id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms [Oct 07, 2011, 8:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," 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."
No matter how it's justified or rationalized, at the end of the day, the bottom line is that companies do not care about customers, they only care about profit. If good customer service means more money then they'd care more, or at least pretend to. No amount of lying or PR will change that fact that greed is the motivation. No company is immune to greed and no customer is protected from the fallout of it. Inferior hardware or not, console gamers have a love/hate approach to games, either they love it or hate it. PC gamers always have diverse opinions about, well everything. But the bottom line is companies don't care unless it actually affects them. So you can bend over and take it by buying and suffering or you can stand on a soapbox and boycott a game. Chances are that nothing will change, all you can do is try and hope to make an impact.
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