Realizations

Ever come to the conclusion about something while not really thinking about it? I did just yesterday. I realized that my current PC might well be the last PC I ever buy. Sure I might still upgrade it a couple of times but what do I need more power for in my PC? Games. Now given the next generation of consoles all do some fine resolutions with some astounding graphics and, hopefully with wireless, support some keyboards and mice why do I want to continue playing games on my PC. Currently strategy, RPGs and FPS are all that I really play on my PC. Now FPS are already ported to consoles and the line-up for the next generation consoles suggests this practice will continue. I'm quite certain that with a resolution capable of showing text clearly and the falling price of persistence storage to write save games it will be well within the interests of people who develop strategy games to produce for the console market, even including those hard-core games that wouldn't normally appeal to the console audience.

Of course game development is a moving target and though the next generation consoles seem impressive now, they probably won't compare to a PC when we are looking at the next console cycle. However I'm becoming less and less impressed with incremental graphics updates and I'm not sure that the possibility of doubling the resolution on my PC monitor would appeal to me when I could put that money into a HDTV instead.

So if I remove games from my PC, and I'm not saying with the ever improving market that this will hold true, that pretty much leaves game development as the only thing that keeps me on an upgrade cycle. If there is one thing that requires more power than games it is generally the tools that are required to build for that game. Whether or not I'll find my current PC good for this purpose or not remains to be seen. I suppose maybe I'll get into video editing one day and realize that I'll have to bump up my machine for that. For checking email, listening to music or writing a document though there is going to have to be a hard sell as to why it is worth my time to upgrade.