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

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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John Carmack: PC Is Not the "Leading Platform" for Games

John Carmack admits the launch of Rage was a "cluster !@#$" but says the PC is not the "leading platform for games."

If you purchased and played the PC version of drivers were to blame [http://www.amazon.com/Rage-Pc/dp/B003ICGL7I/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1318260384&sr=8-3], good information to have but not terribly useful in practical terms because it left gamers effectively dead in the water. But how did id, known above all else for its extreme technical competence, let it get out the door in that shape in the first place?

id was actually "quite happy" with the state of the game on its test systems, but those were sporting drivers that had gone through "significant internal changes" to maximize performance. "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," Carmack told Kotaku [http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such-a-cluster]. "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. 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."

Speaking of prime platforms, Carmack also made it clear that the PC, in general, is no longer one of them. "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. 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."

"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."

It's a perfectly reasonable position to take but a little infuriating nonetheless for PC gamers who found that the launch version of Rage only allowed for the most basic adjustment of video settings, hamstringing any attempts to correct, or at least mitigate, its many problems. Fortunately, a patch was released over the weekend which will clear up several technical issues and also allow users to adjust video settings including texture cache, vsync and anisotropic filtering. The "massive" update is available now via Steam [http://store.steampowered.com/news/6464/].


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Corporal Yakob

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Nov 28, 2009
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Incoming rage in 3....2....1....

Does this game have any RPG elements or is it just a shooter in a post-apocaplytic setting?
 

DP155ToneZone

Good enough for Petrucci on I&W
Aug 23, 2009
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Dismissing and otherwise disingenuously underestimating the power that the PC holds over the market is directly shooting your profits in the proverbial foot.

Why don't you ask Valve how much their PC-centrism is hurting profits, hmm?
 

Ragsnstitches

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Dec 2, 2009
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"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.
 

Waaghpowa

Needs more Dakka
Apr 13, 2010
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Funny, I remember him saying that it was a mistake to develop Rage for consoles...

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=23760
 

Kapol

Watch the spinning tails...
May 2, 2010
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While I don't disagree with him, that doesn't excuse the fact that he's just trying to make an excuse for releasing a broken game. This reason is much worse then the Dead Island's excuse of 'we just messed up, sorry.'
 

D0WNT0WN

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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.
 

mattaui

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Oct 16, 2008
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I'd expect this from anyone but id games, at least that was my prior opinion. Guess they're dedicated to pushing the boundaries on outdated hardware now, and feigning surprise when PC gamers wonder why they didn't even include the most basic of graphics settings. It's amazing how they managed to screw up something so basic. The driver issue wasn't what took the graphics menu out of the game.
 

Corporal Yakob

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FelixG said:
Corporal Yakob said:
Incoming rage in 3....2....1....

Does this game have any RPG elements or is it just a shooter in a post-apocaplytic setting?
The only RPG element it has is an inventory system.

Oh and you choose a class near the middle o the first section that affects how much gear costs in shops, but other than that, just a shooter

Edit OT: 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.
Hmmm I'll give it a miss then, the tiny dredges of interest I had in it before were based on it reminding me of Fallout.
 

Korten12

Now I want ma...!
Aug 26, 2009
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Corporal Yakob said:
Incoming rage in 3....2....1....

Does this game have any RPG elements or is it just a shooter in a post-apocaplytic setting?
Ahh... I see what you did there. XD
 

tzimize

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Mar 1, 2010
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DP155ToneZone said:
Dismissing and otherwise disingenuously underestimating the power that the PC holds over the market is directly shooting your profits in the proverbial foot.

Why don't you ask Valve how much their PC-centrism is hurting profits, hmm?
^_______________________^

I also lolled when I read an interview with him. Describing their past and how they needed to make something new. So the idea of originality is to make what everyone else is making nowadays. With cars. (even though borderlands had cars too, albeit crappy ones).

ID software is a freaking joke. And their megatextures completely failed to impress me. Whats the point of everything looking different if a lot of it looks like shit? Seriously, some of the textures look a decade old.

I had zero expectations for rage and it was even worse than I imagined.
 

Alandoril

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Jul 19, 2010
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Well, technically he is correct. But then why bother making a version for the PC at all? Or hell you could even have bundled the drivers they used to test the game onto the disc.
 

SidingWithTheEnemy

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Sep 29, 2011
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Dear Mr. Carmack, you are *R*E*A*L*L*Y* not helping to keep constant b*tching between consoles gamers and PC gamers civil. Just simply admit that you want us at each others throats.

If you are incapable of making bearable PC ports from your console game designs maybe you should just stop doing them in the first place. Demon Souls, Infamous and Brütal Legends all were successful and available on console only.
Just simply admit that most of you just want more money without adding the needed ressources to port that game succesfully on PC.

Look, in my opinion, once you release a game for a specific plattform it HAS TO WORK for that plattform. But since that logic is too hard understand for some of those developers/publishers I rather wait for the price tag to drop to an appropriate "Crappy Game => Bargain Price" level. Incidently by that time MODs and Patches will probably fix your initial incompetence.
If that hurts your sales, tough luck.
Considering how many homes have decent PCs nowadays (in the First World Countries) PC gaming will not die out so easily.
 

Firehound

is a trap!
Nov 22, 2010
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Kapol said:
While I don't disagree with him, that doesn't excuse the fact that he's just trying to make an excuse for releasing a broken game. This reason is much worse then the Dead Island's excuse of 'we just messed up, sorry.'
And Magicka's Mea Culpa stuff was worth it too and a good sorry gift. It's not as if this isn't common practice on the PC to release buggy games. One of the major reasons I like playing console games is that it is still expected that you get a game that runs out of the box on a console as compared to the computer, where it may take upwards of three months before the producers decide to update their product to even begin to function correctly on most systems, *coughempiretotalwarcough*, and even then, they may stop updating it leaving it in a half-working state, or relying on fans to fix problems- see Unofficial oblivion mod.
 

Panorama

Carry on Jeeves
Dec 7, 2010
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D0WNT0WN said:
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.
snip

and thank you i knew i had seen the article somewhere, cheers.
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

I never asked for this
Sep 8, 2011
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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.