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."
Bhruic wrote on Oct 8, 2011, 13:19: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.
A common complaint, but not one based in reality. Everyone likes to pull the "big bad company" line, but it's a half-truth at best. Do companies want to make money? Of course, I doubt there are many, if any, companies that want to go out of business. They need money to survive. But (again with the false dichotomies), it's not an "either/or" situation. It's entirely possible to both want to make money, and care about your customers.
Caring about your customers tends to bring you money, too. People don't spend money on something they think doesn't care about them.
But you can't care about every single individual customer. Sometimes caring for a certain group just isn't possible because you only have so much time and money. Other times you make decisions that don't turn out the way you'd hoped and don't have the resources to fix them.
There seems to be a notion that being a company means you have infinite money to hire infinite people.
Also, Carmack was saying this since the reveal. We had more than a few quotes from Carmack that said "the PC is far more powerful than consoles" that some people loved to quote, ignoring that he kept following that with "but we're having a much easier time getting 60 fps on the consoles."
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Music for the discerning:
http://www.deathwishinc.com
http://www.hydrahead.com
http://www.painkillerrecords.com
Music for the discerning:
http://www.deathwishinc.com
http://www.hydrahead.com
http://www.painkillerrecords.com
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