Disclaimer, I know I am reporting a news story that isn't really positive. But I thought it would lead to a good debate as to John Cormack's points. Please don't shoot the messenger, I would love to see Carmack's opinions discussed in a civil and intellectual manner!
John Carmack, id Software’s founder and chief technological officer has always been a huge supporter of PC content and PC gaming. His company created the famous Doom and Quake titles which rocked the PC world, they also produced games for PC almost exclusively sometimes later porting their titles to video game consoles. But the priority has always remained PC, until now.
It would appear that John Carmack no longer sees PC and computers as the best vehicle to get his content to the market. A recent interview about how id created Rage for consoles first and later ported to PC was a mistake would have lead many to believe he was still an avid PC enthusiast. After seeing his latest talk about PC and consoles (The one the threads about) it would appear that while John still values PC and sees it as the best development platform to ensure the product comes out the best way possible. PC is no longer viable as the main market for id's software.
His words indicate PC is now the last priority when it comes to sales and marketing. "We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games" adding "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." He goes on to say to "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,"
In the end Carmack appears to be planning on supporting all gaming platforms in the future but the emphasis will be placed on console versions with the PC versions taking second thought as a last priority!
Do you agree with Carmack's views? Do you think he should have thrown his hat into consoles along time ago and is too late to the party? What do you think of his flip flop statements in regards to PC, says he supports PC completely around E3 then completely changes his tune only months later?
-JC7
"In God We Trust - In Games We Play " - Joel Reimer
