stroopwafel said:
Again it boils down to what kind of games you want to play. If you want to play strategy games, or old games or a lot more indies then PC is the platform of choice. However most people get excited over AAA releases and you're just lumping them all in the same category. The Witcher 3 is an AAA release and even CDPR admitted(probably one of the most PC devoted developers out there) that they wouldn't be able to make this game without the marketing incentives of consoles. PC gaming represents only a small part of the pie and in no way mandates 50 - 100 million dollar investments that they would never be able to recoup without versions of the game on consoles.
I think that's a rather disingenuous perspective. Planetside 2, FPS and MMO. PC exclusive, slowly making its way to the PS4 only because it was successful on the PC first.
Spore. Not what a lot of people were looking for, but PC exclusive, and very different to most other games out there.
99% of MMOs. WoW, DDO, LotRO, EvE - ect. Never would have even existed as a pseudo genre on consoles if not for the PC.
How about roguelikes and Dungeon Crawls? Diablo series & co would like a word.
MobAs? Started off as a mod for WC3, as many games do [Start of as mods that is], and is now one of the most profitable genres in gaming, whilst being free to play for most of its titles.
See, PC isn't just for weird indies and strategy games. PC plays every type of game out there, many of which simply don't exist on consoles in any meaningful way because - as you said, they're not AAA.
Not being AAA isn't a bad thing, however. Because we were talking about driving innovation. AAA is the antithesis of innovation. AAA is the "Re-release the same game 10 years in a row with a new skin" to PC gaming's diverse and varied gaming ecosystem. If your argument in support of innovation is AAA gaming and AAA budgets, then I'm sorry but its already failed.
Even Witcher 3, as amazing as the game is, isn't that innovative. It is simply a very well polished version of something that has been done a hundred times before. Its still a fucking amazing game, but its not new, its not innovative. It is at least iterative, but it is just a story-driven open-world adventure game in third-person. Sure, some of the biggest, most polished iterations of older games might need the budget of a console game, but don't let that be confused with innovation.
Since there is no single, dedicated corporation pushing games to sell their system PC versions of games also fall way short of advertising that is necessary to reach the public. No publisher would ever invest a shit ton of money in a game for a system that no corporation had a vested interest in. It is the reason why PC versions of AAA games are so often half-baked and/or are released like half a year later. Simply b/c the PC version is the lowest on the publishers priority list.
Again, this is actually another point in favour of innovation on the PC. Marketing and advertising it is well known focus on 'focus groups', and building games to those focus groups, which results in things like the Assassin's Creed series where the same damn game has been released probably 20 times now, just with a new skin and maybe 1 different gimmick each iteration, because you need to NOT innovate to be 100% certain that your game will sell enough to earn back your 50 million dollar investment. That budget isn't a blessing for innovation, its a curse, because you have to earn every cent of it back. As you say later, games are about making money, and innovating doesn't make money. It risks it. Far safer to spend much smaller budgets on that, and save the big budgets for the 'sure hits' that you won't let stray too far from what is accepted already. As I said, look at Consoles, look at PCs, look at the games on each. Tell me which has the more varied ecosystem of games. Its not consoles. They are notoriously samey with their games, because they feel they need to make all their games the same to follow the latest fad, and try and cash in on it. Its something that has been talked about for years at this point.
Games are eventually made to turn a profit and PCs simply don't have the reach and marketing incentives that warrant development of games that cost over 50 million dollars to make. So PCs don't 'drive innovation' for the simple reason it's not commercially feasible to do do so. Take a game like Dark Souls; loved by PC gamers but would have never seen the light of day without consoles or even Sony Japan who published(and funded) it's predecessor Demon's Souls. Every AAA game is ultimately made with consoles(or rather the companies behind it that market the game) in mind.
Thing is, games don't need to cost $50 million dollars to innovate, nor to turn a profit. Civilization V was innovative for the 4X genre. Hexes, multi-turn combat, complete rebalance of everything in the series so far, eventually a new custom religion system... Sure, MAYBE those features had been done individually in one or two very old games, but look at 4X games before Civ V, and after, and some of those features that were well received are now just a core part of the genre.
If you want to do things similar for big console games, you're looking at open worlds which started back before Daggerfall even... On the PC, you're talking FPS which was kickstarted by Doom... On the PC... We're talking cinematics in games which came about way back in the arcade machine era. And these weren't one off games that were ignored and then the same idea came up years later. These are games that Defined this whole deal, and then were copied continually in the following years by many games in the same genre.
Dark Souls is, amusingly, also a rather poor choice of example by you. The reason you seem to have picked it seems to be that it started on the console, and then moved to the PC, more than because of any actual history to it. Dark Souls was, amusingly, ported to the PC because the PC audience made a very convincing case that they were a profitable market segment to go after. Prior to that, the game wasn't developed for PC not because it wouldn't have been profitable on the PC, but because it and its predecessors were made by a company that had ported [Fairly unsuccessfully] the whole of 1 game to a PC in their lifetime, and developed primarily for consoles from the get go. This is a symptom of game development in Japan, where outside of eroge and visual novels, most games are just made for consoles because Sony and Nintendo dominate Japan's gaming ecosystem, and have for decades. If the company had of been a Western company, odds are the game actually would have been developed for PC first, and then moved to consoles. Also could have stayed similar to how things did happen, but in the Western sphere the easiest way to break into game making has always been through the PC, where you never had to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get your game onto a specific console, and had full rights over your game when released if not through a publisher.
About the only Console & company I will give the title of innovation to is Nintendo and their products. Because, as you said, its not commercially feasible to drive innovation. Nintendo just don't give a shit. They've made a ton of commercial flops due to innovation, but they just keep going at it. PC does the same, though I'll say less than Nintendo at times because I'll again repeat, Nintendo doesn't give a shit - they at least were headed by a person who truly just wanted to make new fun things. Sony and Microsoft? I don't think them, or most of the games on their systems, have innovated for a very long time. The AAA space has been stagnated for a decade or more, in my experience since the end of the PS1/N64 era. Because its not commercially feasible to innovate. Hence AAA and console companies don't, as they want to turn a profit. PC has for years, as the goal of many developers isn't to rake in millions - its to make a fun, cool game for others to play, and then that game catches on and earns a fortune. See Minecraft as but one example.
If we're going in the 'if it weren't for' argument, if it weren't for PCs, consoles wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have FPS. We wouldn't have RPGs. We wouldn't have the Xbox because Microsoft would never have earned the money from its PC centric sales to make its own console. We would never have exited the 2D graphical arcade era, because it would have been more profitable to just keep making arcade machines with new versions of the same game, than to actually create a new game, or try something different. But PC parts manufacturers strived for more. They created graphics cards capable of creating 3D games, and the PC gaming market took them on board and made 3D games. They constantly improved performance year on year, and year on year more complex games were made.
I'll say it again. Consoles don't drive innovation. Innovation is a risk, and not 100% certain profitability. So the AAA companies that live on consoles don't like it, and don't innovate. Up until recently, consoles have also been very hostile to indie or small developers, and with their locked hardware have stifled hardware innovation as well. The PC is ever changing, as are its games. Consoles may fund their yearly releases worth $50 million, but I'll be honest and say most of the time [Sole exception thus far is the Witcher series] those games look worse than PC exclusive games, and innovate less. Consoles aren't needed for innovation, and they certainly don't drive it [Again, exception of Nintendo, because Nintendo just don't give a fuck]. What they do drive is repetition, and a constant graphics arms race that they can never win. That's not innovation though. Innovation has never been a AAA thing, or at least hasn't been for decades. Its the realm of Indies, small publisher studios, and Nintendo, because Nintendo don't give a fuck.
Even when looking at FPS, which one is more innovative? Natural Selection 2, or Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3?
AAA doesn't innovate. How about Team Fortress 2 [Again, wouldn't have made it to console if not for PC], or Battlefield 4 [Ironically the same case, but now focuses more on its console audience than its PC]?
I am honestly struggling to see where you can make the case for console innovation. Look at the games. Yeah, console games have bigger budgets. They also waste it on copying the big game of the day, rather than trying something new.
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