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

[samsonguy920]

I'm really confused at his argument here, since current consoles, including the PS3 are already generations behind what you can have with a PC.
Sounds more like Id got lazy and figured Rage was going to sell more on console anyway, so why bother making the little bit of extra effort to make for a smooth PC release. Considering the drivers are free, and Nvidia and AMD would both say thank you for the exposure, Id could have easily packaged the drivers to send with the PC game.
On the other hand, anyone playing PC games should know how to handle their PC and deal with it themselves and quit crying. By now, if you don't know that there are going to be hiccups with any new over-the-top game, then you need to just stick with your spreadsheet program and bottlefeed yourself with console games.

I feel the need to curb stomp someone.

Remember, The Dude abides. Might be a good time for some bowling.

 

[Mr. Omega]

Ok, I give you all the things you listed, but one.
"- They made an FPS from the ground up that was designed for the PC"
Yeah, a PC from 7 years ago. This would cut more ice if it used an API higher than DX 9.

Why is that necessarily a bad thing? So the graphics aren't the epitome of shiny, and it doesn't require a laundry list of specific parts to run. It's a good game, with all those features listed.

No, my pedestal feels pretty secure...

Ah, that explains a lot...

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."

Focus on consoles larger audience has deprived PC's of an "unquestionably" "better experience". Yeah, really don't see that pedestal going anywhere....

The guy's trying to suck up to the PC Gamers he screwed out of a decent experience by appealing to their egos. I know PC Gamers have big egos but you can't honestly tell me you're falling for that. It's a PR spin to try and divert blame. "Oh, we didn't do a lousy port job and just fuck up. It's all the console gamer's fault!"

 

[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.

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

My PC can handle BF3 on high settings at about 45fps (unoptimized beta). I played it on everything low, shadows medium (because medium shadows look exactly like ultra) and the visual difference is 0.004! The FPS difference however, is huge! So if you could play beta, you'll be able to play the final product with more fps. All of that wouldn't matter if the game was shit and if it was boring. But it's a lot of fun. That's how you're supposed to make a multiplatform game.

 

[scotth266]

The butthurt is palpable in this thread. As per usual, PC gamers are taking a perfectly legitimate statement, and misinterpreting it. Let's fact-check, shall we?

First off, the issue with the drivers themselves. From the Kotaku article:

Spoiler: Kotaku Driver Stuff, Bold Is The Important Bit

The chief issue with the current state of Rage on the computer, id says, is mostly one caused by the drivers that help the game interface with graphics cards made by Nvidia and ATI, something very frustrating for the perfectionists at id.
...
"Unfortunately, we have had video driver issues that have caused problems and frustrations with our PC fans. Everyone at id Software is very upset by these issues which are mostly out of our control. We are working with both AMD/ATI and Nvidia to help them identify and fix the issues with their drivers. We've had assurances that these problems are being addressed and new drivers will be available soon."
...
"The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$," he wrote. "We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions."

"We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn't help either.


(Bolded for emphasis)

In other words, his explanation is that the issues have been caused mostly by some sort of management miscommunication (the bad driver release). His statement about other titles is sort of confusing though, it would help if he clarified what he was talking about.

Carmack then said in his next sentence: "Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms." The way I see it, the use of the phrase "prime platforms" was referring to computers that should have been able to run RAGE perfectly.

However, considering the waves of PC fanboy hate the game has garnered, Kotaku wanted to clarify what he meant by "prime platforms":

KOTAKU:

I've noticed that among those people who aren't enjoying the PC experience, I wrote to the developers, the underlying issue seems to be one driven by expectations. People seemed to have been hoping that this would be a game that proved the value of owning a PC over a console. But instead they got a game that they feel cut some corners to level the experience between console and PC. Do you think that is a fair assessment? Does id still see the PC as the leading platform to make games for?

CARMACK:

"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," Carmack replied. "We chose the latter."

When it comes to multi-platform releases involving console/PC simultaneous releases, this is the flat truth. Carmack chose to make the game around console limitations, but took advantage of what the PC had to offer by making certain improvements:

CARMACK'S STATEMENT (CON):

The fact that id had already decided that they wanted Rage to run at 60 frames per second already removed one of the major things PC gamers look for in a title, he continued. That only left resolution, anti-aliasing, and texture streaming as things that a computer gamer might want to see look better than on a console.

So essentially, the game was designed to be mostly similar across all platforms, with mild improvements for the PC. PC gamers have been acting as if this were some sort of betrayal, just because ID made lots of PC games in the past. People make jokes about the "PC gamer master race" attitude a lot, but the automatic backlash from people assuming that "it was made to work on consoles, it must be shit" makes me wonder...

Now here's the kicker, the one that PC gamers are pitching a ***** about:

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "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. A high end PC is nearly 10 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. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."

Of course, the PC Gaming Master Race types have all jumped on this as Carmack meaning that PC gaming is bad or something. Ironically they're mimicking console fanboys (in this case, I guess they could be called platform fanboys) by immediately assuming that Carmack has "defected" to the console camp.

However, if you actually READ the whole comment, you can see the true point behind Carmack's statement: that the question of what is a "prime platform" is irrelevant, so long as enough effort is put into making the game. Carmack is saying he doesn't care about the "PC vs. Console" development wars, he just wants to make a good game.

Whether he managed to do that or not, I have no idea. I don't own RAGE, nor do I intend to get it at present (maybe at Christmas, if it's on sale). However, if the game itself (once it gets the driver patch) is actually good across all platforms, why is the issue of how it was developed so freaking important?

 

[Uber Evil]

Carmack needs to make up his mind. [http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=23760]

I like Rage, the shooting is fun. I am having the most fun I have had with a shooter in years, it's just that the texture buffering is quite noticable but I can deal with it.

You are on PC, right? Have you made a cache and a config file for it yet? Those worked wonders for me.

 

[Ragsnstitches]

"Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on," he continued. "A game built with a tenth of the resources on a platform ten times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
This here, is a reasonable standing... though I doubt some PC enthusiasts will likely let their pedestal be taken away from them.

No, my pedestal feels pretty secure...

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."

Focus on consoles larger audience has deprived PC's of an "unquestionably" "better experience". Yeah, really don't see that pedestal going anywhere....

Oh, okay... but you're missing his point, and mine. The market is in favour of consoles and has been for a few years now. PC is still the pioneer of technology, but it's not the focus of the game market and consequently it's lost its top spot (probably a while ago) as a gaming platform. That's not to say it's dead mind you.

I'm not saying I agree with it, I just see it as a reasonable perspective. I also expect irate PC users to jump at this as some sort of indication that Consoles are ruining the industry or as some sort of bogus statement that PC is dead/dying or some such nonsense.

Face it, only a handful of developers/producers set the standard with PC these days, most build their games with the Xbox in mind, since it's the lowest spec. The few that I can think of (Valve, CD project, Blizzard, Relic etc,) have started to accept PC central business is not as lucrative as it once was and plan to incorporate consoles into their future projects (Valve is gearing steam for PSN, CD project are porting The Witcher 2 to Xbox, Blizzard are releasing Diablo 3 to consoles and Relic just released their first console game "Space Marine").

I don't personally think this is a result of consoles though (well, not as a fault of their own)... the ludicrous diversification of hardware and a ton of misinformation has long since crumpled PC's reputation. Fewer people could be bothered kitting out a decent PC, despite it not being so hard or expensive to do at the moment (what with the tech gap reaching a sort of plateau... which is what Carmack is suggesting).

PC is great for customisation and depth, but sadly it's not a straight forward affair... there is no real standard to hold to, just speculations (and mileage may vary) that fluctuate yearly. There is so many options to choose from and some of them come with insane price tags, a lot of which are hit and miss, that it isn't surprising how so many people almost abhor PC. Why bother with the research and effort of filtering hundreds and thousands of hardware permutations when you can get 1 of 3 consoles that entertain just as well.

Just for the record. I'm a PC gamer first and foremost... I have a PS3 with about 3 games, all exclusives. But I hold no allegiance to any platform and personally think Hardware companies have done the damage and not the consoles...

That was a rant I wasn't expecting to get into, sorry about that.

 

[D0WNT0WN]

Carmack needs to make up his mind. [http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=23760]

I like Rage, the shooting is fun. I am having the most fun I have had with a shooter in years, it's just that the texture buffering is quite noticable but I can deal with it.

You are on PC, right? Have you made a cache and a config file for it yet? Those worked wonders for me.

I am on PS3, it would be a miracle if I could get anything from the past 5 years working on this laptop of mine.

 

[harvz]

Here's an idea, if you don't want to work on making a decent port (with proper graphics options), don't release your shitty port and in particular, don't charge full price.

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

If it's such a dead platform why did you bother making a shitty port? Clearly you think the effort minimal as it was, wasn't worth the cost then you shouldn't have bothered it certainly would have been better for us pc gamers.

 

[I forgot]

Why do people think that because the PC is more powerful, it'll have better games. It won't and it's a waste of time making games for it because as Carmack here says, it's not the leading platform.

 

[TehMadness]

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

I think we can all agree that the true tragedy here is the fact that 1.78% of people on Steam still use Norton. The poor bastards.

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.

I can't help but feel that you've missed the point here somewhat. RAGE is released - is shit on PC (to none of my surprise at all) - and Carmack basically does a LOLHAT and flies away into the sky, raining shit down on consumers as he goes. It's not down to the high-end PC users feeling butthurt about losing out on some graphics.

Fix'd that for ya. Blizzard is now just milking their old franchises without bringing anything new to the table, with outrageous DRM to boot.

Slightly off-topic, but what the hell, he started this party. I think Blizzard's DRM is actually rather justified, considering what they're doing with the game. Hell, I'd have preferred them to have just left it out if it was gonna be that much of a problem, but as it is, it isn't at Ubisoft levels of 'lets fuck the consumer for fun!'.

As for the actual topic, Carmack is schizophrenic and always will be. The guy probably thinks he's in Doom or something. Given the state of most gamers' rage, I don't blame him for mistaking them for demons.

Still, the fact that id didn't make him apologise is a sore one, and coming out with a bullshit excuse like 'it worked when we used it' just doesn't cut it when millions of people are left with an inferior product.

But on the other hand; stop crying. It'll be fixed within days. Sure, they released a shoddy product, but THEY'RE GOING TO FIX IT. You might not be able to play it for a few days, but think of it as extra development time. Go back and Liberty Island one more time. You know you want to.

That said; poor show Carmack, poor show.

 

[Ken Sapp]

It would be one thing to say that the PC is no longer important if they had not released the game on PC. But to release it in a "broken" state is inexcusable. Considering that the game was programmed for five year old hardware in the case of the consoles there should be no issue making the graphics work correctly on a moderately up to date PC.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Er so? Its a platform that needs a tiny bit more work on the port than the others you work more on the port and release it, how hard is that for a master programmer? Apparently imposable ...

 

[II2]

I know a few people who have known or worked with Carmack in the past and his comments seem pretty congruous with his general personality and outlook:

- He is not a man who is terribly passionate about VIDEOGAMES; he's passionate about PROGRAMMING.

I don't think he's trying to cover his ass OR be incendiary, but rather is just an almost neutral party speaking frankly and calling it as a he sees it.

 

[RevRaptor]

Geez, no wonder company's are favouring consoles, the sheer amount of crap coming from the Pc users is insane. Look I'm a Pc player my self but it's got to be said console have a larger market and a more friendly user base.
It's really no surprise the developers are primary focusing on console sales. Consoles = easier development, more sales and less customer back lash.
It's the customer back lash that's the big one. If a company has to choose between two platforms of course they are going to choose the one with less bitching.

Look if you love Pc gaming then stop hurling the insults, it's not helping, get proactive. find a way to help in a positive fashion or watch Pc gaming go down the tube, it really is up to to the end user to find a way to support gaming they way you love it. If company's keep getting all this hate from the Pc crowd they are simply going to quit making pc games. It's already happened with some developers and if all the hating continues more and more of them are going to switch to consoles.

 

[Danceofmasks]

If you want goodwill, you offer a money back guarantee if people can't play your broken game.

The lack of accountability is the reason why some devs just don't give a rat's arse about releasing buggy shit.

 

[ph0b0s123]

"Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on," he continued. "A game built with a tenth of the resources on a platform ten times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
This here, is a reasonable standing... though I doubt some PC enthusiasts will likely let their pedestal be taken away from them.

No, my pedestal feels pretty secure...

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."

Focus on consoles larger audience has deprived PC's of an "unquestionably" "better experience". Yeah, really don't see that pedestal going anywhere....

Oh, okay... but you're missing his point, and mine. The market is in favour of consoles and has been for a few years now. PC is still the pioneer of technology, but it's not the focus of the game market and consequently it's lost its top spot (probably a while ago) as a gaming platform. That's not to say it's dead mind you.

I'm not saying I agree with it, I just see it as a reasonable perspective. I also expect irate PC users to jump at this as some sort of indication that Consoles are ruining the industry or as some sort of bogus statement that PC is dead/dying or some such nonsense.

Face it, only a handful of developers/producers set the standard with PC these days, most build their games with the Xbox in mind, since it's the lowest spec. The few that I can think of (Valve, CD project, Blizzard, Relic etc,) have started to accept PC central business is not as lucrative as it once was and plan to incorporate consoles into their future projects (Valve is gearing steam for PSN, CD project are porting The Witcher 2 to Xbox, Blizzard are releasing Diablo 3 to consoles and Relic just released their first console game "Space Marine").

I don't personally think this is a result of consoles though (well, not as a fault of their own)... the ludicrous diversification of hardware and a ton of misinformation has long since crumpled PC's reputation. Fewer people could be bothered kitting out a decent PC, despite it not being so hard or expensive to do at the moment (what with the tech gap reaching a sort of plateau... which is what Carmack is suggesting).

PC is great for customisation and depth, but sadly it's not a straight forward affair... there is no real standard to hold to, just speculations (and mileage may vary) that fluctuate yearly. There is so many options to choose from and some of them come with insane price tags, a lot of which are hit and miss, that it isn't surprising how so many people almost abhor PC. Why bother with the research and effort of filtering hundreds and thousands of hardware permutations when you can get 1 of 3 consoles that entertain just as well.

Just for the record. I'm a PC gamer first and foremost... I have a PS3 with about 3 games, all exclusives. But I hold no allegiance to any platform and personally think Hardware companies have done the damage and not the consoles...

That was a rant I wasn't expecting to get into, sorry about that.

This all depends on what you meant by 'pedestal'. Is it the 'pedestal' of audience / sales figures. Or the 'pedestal' of being a platform capable of delivering better gaming experiences than consoles.

If the first, then guess what, that was a pedestal I would never claimed to have sat on during my 20 plus year of gaming on the PC. I don't remember a time when PC's were out performing consoles in sales or audience. Which was always going to be the case with the easier access console gaming has, with lower price of admission in money and time to get playing. This was never a chip on my shoulder or something I though that had been lost. Don't know where this idea in the community has come from.

Now the second option for what you meant as 'pedestal' is what I will defend. And this is also what Carmack's comments support. And I do believe that it is the fault of the almost blinkered focus on consoles that means the PC is not able to deliver on it's potential of delivering better gaming experiences. This is something new with this console generation and it's booming sales figures, which have made the PC's look bad purely because they have not increased as fast, so are now deemed as not worth chasing.

Your idea that PC's are unpopular due to diversification is completely the opposite of reality. The PC has never been as consolidated as now. Now we only have two companies making gaming GPU's. One API of DirectX that they have to conform to, so no matter which you buy you know games will run. A while ago you had ATI, Nvidia, 3DFX, Mattrox, PowerVR and others all making cards with their own API's. You also could buy CPU's from Intel Cyrix, AMD and VIA. Now its just Intel or AMD. Oh and I'm aware that Rage is OPENGL, a standard that has not been used in a PC game for a while (which was probably the main cause of all these issues). So if anyone is causing diversification it's ID.

And the idea there are no standards to hold to. That's wrong as the PC has standards that are so good consoles have taken to using them as well, whether it be DirectX on 360 or OpenGL on PS3 and mobile devices. Not forgetting the PC hardware consoles are quite happy to incorporate.

So consoles have always had the highest popularity in gaming for the in the present, but the PC has always been the window into tommorow.

 

[Phoenix Arrow]

He's pretty much right, but this has to be awful PR. Everyone knows people use consoles more than PCs for gaming in this day and age, but to come out and say it like that is just ridiculous, particularly from a comany like id.

All we've learnt here is Cormack is still a total douche.