PC gaming is dead-- long live PC gaming

[vlad321]

twesterm said:

Sorry for the late reply, been dreading reading and taking the time to respond to a long post (and I sometimes lost interest when I don't post in a thread for a while...)

Anyways!

Game development costs haven't risen because it's focused on consoles, it has risen because more is expected of developers.  You could actually argue that consoles are keeping costs down since if we were developing only for PC we would constantly have more and more powerful hardware to deal with and have to create better and better.

Yes, the industry is in a shaky place at the moment, but that really has nothing to do with PC or console gaming. 

I don't know if quality overall has fallen, it's just that right now games are a big risk and taking a leap of faith in game is big risk.  You can either make something original and out there or you can build what you know will sell.  You call things like Call of Duty the lowest common denominator because it's easy and that's fine, but it also allows more people to get into games.  I don't really like it either way, but it's what people like and it sells.    I'm really not sure what the complaint is.  I'm sure if it was shit-in-a-box and it sold bazillions I could see getting upset over it, but like it or not, it's a quality game that people want.

Costs are really high right now because some games just have infinite budgets and have set the bar unrealistacally high.  Killzone 3, FFXIII, and Gran Turismo 5 are great examples.  I won't say a word about their gameplay but just look at the games.  These all had infinite budgets where the developer got to take all the time they needed to make their game as good as possible (or at least as good looking as possible).  They release and they blow people away because they look amazing.

Now, every game must live up to those which most developers just can't do, or more specifically, they can't do with their budget, or even more specifically, they can't do with their budget and make something completely original.  That isn't the fault of consoles or PC gaming, that's just humans being visual beings.  If you look at two similar games side-by-side, you're going to take the one that looks better.

But I digress, that really has nothing to do with the topic.

What does tl;dr mean?

tl;dr means too long; didn't read, in case you didnt want to read the entire wall.

As I said before, I overwhelmingly agree. However there were such big jumps in gaming before as well. All of the sudden you didn't have a studio of 5 making Pac Man, you had a studio of 15 making Sonic, or Mario, or w/e. So there have been incrreases in budgets and everything every time gens would increment. Funny though, since there are no generatoins on the PC, the only people who pushed the envelope were the ones who could afford it. There never was the pressure to look like all the other games there is now. Hell, Civ 3 never came close to looking like any of the UTs, Quakes, etc. Because it didn't need to. Deus Ex as well, it didn't push the envelope on the graphics, it let someone else do so. Basically, with the PC the only ones who have a huge ne technology shiny games are the ones that have the budget to do so. With consoles everyone is forced to meet the basic graphic levels, which increases costs on games which shouldn't cost so much. Also don't forget all the marketing and thiings people spend, wasn't MW2 with a $150mil marketing budget, and only cost $50 to make?

As I said, theoretically all your points are correct, but for one reason or another, realistically you are completely wrong. I don't know why, I can jsut see that since 2005/6 when consoles became more pronounced and tried to get more PC games on them, the industry has been getting screwed.