Jerykk wrote on Mar 23, 2011, 00:06:
Oh dear. What a terrible article. So many stupid points, I don't know where to begin.

1) Xbox LIVE is not going to lure PC gamers away from PC gaming. GfWL was MS's attempt to bring LIVE to the PC and it has failed horribly. PC gamers enjoy the freedom and flexibility that the platform offers and Xbox LIVE/GfWL represents the antithesis of those things. Also, PC gamers don't like paying for functionality that was previously and should always be free (like the ability to play games online).

2) The next batch of consoles will not support mouse and keyboard because developers won't want to deal with the balancing issues. The X360 and PS3 both support M/KB, yet UT3 was the only game to actually support it as well. There's absolutely no reason why this would change in the future.

3) The X720/PS4 will likely match or even surpass PC hardware at launch. However, that will only last for about six months before PC hardware regains the lead. The author claims that next generation games will all have AA but that very same claim was made about the current generation as well. In fact, Microsoft initially required that all X360 games run at 1280x720 and at least 2X MSAA. However, they eventually dropped those requirements because the hardware couldn't keep up. I expect no different from the next generation of consoles. Even if the consoles ship with powerful GPUs and CPUs, they will very likely skimp on the memory, as that has been the trend since... well, since forever. AA takes a lot of video memory so when developers inevitably start running into memory issues, AA will be the first thing to go.

4) The author seems to believe that next gen consoles will cost the same as current-gen consoles. That's highly unlikely, especially if they'll be as powerful as the author suggests.

5) PC gamers generally don't care about big-budget console exclusives. Halo, Fable and Gears of War all eventually came to PC and received little to no fanfare. This is because pretty much every big-budget exclusive is overrated and overhyped by platform fanboys. In addition, this generation of consoles saw tremendous growth in multiplatform development. The vast majority of games are multiplatform these days and the vast majority of those also appear on PC. In fact, the number of console games being ported to PC is far greater than it was 10 years ago and the quality of said ports has improved substantially.

The author of the article could have saved a lot of time by just saying that he's become more complacent in recent years and has put quality, performance and flexibility below convenience.