Sweeney: PCs Good for Anything... But Games [Mar 10, 2008, 9:11 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Unreal creator: Tim
Sweeney PCs are good for anything, just not games” on TG Daily is a Q&A with
the Epic CEO which, as the title of the article suggests, features some
negative comments about the PC as a gaming platform. This is actually just the
age-old complaint about PCs with integrated graphics, as he says that mainstream
PCs are not suited to gaming:
Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference [to more capable gaming PCs]. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that. Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x.
Actually I think he's just complaining that some retailers don't give a lot of info to customers, so somebody with little or no PC knowledge could go into a store and buy a cheap PC, expecting to play Crysis at full res on it.
I think he's a little confused though, because he thinks that anyone wanting to play online games wouldn't suffer from the same thing.
But overall, if you squint at it enough and look at it from a certain angle, he's raising a valid point. When some games developer designs the next high-end game, he doesn't know what my system is, and he needs to figure out the best level to pitch the game at - high end or low end? High end and the game will look awesome but you don't get the cheap-PC market.
To get a proper gaming PC can mean a lot of research and work up front, particularly for the non-geek, and that most likely does harm sales for a lot of PC games. People want to be able to plug in and go.
But the PC does have the advantage of variety - many games available on the PC simply have no viable counterpart on the consoles. Anyone think we'll ever see Medieval 2 on the 360? And often, when they do appear on the consoles developers and gamers find they have to compromise and battle with the controllers.
This comment was edited on Mar 11, 06:47.
I think he's a little confused though, because he thinks that anyone wanting to play online games wouldn't suffer from the same thing.
But overall, if you squint at it enough and look at it from a certain angle, he's raising a valid point. When some games developer designs the next high-end game, he doesn't know what my system is, and he needs to figure out the best level to pitch the game at - high end or low end? High end and the game will look awesome but you don't get the cheap-PC market.
To get a proper gaming PC can mean a lot of research and work up front, particularly for the non-geek, and that most likely does harm sales for a lot of PC games. People want to be able to plug in and go.
But the PC does have the advantage of variety - many games available on the PC simply have no viable counterpart on the consoles. Anyone think we'll ever see Medieval 2 on the 360? And often, when they do appear on the consoles developers and gamers find they have to compromise and battle with the controllers.
This comment was edited on Mar 11, 06:47.
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