id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms [Oct 07, 2011, 9:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," getting answers from id on the topic, who express frustration with problems that were largely caused by driver issues. Along the way they also address how the game being designed for consoles holds back the PC edition. "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," John Carmack tells them. "We chose the latter." He also bluntly addresses why this makes sense for id (emphasis Kotaku's):
"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
Fibrocyte wrote on Oct 8, 2011, 06:00:
So Carmack innovates like crazy and is probably the most influential figure in FPS games ever (and graphics technology in general) and because of one game that was primarily made to make his company some money he's now a quack?
It's a "What have you done for me lately?" kind of thing. No one disputes that his past accomplishments helped pioneer gaming as we know it, but in light of his attitude displayed here it seems obvious that he is no longer relevant to PC gaming's future. And his flippant attitude towards creating a decent working product simply because the market for it is smaller smacks of unprofessionalism and arrogance. So yeah, "a quack" sounds about right.
His attitude towards the PC platform is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course your market will be smaller on the platform for which you make inferior, barely-working products.
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