Comments on: Platforms in Play

By: Ben Sizer

Ben Sizer — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 13:31:14 +0000

Brad Wardell’s article is flawed in several ways. the main one being that PC gaming exploded in popularity when game consoles were already well-established, technologically more advanced, and cheaper than the PCs of the age. These days the technological gap is reversed and the price gap narrowed, yet people predict the decline of PC gaming. Most of his points were far more valid in 1990 than they are today, and the market flourished. It’s quite odd. He is also totally wrong with the “difficulty in getting published” issue; you are far less likely to get published on a console unless you have a good track record. So maybe the average budget of PC games will drop a little but most developers won’t be able to make that migration.

Sophistication of console games is limited by technology too. (Although I won’t doubt that marketing can play its part.) Developers regularly complain about the amount of memory available to them on the X-Box, meaning they have to make numerous small areas instead of large sprawling ones, for example. And you already touched on the controller issue.

The gaming market is in trouble at the moment, but the developers who suffer the most are not the few who will be able to migrate to consoles. Instead, the industry is just going to have to mature in certain ways – such as using more shared code, and ending the abysmal reliance on patches rather than quality control – and adapt to the future.

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By: peterb

peterb — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 00:48:18 +0000

I meant to say something about mouse targeting, but “control schemes” probably deserves its own article.

The thing that fascinated me about the comments on Wardell’s article is the vituperative feeling expressed by some that games on consoles were _by definition_ less sophisticated than games on PCs. Which is stupid; a console is just a PC with less that can go wrong.

(I agree that games on consoles _have tended to be_ less sophisticated, but that is a marketing decision, not anything intrinsic to the technology. At least as of this generation).

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By: Eric Tilton

Eric Tilton — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 00:27:29 +0000

Part of it’s expectations (although I have the distinct impression that it’s possible to download patches via XBox Live if the game’s already setup for downloadable content); but part of it is everyone has the same box. I do OpenGL hackery on OS X, and it’s definitely easier when you know you only have one OpenGL driver to deal with, but oh, what blissful notion to know that if it works on your debug machine you’ll never ever ever hear from your QA department that there’s this one weird configuration with two monitors and a chinchilla where everything is drawing at 45 degree angles.

OK, OK, I made up the chinchilla.

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By: Nat Lanza

Nat Lanza — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 23:15:13 +0000

Another issue that Wardell’s article mentioned which I think is pretty important is patches.

When I go into the store and buy a PC game these days, I have no expectation that it’ll actually work out of the box, no matter what drivers I have on my PC.

I expect I’ll have to download and install some number of patches to fix all the bugs the game shipped with. If the game came out recently, there might not even be a patch yet. If I’m unlucky, there might never be a patch.

Consider Temple of Elemental Evil — it’s a good game, but it was largely unplayable for weeks after release because it shipped with so many hideous bugs. A patch eventually came out, but it didn’t fix all the issues. A second patch might have come out later, but by that point I’d stopped paying attention and just decided not to buy the game.

I don’t want to be an auxiliary QA tester for the game developer. I’d like finished product, and I generally can’t get that with PC games because of the expectation that everyone will just download patches.

This isn’t to say that console games never ship with bugs (KOTOR, for example, has some unfortunate game-corruption bugs in the XBox version), but it’s a lot less frequent. When I buy a game for my XBox or Gamecube, I can pretty much assume that it’ll actually function as designed.

That’s pretty powerful motivation for me. I spend enough time debugging programs at work. I don’t want to do it during my leisure time.

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By: Nat Lanza

Nat Lanza — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 23:08:32 +0000

Wow. Reading the comments in the Brad Wardell article you linked to was interesting. I’d forgotten just how angry some people get about the fact that others might prefer a different gaming system. Dozens of screaming rants about how stupid and terrible and childish consoles were, and how PC games were for intelligent people who could handle the complexity, etc, etc.

The best bit were the posters who tore Wardell apart for daring to say anything bad about PC games, declaring that he obviously didn’t know anything about gaming at all. ‘Cause, y’know, why would a professional PC game developer know anything about PC gaming?

More on topic, I’m in the same boat. I’ve been meaning to upgrade my gaming PC so it plays the whizzy new games for the last two years or so, and I’ve never gotten around to it. Every time I think about it, I end up spending the money on XBox or Gamecube games that I can actually play now instead of going through all the irritation of setting up and maintaining a new PC. I might finally get around to upgrading when Half-Life 2 comes out, but I bet I’ll actually just wait for the XBox version. It won’t be as shiny as the PC one and it won’t have the community support from mods, but it’ll just work.

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By: Eric Tilton

Eric Tilton — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 22:46:00 +0000

Amen. “It just works” applies both to the (ha) installation process (put in the disk), and the whole XBox live shebang. Frame rates are predictable and generally smooth, since there’s only one platform. And frankly, at the end of the day the last thing I want to do is still be using a mouse.

Plus of course, the surround sound system is out there, not in here .

I do miss my improved targeting precision with the mouse, but I seem to be getting better at it on the console.

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