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."
Zuckuss wrote on Oct 8, 2011, 10:29:
What game devs always fail to realize is that it's PC gamer's wallets that fund the tech evolution that they are able to put into consoles. If we weren't upgrading every 2 years, consoles would suck that much more.
True, and the fact is that even when Blues runs stories about how Valve and EA both, in recent weeks, have gone on record stating that the PC--not the console--is their overall chief revenue driver, some people are so conditioned to thinking that "PC gaming is dead" that they ignore these public statements and continue to support their weird console biases in their posts.
It depends on the publisher and on the developer as to "which platform" is their largest revenue driver. For some it is consoles, for others it is iPhones/Android phones, and for still others it is, and always has been, the PC.
It is well known that I cannot err--and so, if you should happen across an error in anything I have written you can be absolutely sure that *I* did not write it!...;)
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