Dev wrote on Feb 12, 2012, 13:44:
Orogogus wrote on Feb 12, 2012, 12:31:
Being pushed farther and faster ase development teams.
That assumes that money isn't being REDUCED for the PC market to take it away and put it into console market instead. Which is my argument, that game publishers (and thus devs) have focused spendinsumes that there's a comparable amount of money being sunk into game development, which might not be the case if the income streams from the consoles vanished. That the current PC gamer market is large enough on its own to support AAA games and their largg on consoles, taking it away from PC.
The current PC market on its own currently can support PC exclusive AAA games (see starcraft 2, civ V, etc). However, most big games like skyrim aren't PC exclusive. The devs make it lowest common denominator like dx9 because its cheaper when doing multiplatform, and then they throw in a few extra graphics options for PC (if you are lucky). That game is a prime example of exactly what I'm talking about.
Those two AAA PC-only games don't push the GPU the way that Skyrim or any dozen multiplatform games do, though, and are a counterargument against the supposition that PC hardware would be pushed further without consoles. The evidence suggests that PC developers would broaden their markets towards an even lower denominator instead of delving further into the niche crowd that actually installed a video card in their PC.
What recent high profile AAA games were PC only? S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which apparently didn't do well enough to safeguard funding for its developer (and is now going multiplatform). I Googled upcoming 2012 PC exclusives and came up with this link:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/121/1216513p1.html . Nothing looks like it's pushing significantly more polygons that the consoles.
It's just generally hard to believe that there's so much money in high-end PC exclusives, yet every single developer and publisher has opted not to exploit it, and most of the big titles that used to be PC-only (e.g. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Crysis, Battlefield, Witcher) have gone multiplatform. If it were otherwise, then shouldn't genres still centered on the PC -- strategy games, mostly -- have seen their visuals surge past shooters? No one's tried to outdo the scope of Total Annihilation, for example. Dawn of War looks nice, but not stunningly so.
This comment was edited on Feb 12, 2012, 15:55.