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.

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).

OK, OK, I made up the chinchilla.

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.

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.

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.