Though PCs have, for a LONG time, had the superior technology and number of games. For many it was an ease-of-use issue, because running PC games with the proper technology requirements was much more difficult than popping in a console game, knowing the requirements were built in. Steam and similar services make it easier to buy and run everything, and consoles are more and more like PCs now with their options, so there's less demand for the relative historic simplicity of consoles.
Probably 75% of my gaming, lifetime, has been on the PC. In any era, even when it lagged behind in sales, you could make a case that it was the best platform for gaming. Good to see the pendulum swinging back its way again.
I'm on the fence to say that PC is the best platform.
I'm 50-50.
I think console and PC are roughly equal. For instance, I like how with consoles, you buy a game and it works while with the PC, if it doesn't work, you can sometimes fiddle with it to make it work. If the game doesn't work on console, it's usually a long wait for the eventual patch while on PC, it can be a day.
There's pros and cons for both. I played equally. It all depends on what type of genre the game is and if I want to buy the game. If I don't, I usually just rent the game on console.
I'd say 70-30 Pc's. One of the main reasons, innovation and optimization that happens what every 10 months compared to the consoles 5 to possibly now a ten year span.
For example have you seen Rage? Read this..
At QuakeCon 2011, Carmack offered many technical insights of the development and differences between the three main platforms (PC, 360, Play Station 3, noting that it was not easy developing such an optimized engine to be able to smoothly run on consoles and still having the best artistically looking game on consoles. He also affirmed that the PC platform is as much as 10 times faster than the current generation of consoles.
PC's won't outsell consoles. What's going to happen is that consoles are just going to turn into PC's that you can't upgrade.
I prefer consoles to PC's because I like being able to spend 200 bucks on a system and play all the latest games for 10 years with absolutely no hassle. I can live with less impressive graphics, since all graphics look like shit to me, anyway.
__________________
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
PCs are much better in most comparisons be it hardware, game variety, graphics etc but the problem is their hardware is so diverse that often, old games become obselete a year or two down the line or some hardware does not run as well with some games, their a lot more complicated. Its nice to have a system like Blax said that will be able to run most of its games if not all with ease, buying a game that you know that unless theres a virus or technical fault involved should run every time since the system to system is more or less the same. However theres only so many games I like on consoles, so I spend a lot more time on PC.
I am a PC player and I would never say the ease of use of a console outweighs the pros of the PC, e.g. having more of my favourite games on them (RTS genre) and MMOs, more accurate FPS gameplay and most of it being fully modable making even some of the less interesting games or older ones brilliant again thanks to the community but it is nice to just rely on the console sometimes.
Nice quote considering Rage is a very good example of the bad qualities of PC.
Look at the Rage Steam forums and news articles criticizing ID Software for releasing a buggy game. The majority of people are experience incredibly bad texture pop-in, horrible screen tearing and stuttering.
I have the game for the PC and those issues are true.
As I said before, both systems have ups and downs. It's based on preference.
As well, it's true that PC have innovation and such but there's a cost associated to that innovation. You need to buy the upgraded cards/CPU's to take advantage of them.
The problem is that PCs are hard to develop for and hard to make really good sales. While consoles are easy to develop for and they produce normal sales.
They are not hard to develop for. It's probably easier.
The problem is that developers need to take into account different hardware setups but companies like Nvidia and ATI/AMD are making it much easier to do so. That's probably the reason why we are seeing more and more companies releasing PC games.
But the idea that it's hard to develop a game on PC is wrong in my opinion.
I'd like to submit that they are all "personal computers" with just different operating systems and API.
Meaning, the lines being drawn are fairly arbitrary.
With consoles, you still do not get stable API throughout the life-cycle (these days...back in the days of NES and Sega, you did). Sure, it's more stable than PCs...but you can pretty much stick with a certain version and not worry about it not working for a few years.
I see it all blending. The PS3 is practically a linux box. It's like an Apple version of a Linux Box (locked down).
I guess I never minded the fiddly bits of getting PC games to run without hassle. I was the kid messing with source files to import my own music into games and tweak damage modifiers, well before games had decicated mod communities. But for others, it's traditionally been a legitimate gripe.
Yeah, I like how if something doesn't work correctly there is somebody on the Internet that knows how to fix usually.
For instance, there's problems in Rage about blurry textures. People figure out how to unlock higher rez textures and stop from the extreme pop-up by messing with the config file (or in the case, creating a cfg file).
You can't do that on consoles but unlike consoles, you sometimes can get a problem that not a lot of people have and there is no fix for it and because your one video card is not working with the game, your pretty much ****ed. It happens a lot with older games. You never have the problem with consoles.
KMC Community Forums
Oct 5th, 2011 12:53 PM
