, any given player could "break out of" the commentated-on view to look around at what else is happening in the game at any time (pausing the commentary mash-up and starting up an extra renderer), and then, when they're done, restart the commentary (terminating the renderer instance and resuming the parent session from where it was.) All the control of being a spectator for a physical sport; all the convenience of a DVR.

---

Mind you, with such a shift, you no longer get "for free" the compositing of the game session video-feed with other things going on on your PC, like voice/webcam recording. But it's simple enough to create a "mash-up" site that plays a raw video-stream from a game-renderer service, and then syncs and overlays a much-more-diminutive 96kbps audio stream from the user's own computer. Twitch would likely grow to serve that market that if the components were in place.

The important thing about this change, though, is that with remote async game-session rendering, you could actually stream games on a less-than-stellar internet connection (you'd still need low latency to play at all, but high bandwidth would no longer be a concern.) So many of my friends living in rural, under-served-by-ISPs areas wish they could stream, but can't.

[pjc50]

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".

[derefr]

> rendering it requires the exact same version of the game (including all mods)

It feels like (most) studios are really dropping the ball on this one. Event-sourcing through "rules engines" isn't that hard; you can have a client that "remembers how to be" every past version of the client, network-sync/replay-sync wise. You just need to go into the game architecture phase knowing you're building a networked game.

As a free bonus, when you build a game engine this way, you can also "audit" ladder/tournament matches by (asynchronously!) running through the game physics on the server after the match, before letting the match determination influence each player's ranking. (And doing your cheat-detection post-match really eases the requirements on the client sync protocol!)

It's harder with mods, unless your mods are also cleanly separable into "presenter-level" and "rules engine" parts. Not that I've seen this particular innovation before, but if the "rules engine" parts of mods are all in some common bytecode, the particular "house rules" required to run a replay could be embedded in the replay itself, along with package URLs for fat clients (and renderer instances) to pull down the presenter bits as well.

[eterm]

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.

[kqr]

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

[soylentcola]

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 expensive way to play video games. On the surface, a PC (of any stripe) will look more expensive than a game console at $500-1500 for a typical computer versus ~$400 for a game console. But to me, a game console is an additional $400 that I'd be spending for another box just for playing games.

I think for a while, the growing popularity of laptops and fewer desktop sales might have affected this balance since notebooks were generally more expensive for equivalent hardware and often lacked the GPU power needed for even modest gaming. But now I see even more modest laptops with integrated graphics that can handle at least some level of game performance as well as a crop of reasonably priced ($800-1000) notebooks that come with some sort of dedicated GPU.

I'm sure that for a lot of people whose computing usage can be handled solely with mobile-grade hardware (tablets, phones) the game console is a cheap and easy way to keep playing video games on a screen larger than 5 or 10 inches. But for anyone who already needs a laptop or a desktop, the cost difference to add a bit more RAM and a decent video card is less than the cost of a game console and even the base level specs are getting to the point where you can expect at least a decent level of gaming capability.

I guess the tl;dr version is: eSports help and more powerful phones/tablets may be cutting into the desktop/laptop markets but at the same time, desktops and laptops continue to improve and even mainstream PCs can handle games now (even better if you put an extra $150-250 into RAM and GPU).

As has historically been the case, the PC (whether a $600 Asus or a $2000 Macbook) is the gaming platform many people already own so it stands to reason that many will continue to use it as such.

[kqr]

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

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

[atom-morgan]

> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement.

I can't say for sure with CS but I know it's definitely the case with StarCraft. I saw it firsthand when I was in Vegas for a competition and had the chance to spectate behind some of the competitors irl. All that I saw were on the lowest graphics settings.

[danielvinson]

This was a big thing in Counter Strike 1.6 due to it giving you in-game advantages. For example, all leagues eventually started requiring you to use 32-bit graphics because people were using 16-bit graphics to be able to see through smoke grenades. If you ran the bare minimum settings, you would be able to minimize the distractions and increase the contrast between players and the level, letting you focus on winning.

The main reason pros will use lower settings for CS:S or CS:GO is because it is incredibly important that the game runs perfectly smoothly so that it reacts consistently to their input. Since everyone is on 144hz monitors now, that means they will need to stay above 144fps at all times.

Now, most CS pros who are sponsored will have good hardware and can do this on 1920x1080, but the problem is that at LAN tournaments in foreign countries, it is much less common that hardware which can do this is available. So the pro players will purposely use something like 1024x768 because they know 100% that the computer they will be given at any tournament will handle that, and changing something like resolution would take a few days to get used to and they won't get that chance.

[freehunter]

When I played CS:S in CAL Open, I saw a lot of people putting the graphics all the way down so their vision wasn't obscured by dust in the air, or fluffy bushes, or sun glare, or particle effects.

I never played seriously enough to go as far as finding out if it made a difference. I just liked to play a pretty game.

[cryoshon]

CS:GO isn't that graphically advanced over CS:S. A lot of the more serious players will turn off props/doodads that don't have player collision.

Turning off bloom is always a good decision IMO... just looks ugly most of the time.

[goeric]

Former professional Counter-Strike player here, can confirm. A lot of the top players still play on 1024x768 even on widescreen monitors (some have it stretched, some have black bars on the side). While I can't explain the technical reasons behind it, from experience I can definitely say the blocky nature of low-resolution gives you does feel like it's easier to get headshots. I always performed better at low resolutions, even with a gaming PC more-than-capable of running at 1080p 200FPS+.

[drawk]

My understanding is that low settings used to make stealth units easer to see in SC2 (and heroes of the storm, which is on the SC2 engine). Supposedly they've patched it in newer versions, but I'm sure people who've logged a ton of hours in low modes still prefer it.

In HotS some of the ability effects show through the fog of war, and supposedly that's easier to spot on low settings still. It also reduces the business on the screen when everyone in the game is teamfighting in one area.

[moistgorilla]

> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. We are talking about games where a few ms can make a difference.

While this is true pros still have very high performance pcs because there is an advantage to playing at 300 - 400 frames per second.

[BMFX]

Not so much, while you are right that the requirements of the games has more than been met in most competitive games. Go try and stream that game in HD using twitch - and now you will see why its saving the PC gaming market. To stream a mid-level detailed game in HD takes a ton of performance, more than you'd think.

[Joof]

I disagree. eSports provides a low price entry point into the platform and greatly expands the PC base.

The hardware sales come with the culture of PC gaming along with what you said, but the people become PC gamers first and hardware buyers second.

[Shivetya]

the mod community for XCOM has been very active and for the most part the developers don't try to stop them. If anything features in the next version of the game show a lot of requests for what previously had to be modded are to be added.

With regards to eSports and the sites that cater to them, I would like to see them impact on game sales as well as the hardware used to run them. If anything watching others play a new game is a great way to determine if its even worth buying

[rlu]

Re: Counter-Strike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyCuEmmZc4A