John Carmack: PC Is Not the "Leading Platform" for Games

[adamtm]

I think you forgot the part where those figures are based on Amazon sales figures and nothing else. Judging the future of game sales based on Amazons sales figures and nothing else is idiotic. Amazon sales are not representative of the entire gaming industry. It is kind of like saying PC gaming is dead because it makes up such a tiny portion of Gamestops total profits.

Might i offer a different source: http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/04/19/hear-that-knocking-sound-its-pc-gaming/

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

Exactly, id were great. Were, it seems they really dropped the ball hard here.
At my college we have a Compyer Games Development course that we offer and all the students in it for all different years are all avid PC gamers.

I asked them if any of them played or bought Rage. 3 said they got it, and none of them could run it. Many of them don't know any other id games because they're so young.

This has already marked id as a second rate console hugging developer to them sadly.

Are you sure its because they are young and not because they dont give a rats ass who develops what game and instead care about if it is actually good or not.

John Carmack, your argument is FLAWED !

http://www.megagames.com/news/nvidia-pc-gaming-revenue-will-surpass-consoles-2014


take that in your Friggin' Face !

I think you forgot the part where those figures are based on Amazon sales figures and nothing else. Judging the future of game sales based on Amazons sales figures and nothing else is idiotic. Amazon sales are not representative of the entire gaming industry. It is kind of like saying PC gaming is dead because it makes up such a tiny portion of Gamestops total profits.

True, but you will agree that Carmack isn't Truth itself neither...

 

[The Lunatic]

Ya know, there's a big difference between "Not the prime platform" and "Doesn't deserve bug fixes and testing under certain software and hardware."

PC gamers are pretty okay with not being in the spot light, we've had it for years, but the moment you get lazy and deliver a sub-par console port, I think we're well within our right to be pissed off.

It's like an Xbox 360 game being sold on Blu-rays. If your own lack of consideration was the reason for a game to be unplayable.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Well that is true but that wasn't my argument was it battlefield 3 looks gorgeous on the xbox never mind the pc. I want quality as much as the next person but my argument was that making a game only a few people can play is pointless

Scalability is the solution. Battlefield 3 looks gorgeous on PC's but it can be played on a very medium machine and still look good. And it can be played on consoles with the same essential quality, just a little toned down. It's a quality game on all platforms and it earns money on all platforms. And even if the truth was that not a lot of people will be able to play it (but they will), people actually buy systems and upgrade PC's when a game like that is about to be released. And I bet that Battlefield 3 sales on PC will baffle everyone. The numbers will be higher than anyone's expecting.

 

[Dfskelleton]

Well, I guess I can't blame them. Considering that the PC market is no longer as huge as the console market, I wouldn't want to put millions of dollars into a game that only so many people will play either.
Unfortunately, this means that Id has to try and appeal to the console market now. Well, I guess "Fun" is now completely out of the question. It's a cold day in hell when Id games stop being fun.
I'm off to go play Doom.

 

[Laxman9292]

And now every unreasonable PC gamer is going to ***** and moan that Rage wasn't developed for their one of a kind $1.5k rig but rather for standardized gaming rigs that are used by about 100 million people in the world. Why would id cater to you rather than to consoles. Besides, fps on consoles are stable and really what the PC has over consoles is graphics.

And Carmack is right. Look at minecraft, it looks like we went back in time graphics-wise, but no one cares then. PC elitest need to stop swinging their raging hard ons for their superior processing power and realize that they are a minority and are not as important as they think they are.

 

[ph0b0s123]

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," he said. "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.

Fiat don't make as much money off Ferrari's as they do their other car models so using the same logic you should see Ferrari's not being made very well. Oh that's right you don't see that. That's because Fiat know that their sports car division, even though not as profitable as other car divisions, are important in generating innovation and prestige.

And yes I just compared PC's to Ferrari's. PC's are the sports / super cars of the computing world. They are a niche market but manufacturers still realise how important they are to the market as a whole.

 

[theonecookie]

You know what the funny thing is making a super high end game for super high end rigs would send you out of business a lot quick because you limit your target audience to some silly low figure like .5% but you know common sense is lost on people who buy such machines

Actually you'd be suprised as to how many people have high end machines specially since you don't know everyone on the planet and quite a lot of my friends have high end machines that cost them as little as £900-800 and that build can manage today's games and the amount of people that can afford those parts.

I am a console and PC gamer and i'm not going to pull an imaginary figure out of my ass no offense to you but i wouldn't try doing that again unless you go out and check to make sure your data is right before making an assumption.

OT: I do like Rage quite a bit having played it on the 360 and i do indeed feel for the PC players suffering the launch release fiasco but id claiming PC is no longer important is an obvious statement from a company that has clearly failed even achieving a simple goal that many before them have at least accomplished.

Since it's now proven that id cannot live up to even making a decent PC port they should just honestly own up that they can't finish or do the job to their expectations and just focus on console gaming instead and let other decent companies tend to PC gaming.

You sir are being called out right this instance. You have the audacity to call me a idiot for pulling figures out of my arse and then go to provide no evidence of any sort to prove me wrong whiles pulling facts out of your own arse you want fact

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

the fact the your average pc has a 2.6 duel core speaks volumes and looking in more detail we can see high end rigs make up about 25% of all pcs now if we assume that the pc hold,s a 33% share of the total market(can't find any hard figures feel free to correct me) your looking at a total of about 9% of the total market which is not a huge amount compared to people who own midrange pc's and consoles

You missed my point didn't you and i also said no offense so thank you for reading everything and just checking only with Valve and no i'm not in this little data figures battle you wish to start for a debate just an fyi

Why would you call me out on it if you don't want to argue? But if you want to leave it there fair enough

You know what the funny thing is making a super high end game for super high end rigs would send you out of business a lot quick because you limit your target audience to some silly low figure like .5% but you know common sense is lost on people who buy such machines

Yeah, they'd go out of business if they make quality games. Last time I checked Battlefield 3 wasn't a PC exclusive and yet it's oozing with quality. Same thing with a lot of other multiplatform games.

Well that is true but that wasn't my argument was it battlefield 3 looks gorgeous on the xbox never mind the pc. I want quality as much as the next person but my argument was that making a game only a few people can play is pointless

A high-end PC is nearly ten 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.

This basically translates to

we know PC's are the best, but PC gamers want high quality products that we choose not to make. We would rather be lazy and make games for inferior systems because people who play on those systems don't seem to care. And we're also ignoring Valve's business practice because they make money on PC by creating high quality games, that we, as I said before, don't intend to make. Long live mediocrity!

Guess who's going out of business soon.

You know what the funny thing is making a super high end game for super high end rigs would send you out of business a lot quick because you limit your target audience to some silly low figure like .5% but you know common sense is lost on people who buy such machines

I love that everyone only focuses on the high end with these discussions. Fact is if the highend is more powerfull so is the mainstream of PC's as well. That is the mainstream of pc's are powerfull enough that they could support AI and other game mechanics that console could notn So it is not just the top 5% as everone tries to make out and therefore the lack of market is rubbish.

Calling bullshit right there. While it is true that even a mid-range pc out strips consoles the fact is that the average mainstream PC at the moment I'm willing to bet is a bout 3-4 years old and wasn't top of the range when it was new so the power gap you talk about is over played to the extreme

If you cut these people out as well as both primary consoles you limit your target audience to about 10% at best of the total player base so you have increased cost and lower sales from a business point of view that's a bit dumb when your putting millions on the line

Also what AI and game mechanics do you have in mind the AI is fairly light weight as the needs for processing go and game mechanics tend to be limited by controls not power (the only thing i can think of is maybe someting to do with time travel that renders multiple time lines at once)

Right where to start. First on your statement about 'average PC's' vs consoles in power. The 'average PC's' you are talking about are not PC's that are being used to run the games we are talking about here, like Rage. So they were never part of the PC gaming market in the first place, so losing them makes no difference. The average gaming PC, which is what we are really interested in, is a couple of times more powerful that consoles.

About the idea that excluding current consoles owners and very low end PC's is a bad idea. I disagree, in the short term it is not great for your bottom line. In the long term though it is great as you already have titles for the next gen of console to play. You also have driven desire / interest (or whatever the economic term is) for the next generation of console with killer apps that are ready to go at launch. Rather than having new hardware being launched followed by a period of people not know what to do with it and a lack of killer titles. This is what happened in previous generations where PC titles that could initially only be run on PC's, enthused console owners into getting the next gen as it could finally run those titles only PC's owners could play at that point.

Next is the idea that AI does not need much processing power. I think you have got the cart before the horse here. AI takes up little processing power at the moment as it cannot use more due to, certainly on consoles, that power being needed to run graphics etc... Hence why most games are generally seen to have very ropey AI. For better AI, more processing power is needed.

As for the idea that better game mechanics are not helped by more processing power. All you need to do is take the example of Battlefield 3, if not all Battlefield games that have been multi-format. Why do you think it is that the PC versions can always accommodate more players in on-line matches (64 vs 24)? Also going back to your first point, this mechanic of allowing more players to play together is open to all PC's that can run the game, i.e the whole PC gaming market can use a mechanic that consoles cannot, not just the top 10% of the market. QED......

I made a comment about the average gaming machine just above your post Backed it up with evidence and everything the fact is that higher end machines are about 25% of all gaming pcs and about 10% of all mainstream gaming it's still a considerable drop and judging valves statistics on the "average" pc the powergap is not as large as one would imagine the only real major difference is in the amount of ram 512mb compared with 4GB but the fact is consoles can play the latest games with some quality make something a console cant play and your cutting out at big chunk of pc gamers to

On the point of AI i don't think its that devs cant do anything its that they don't want to do anything I cant remember one game this gen that has had praise for its AI where we used to get that last gen Half life 2 for instance and that ran on the old xbox all I'm saying is that the jump from last gen to this didn't produce anything new on the AI front so I don't think power is the issue although I would like to be wrong on this one

and lastly I will say you have a point with battlefield 3 having more people online and it being down to the pc platform generally being better but that's got less to do with out right power and more to do with pc having a better online system dedicated servers and what not peer to peer on xbox can barely handle 16 players but I will also say that some of the mps would have to take a graphical hit to be big enough to support 64 players but I wouldn't say its impossible if you improved the online system

Long post is long

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Love to see PC fanboys now claim that ID is over and done for for speaking the truth. No one cares about idiotic PC only gamers anymore. Grow up kiddys, or go suck on Valves dick some more. Your last little bastion for a PC market.

And that's all you came here to say, you just came here to pick on another faction of the gaming community without actually posting anything to do with this topic?.

Seems like a waste of your time to me.

 

[sturryz]

I like how most of the people in game development who say things that don't make any sense are has beens who have failed in the gaming industry.

 

[RA92]

Love to see PC fanboys now claim that ID is over and done for for speaking the truth. No one cares about idiotic PC only gamers anymore. Grow up kiddys, or go suck on Valves dick some more. Your last little bastion for a PC market.

Why hello there, you seem like a pleasant person.

OT: Well, off to get Red Orchestra 2 then. That's been patched up nicely last I heard.

 

[TotalHobNob]

Well me no buy rage for pc now. I really wanted to play this,but if you treat pc gamers like second hand citizens regardless of market dominance backlash ensues. Driver issues okay fine, but what I'm saying is don't be a dick.

 

[Wicky_42]

So, because PC isnt the leading console, he cant be bothered to make a port that runs well? Good to know not to buy ID games in the future.

Yeah :/ Amazing when taken with:

How can CDProjeckt Red which is a tiny company manage to pull off a great selling game like the Witcher 2, and then work on how to get it on consoles without sacrificing any quality.
Not to mention Valve and their non-stop hits.

Carmack himself said that it's the way it should be here, and they made mistakes focussing on consoles.
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=23760

So how, how did they manage to work on Rage this long and only come to the conclusion this late into the process and then still release and sell a broken game.

 

[theonecookie]

Well that is true but that wasn't my argument was it battlefield 3 looks gorgeous on the xbox never mind the pc. I want quality as much as the next person but my argument was that making a game only a few people can play is pointless

Scalability is the solution. Battlefield 3 looks gorgeous on PC's but it can be played on a very medium machine and still look good. And it can be played on consoles with the same essential quality, just a little toned down. It's a quality game on all platforms and it earns money on all platforms. And even if the truth was that not a lot of people will be able to play it (but they will), people actually buy systems and upgrade PC's when a game like that is about to be released. And I bet that Battlefield 3 sales on PC will baffle everyone. The numbers will be higher than anyone's expecting.

While I wouldn't what to downplay the importance of scale ability god knows me and my junk rig depends on it but I think battlefield 3 will show what a difference a competent Dev team makes because at the end of the day somebody put alot of work in to this running on older and mid-range machines xbox and ps3 included So i hope this does sell loads more than people are expecting because at the end of the day it looks like a quality product

 

[Braedan]

PC doesn't pull in the most sales, so fuck them?

I'm mostly a PC gamer, and I'm under no delusions that we're 3rd place in AAA game sales, but that doesn't mean fuck it let them suffer because we only make you 100 million, not 300 million dollars a year.

Asshole.

 

[BaronOfStuff]

-10: Respect

Shit Carmack, then what?, the iOS being the greatest platform ever?.

For a moment I interpreted that as Icon Of Sin. Derpderpderp.