Game on in battle to revive PC sales

Net Results Games - often ignorantly derided as solely the weapons-and-gore territory of teenage boys - may well end up as this year's sword-wielding saviour of the beleaguered personal computer sector.

Scoff not. While new projections from industry analysts, as well as sales figures from the PC industry, show a long-awaited recovery may finally be on the way, home desktop sales still remain relatively sluggish. Anything that might dig a spur into the side of this $1.4 billion (€1.2 billion) market will be eagerly welcomed by manufacturers.

Because the fact is, most people haven't really felt a driving need to replace the PC sitting on the table at home for the past couple of years.

Many commentators feel the reason why is that PCs are now so powerful, with their muscular chips and vast hard drives, that consumers reason there's no need to fork out for a newer model. Yet.

And it's true. We enjoyed years of an extraordinary bang-for-buck explosion, when the steadily falling expense of a spanking new PC was well worth the huge leap in computing capability.

But right now, if you're assessing your home machine, you probably have memory and hard drive capacity coming out of your ears. People have held back from new PC purchases and, instead, gone for peripherals such as gaming joysticks, little webcams and other devices that make your PC more fun to fiddle with.

But PC manufacturers have their fingers crossed that two games, due for release in the coming months, will have the punters back in computer stores and clicking through PC retail websites for something with more memory, chip power and graphics capability.

The games are the extremely violent, highly animated Doom III, and the lushly graphic Uru: Ages Beyond Myst.

The originals of each game - Doom and Myst - were ground-breaking in their time, both visually and conceptually. Doom introduced multi-player networked gaming as well as the pleasures of the splatterfest to the masses. Myst, with its visual worlds of extraordinary detail, was the Beatles of gaming, the biggest selling game ever until displaced by The Sims after nine years of glory.

Those two games encouraged many tens of thousands of people to buy new PCs in order to get the best visual effects and performance on their screens.

In recent years, however, game designers have tended to work within the capacity of existing hardware rather than push the envelope.

According to an article in newspaper USA Today, this is because in an economic downturn, the $8 billion-plus games industry preferred to keep titles moving out the door and onto the PCs people already owned.

Now, Doom and Myst are ideal candidates to pull gameplay and visuals - and by default, the hardware - to a new level because they inhabit a world of their own in terms of consumer loyalty and fanaticism.

PC-makers are betting there are an awful lot of gamers who are sitting in front of three-year-old machines and need just this sort of nudge to commit to a new PC purchase.

But it's not just PCs that might see an uptick through the gaming habits of the big, grown-up boys and girls - those with platinum Visa card discretionary incomes.

According to the current issue of Forbes, big digital projectors might have a market beyond corporate PowerPoint presentations and conference sales pitches.

Mr Scott Harker, chief executive of InFocus, the world's leading seller of digital projectors, is beginning to promote their use as the ultimate in home gaming screens. As Forbes puts it, "Harker's grand plan is to get the couch potato lurking inside every road warrior to buy a second projector for the home."

The magazine chronicles how California software designer Mr Scott Bonds did exactly that after using one of the screens at a work party for showing films and playing games. Next thing he knew, he'd bought his own $5,000 projector with an 84-inch, wall-mounted screen. His kids must be the most popular in the neighbourhood.

And while waiting in an airport lounge early this week, I ended up chatting with a Dell executive about these crossover uses of hardware once intended solely for the business market. He pointed out that Dell offers three digital projectors, and one can guess that the PC market giant would love nothing more than to see demand take off for these items. Think of the opportunities for cross-selling across Dell's product range.

And all of this made me recall a comment I heard from an Irish telecommunications executive recently, who argued against the need for offering home internet users broadband internet connections faster than one megabit per second. "Do we really want to become a nation of gamblers and gamers?" he asked, citing two of the popular ways in which countries that have mega-bandwidth, such as South Korea, utilise their big internet pipes.

Well, the fact is, online and offline, we already are a nation of both, with one of the highest per-capita computer gaming markets in the world. Gaming is big business, bigger than the US film industry, with the largest market slice being the over-35s with deep pockets, not teenagers on an allowance.

That's no real surprise, when you think about it - thirty-somethings were the first generation to grow up with arcade games, gaming consoles, computer games - and a home PC. Gaming is what breathed life into the home computing market in the first place (and promises to do the same for the phone industry).

So, scoff not. Things are always much more interrelated than you think, and healthy entertainment ecosystems have the tendency to pump money into places we forget are associated with them, like the PC market.

klillington@irish-times.ie

Karlin's tech weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/