ecoho said:
PC is the lowest in playerbase, lowest in profit(games sell for less), and as you have proven are a harder sell then consoles. face it man all this bitching is just proving them right by excluding the PC market.
oh, wow....
PC has install base that counts in hundreds of millions. Steam alone has install base 5 times the size of either console. There are FAR FAR FAR more gaming PCs out there than all current consoles combined.
Games are more profitable on PC, even EA financial reports say so. And it makes sense considering there is far less costs asociated with selling a game, publishers get much larger cuts and sales in fact are the most profitable period due to volume of items sold.
Yes, itis easier to sell on consoles. For one, they have far less of games to chose from, for two, they are the audience where a saying "you can sell them shit if you market it well" is true.
No, this
rightful complaining is only proving them wrong for excluding. It is their loss, and a large one at that.
The Almighty Aardvark said:
Yeah, that's one thing that I'm surprised hasn't been brought up much. I haven't done much real software development, but designing for the PC seems like such an absolute hassle. There's just so many considerations you need to make. You can't optimize for the hardware, you are designing it to be compatible with hundreds of GPU's and drivers. There's bound to be a whole plethora of bugs to dig through, and from all my experience in coding, finding and fixing bugs takes up the longest amount of time. And that's with a several thousand line program, not programs that are in the hundreds of thousands of lines.
It hasnt been brought up because its wrong.
You can optimize the games code. there is no hardware optimizing. nor is there for either of the two new consoles. You are not making game compatible with any hardware. that is handled on user side. you are making it compatible with second layer software handlers (directX and the like). you program for them. you can probably count on your hand the people in whole world that can program something like this directly to hardware. and all of them are busy making these layers everyone else can program to. Everything else is handled by your engine, unless they made their own engine (didnt look) in which case yeah they will have to build that as well.
Finding bugs does take time, however they are already going through that process for 4 different machines, two of them using identical architecture. most of bugs found on those two can be fixed on PC as well.
The only games i had difficulty launching on my PC was either ones with known massive issues that was widespread (like world of tanks hilarity) or ones so old they still try to detect my OS and think its NT3.0 and does not understand why im not runnign a 15 year old Directx library.
(well ok, there was also Scarface, a 2006 game, that does nto run on new machines).
Kheapathic said:
This is probably a novel concept, but a big company that moves a lot of money usually have actuaries and other money/risk associated people. Those people probably have more experience and know-how then a forum full of crybabies. Let them do their job and learn to deal with your insecurities.
Step 1: look at big gaming industry history for the last 10 years.
Step 2: completely disregard what you just said.
Imperioratorex Caprae said:
Not launching on the PC is different than not being developed for the PC. But of course its always open invitation to mock consoles whenever they get something PC doesn't. And then the game will get mocked because its "ported" and thus "subpar". No wonder corporations don't seem to give a rats ass about customers sometimes when all they do is complain about the product no matter what state it might actually be in.
Oh yes, poor corporations, they only sit at the table and after fuillnig their bellies sweep the trash down for you and then tell you you deserved it because you dont want to eat shit. how terrible are PC gamers that want to have a product at the same time instead of getting the backhand half-finished ports a year too late.
