Phoenixmgs said:
I have no clue how you say phones are harder to use than PCs. You just touch the little picture of the app you want to run and that's it. PCs have so much more management to them and you can obviously mess up the OS much easier. The touchscreen nature makes phones very intuitive to use and definitely much easier for someone who is new to technology. It's why you have those tablets made for children as if a normal PC was easier, there'd be kid PCs instead of kid tablets.
And on the PC you just click on the little picture of the application you want to run and that's it.
Both have a bit more depth to them than that, and having them work the way you want isn't a simple "Press the app button" and you're done.
I looked up the Watch Dogs issue, it was the Day 1 patch that caused it. At the same time, why would you download and install the patch before playing? I put in the disc to play a game, not to update the game then play. That was obviously nothing to do with the PS4 but a bad game patch. That was easier to get around vs if it happened on the PC as just deleting the game data and starting over would have you back up and playing a couple minutes on PS4. Whereas on PC "deleting the game" means redownloading it, which is obviously much longer.
Funnily enough, when your PS4 tells you "Please install this patch before playing", most people are just going to click ok. They were also able to play just fine... Until the game simply stopped working. Your whole point has been "This doesn't happen on the PS4". This is one example where it does, I'm sure I could find more if I tried. The PS4 is not perfect or exempt from the same issues as every other platform.
How are consoles cheaper to develop for? At least before PS4/Xbone going with x86 architecture, every new console was a huge re-learning experience with different architecture. Even developers with console experience isn't really a factor when moving to a new console as that experience isn't very helpful. Developing for new consoles was much harder than developing for PC yet consoles were always the priority.
The cheaper part came from the fact that there was only 1 API and driver set you had to account for, one hardware setup, or I guess 2 if you're going both platforms. You didn't have to worry about different versions of drivers, different manufacturer's drivers, and the individual capabilities of the hardware and its drivers each PC would have differently, and building in options and failsafes and detections to ensure the game would be adaptable to this. You could also save money on various expensive shaders that consoles still just can't run, and therefore you don't have to spend time and money developing.
Knowledge of how to program for one console also wasn't wasted when moving to the next. Manufacturers include APIs and drivers to help with that. You wouldn't get the most out of a new console, sure, but that'd come with time, and before then you had a good headstart on how to program for that console in general from past experience with the company's APIs and such. With the AAA industry's focus on consoles during the period where PCs were more of a mess, that meant people got a good decade of experience with consoles, particularly Sony's offerings, as opposed to PC games. There is a different skillset in general required for each, as each require a different approach from a AAA game. More devs have experience with the skillset of console games. This is also a really big thing in Japan. Were it so simple and easy to develop for PCs that any chump could do it easier than develop for a new console, the Dark Souls original port and Arkham Knight wouldn't have been in the port state they were in. That was done by devs with little to no PC porting experience, and this was the result. Those more experienced with PC porting, manage to port well.
I feel the "hero" shooter is a new thing for console gamers where it's become huge on PC from TF2 to the MOBAs. Overwatch selling more on PC isn't surprising. I think it's only a matter of time before the "hero" games (shooters/MOBAs) start to dominate the CODs/BFs/etc. on consoles as well. I played a couple matches of the Overwatch beta and hated its simplicity, Battleborn is a far better game.
Honestly, I think a large part of it is just that Blizzard is seen as a PC company. You don't know them on consoles, and their only real outings to consoles haven't been great, so why trust them?
The same is a phenomenon that happens on the PC; If a company like Ubisoft releases a game with a PC port, its not going to sell that well on the PC because PC players know Ubisoft doesn't care at all for them, and thinks they're all a bunch of pirates, so they're going to get an inferior, crappy product. This influences sales quite heavily, and is more a Ubisoft problem, or other AAA companies who behave similar, than a PC problem.
Funnily enough, it was also the best selling game on consoles during June. Hell, it was best selling game overall, even excluding its PC sales. It obviously has popularity on consoles - just far more on PC. But of course, people don't play games on the PC, do they?
For proof of games selling more on consoles just look up say the top 10 best selling games of any year and tell me how many of those sold more on PC. The answer for 2015 would be 0.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/14/2015-npd-the-10-best-selling-games-of-the-year/
So, we have 10 games every year that sell more on consoles combined than on PC. Of them, four are exclusives, which almost certainly could be counteracted by PC exclusive sales, One has similar PC and console sales and is outclassing both in Mobile sales, two are from companies that very clearly focus on consoles and have that reputation with their PC fanbase, and the remaining 3 are only arguably equally biased to both platforms. This does have a large affect on things, as can be shown by titles like Dark Souls having ridiculous popularity on the PC, despite being poor console ports. It really depends on the type of game you're looking at, and the types of games and developers behind them match console audiences primarily - of course they're going to sell more on consoles than PCs. Compare overall sales though, and again, you end up with PCs in front, and consoles slowly falling further and further behind.
Obviously, the AAA industry makes every game thinking it's going to sell like 10 million for whatever reason, and to do that, the game needs to be a huge hit on consoles.
Diablo III would beg to differ.
World of Warcraft begs to differ.
Overwatch on the PC alone probably begs to differ, but without exact sales numbers its harder to tell.
Minecraft begs to differ.
CS:GO begs to differ.
Hell, to be entirely honest, a fair few PC games beg to differ. I guess good luck pointing this out to a publisher, but one thing that has always been shown; create a niche game for a dedicated audience, and you'll be successful. Create a general game for a wide and nondescript audience, and you'll probably do ok, but not as well as a niche title targeting each individually would have done.
I wasn't talking about home entertainment in general (most people don't use consoles for home entertainment outside of gaming), I'm talking about gaming. If someone wants to play COD/GTA/etc., they will most likely prefer a console considering it's designed for the entertainment center and you can play the games comfortably on your couch with a controller. The average person doesn't want to play games in a computer chair at a desk on a monitor with their PC speakers. They want to play on their couch on their big TV that's connected to their sound system.
The average person doesn't want to play games on the couch with a controller, they want to play them on their phone on the way to work. Numerically, more PC games are sold than consoles, and maybe PC gamers are just a lot more dedicated and buy a lot more games, but it does imply that more people, in general, prefer playing on their PC. This is before we get to browser based and F2P games.
I don't think there is enough information to generalise about the average person, looking at the context of playing games. We can say these things about people who play on console, but that doesn't tell us about the average person necessarily. This is also starting to get rather off topic, talking about which is more popular out of PCs and consoles, rather than whether consoles should focus on their strengths of ease of use, of go the path of increasing complexity to try and keep up with PCs and the latest tech developments.
