How Console Stagnated the Art and Business of Gaming

[Neil]

We submitted this to Gamasutra yesterday.  However, since it is relevant to stereoscopic 3D gamers, we thought we'd get this published here as well.  Share your comments below: does this logic hold water?

Last July, AMD made an announcement that they saw a 40% drop in profits due to soft markets in China and Europe.  While Nvidia’s stock has been doing better, the real credit goes to the increasing popularity of their mobile chipsets more than anything else.  Intel could also be showing stronger performance.  Setting economic weaknesses aside, why are people spending less on upgraded graphics cards and faster processors?

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[cybereality]

Yeah, totally agree. There is so much potential on the PC that is not being taken advantage of. Not just with the graphics, but especially with peripherals. I'd like to see more game developers supporting stuff like the Razer Hydra, Novint Falcon, 3rd Space vest, and all the other unique peripherals the PC platform has to offer. Not to mention the Oculus Rift. Huge potential there.

[android78]

I think some of my comments in the thread 'Why PC is a Wasted Opportunity' are relevant here, but also wanted to point out that the reasons why it isn't so feasible for game developers to develop for the PC are more then just piracy:
1. Piracy - This is obviously an issue and you have mentioned it.
2. Consistent user experience - It isn't fair to have competitive games where there can be a huge advantage due to someone having a better rig then yours. Consoles offer the same specs for all.
3. Ease of development - similar to 'consistent user experience', the developers know exactly what they are developing for, so can know at all points how much memory they can use, how many graphics streams can be handles, how many CPU cores are available, etc. This means they can focus on utilizing all of it all of the time.
4. Greater market segment - If you look at the sales of cross platform games on PC vs consoles, (be it due to piracy on pc or whatever) the PC is a very small percentage of (most) games sold. Why would developers limit potential revenue?

I think that games these days aren't so held back by the actual technical requirement to run them, but it starts to become a very costly exercise to generate all the art to make the most of even the lower speced consoles. You have to remember that doubling of texture resolution, or adding finer bump, specular highlights, tessellation, etc all require extra time for creating the artwork for every single object in the world. And if you have a single object which has less details, all of a sudden it stands out like a sore thumb. The big cost of developing a game obviously is going to be people, so to get the most bang for your buck, you need to be able to hire as few people as possible (lower resolution) to sell to as many people as possible (cross platform).

So, when it comes to the idea of pushing forward the 'Art and Business of Gaming', I think that the consoles haven't really reduced this as it has made gaming more accessible to more people (do you think there would be kinect, rockband, etc if there were no consoles?) which has expanded the market. It may slow the pace at which the technology increases, but constant upgrading does nothing but create waste... waste of money and resources for every graphics card/MB/processor that will either end up in land fill of sitting in a box in your garage until someone else sends it to landfill.

I tend to look at this the other way around, that there is too much potential for consoles (mainly in the peripheral space) that isn't being taken advantage of. They are capable, but held back by the parent companies.

[Chiefwinston]

Well the PC games I've bought have typically been horribly buggy. Not exceptable to me to have to patch an off the shelf game to play it. So the PC industry really should look at the damage they have done to themselves in some ways.

[android78]

Well the PC games I've bought have typically been horribly buggy. Not exceptable to me to have to patch an off the shelf game to play it. So the PC industry really should look at the damage they have done to themselves in some ways.

I don't know that the PC games are really any buggier then console, but there is more chance that you have an incompatibility or that the bug will cause an issue. There is also the problem of non-optimized OS which are designed to do anything, not just a platform for launching your games.

[cybereality]

I have played a great deal of PC games over the years and I would not call them buggy at all. Occasionally you have issues, sure, but they are usually fixed pretty quickly.

[Chiefwinston]

Quake I and II were horrid on the first days of release. I am refering to first days of release. 2 months later there usually have the games finished through updates. From then on everyone buying is probably fine. First day releases have disappointed me on many occasions.
Cheers

[Chiefwinston]

I should note that I did get those games fired up in spectacular 3D. I built a very expensive rig at the time just to run quake 2 in 3D- loved it. The rail gun is my favorite gaming weapon of all time.

Cheers

[cybereality]

Well I usually buy games on sale months (or years) later so I probably just miss all the day one troubles.

[Zloth]

Uhhhh... no. Developers are not going to take advantage of everything the PC has to offer most of the time. That's nothing personal, it's just business. Until the developers think the sales boost from putting in nice, modern features like good stereoscopic 3D or tesselation will come back to them in sales, they aren't going to do them. (Well, OK, maybe one or two just for the art of it - these are human beings, after all, not money making robots.)

The truth of the matter is that console game sales dwarf PC sales. That's starting to get less true here at the end of a console generation but, come the PS4, you'll be hearing all sorts of shouts about how the PC platform is dead. Asking developers to take advantage of features that only a portion of the smallest market can use is like spitting into the wind.

We need to remember what the gamer market is really like. Do you know what the reaction was to the news that Sony and Microsoft are coming out with new consoles? Excitement about the prospect of better games to come? Nope. The most common reaction was OUTRAGE! Basically: "I don't want to have to pay another $500 just so I can get slightly better graphics." That's not the economy talking, that's just values. These people would much rather spend money on other things. There's a lot of ignorance talking, too, in the perception that the new generation will just give a small graphics boost. But that comes from the fact that people aren't willing to spend the time to find out how games work.

Though now the whole client/server "cloud" gaming thing is starting to come back. I think that technology is really going to turn everything upside down. With cloud gaming the developers aren't making a game that is supposed to work on PC and all the consoles. They are making a game that works on hardware of their own choosing! There are a lot of good and bad aspects but I honestly think this whole debate is going to become moot over the next decade or so.

[Dom]

I see the point that most PC games are converted from a consoles structure and since consoles are considered older the graphics are worse in textures and animation. I guess when some new consoles come out then they might be able to port PC games to consoles or console games to PC.

I heard people complaining when there was a PC game converted to console too.

Its funny though, Everyone saying how Battlefield 3 has the best graphics and are spending thousands to get it running at 60fps or higher. lawl I don't even see that it has real good graphics compared to even Farcry 2 or Dead Island. Its forsurely not mind blowing animation and textures.

Most people that play games for a living are usually over swept by even games like SuperMario Bros where a cartoon is the best thing in the world to watch and seems lively and dope. Its also a state of mind and if you can dumb yourself down games like minecraft can be a freaking good time.

Also the artists might hold back from their dev team because just "Maybe" they are'nt really interested in making a zombie game or killing/terrorist game ect... so they give the cheapest results and make their salary easy measy.

And about the PC games piracy is that its so simple for all the poor folks to "download" free hacked retail games even "windows OS" and have a full blown pirated computer because they don't steal from the "stores". Now its holding back the devs who want to make things nice and pretty and get money. I guess a computer 3d artist person who wants to get 1 million dollars for helping on a video game and that game gets pirated lots so they only get like 50000 dollars gets pretty mad.

I'd say consoles have the best and greatest selection of games though. PC is just a scientific afterthought more for nerds like me who can wait a week to play a game for 30 minutes if its like this or be enhunched into it for a year straight.

[mbloof]

Ahh, I remember the time when we HAD to upgrade our CPU/GPU every year to even THINK of playing the latest release! Those were the days.

I turn my gaze away in disgust each time I view a PC game titles 'minimum requirements' and one or more of three items are there: WinXP, DX9, 256MB video card. Yuck! Its not 2005 anymore!

Why spend big bucks on a modern i7 with a (or dual) top of the line video card(s) when PC rescued from a recycle center would work almost as well?

Part of the key word at work here is "almost".

I also have a PS3 and after suffering through ME2 on it I bought ME3 for my PC gaming rig! Between the screen tearing and 'go get a cup of coffee' map load times on the PS3 I could not imagine playing the sequel on the same platform. (granted, other titles perform acceptably well on the PS3)

The underlying 'problem' we face are the numbers. While dedicated gamers will always be looking for the next better thing the installed base of any one of: Xbox360, PS3 and WinXP powered PC's so far out number modern PC gaming rigs that studios/publishers can't ignore them.

The simple fact is that the #1 competitor of the PC is the PC! Outside of gaming my 2001 (AGP video bus) vintage XP box can do pretty much everything that my more modern boxes can do except run Vista/Win7/Win8 or modern games. I read once that it is estimated that over 50% of 'corporate America' is using 7-10yo hardware and (surprise!) WinXP (and even Win2000 - 12 years later!).

Our games won't improve until the Consoles improve. Let us PRAY that Microsoft puts a 4core CPU with 4GB of RAM coupled to a single or dual modern GTX6xxM (or similar AMD) GPU that has at least 1MB if not 2MB of dedicated video memory (per GPU).