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

[Callate]

Ever the diplomat, eh, John?

Did you really mean to say "We don't want any more business from the PC-primary gamers who put us where we are today?" Because that's kind of what it sounded like.

I get that it's easier and sometimes more profitable to design with consoles in mind. But putting out a game that basically doesn't work for about half the PC market isn't just a matter of where you chose to aim the level of the tech; it's horrible QA, and it warrants a mea culpa rather than a rhetorical kick in the shins.

Ah well. Between this and the review on Ars Technica, I'm definitely getting a warm glow for not having bought Rage when it came out. See you in the $5 Steam sale, Carmack.

 

[Mr. Omega]

"Well, we did a lousy port job, so we're just gonna blame the platform. Whatever..." is what I"m reading here. Yes, console titles tend to sell more than PC titles, but that has nothing to do with it. It's a bad port job. It's like saying "Well, vanilla ice cream sells better, so let's make crappy chocolate ice cream". Just because one is more popular doesn't excuse a bad job on the less popular one.

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!

While I do agree with THIS...

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.

Well, that doesn't sound elitist, arrogant or downright asshole-ish in the least. Nope. Not at all. Heil to the glorious PC Master Race!

 

[coolkirb]

I wonder what is worse him slightly underestimating the PC market or the overestimating of the market that will come from these forms....................all well forms have no real power anyway

 

[godofallu]

I love how the Escapist puts up articles like this with intentionally offensive headlines, hoping to draw people into a troll war.

Who cares what that guy said, or whether he is right or not? The main focus should have been on tea bagging him over the horrid release. Not the consoles part.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

You know what the funny thing is making a super high end game for super high end rigs would send you out of business a lot quick because you limit your target audience to some silly low figure like .5% but you know common sense is lost on people who buy such machines

Yeah, they'd go out of business if they make quality games. Last time I checked Battlefield 3 wasn't a PC exclusive and yet it's oozing with quality. Same thing with a lot of other multiplatform games.

 

[ph0b0s123]

*Marks checklist*
And so Id joins the ranks of Crytek, Bethesda, Bioware, and most recently of all Blizzard in the modern age and are better for it.

And are are helping to make gaming the stagnent place it is... Oh, look another FPS.

Edit: Just re-read this and it has typo's, etc

Should have read: And are all helping to make gaming the stagnant place it is... Oh, look another FPS.

 

[theonecookie]

You know what the funny thing is making a super high end game for super high end rigs would send you out of business a lot quick because you limit your target audience to some silly low figure like .5% but you know common sense is lost on people who buy such machines

No one ever mentioned making a game for the top 5%.

id always made games that could run on low - high end systems with very different graphical options.

They messed up with Rage badly, hell they even claim in an interview that they were trying to get the game to run at 30fps on the Intel IGP in the 2600k, which is very weak.

Yet the game barely runs on top end systems with far far more power then a console.

[

That'd be because Quake 4 and Quake Wars weren't developed by id.

Exactly, id were great. Were, it seems they really dropped the ball hard here.
At my college we have a Compyer Games Development course that we offer and all the students in it for all different years are all avid PC gamers.

I asked them if any of them played or bought Rage. 3 said they got it, and none of them could run it. Many of them don't know any other id games because they're so young.

This has already marked id as a second rate console hugging developer to them sadly.

well one would think that would be more down to them being shit developers then when you look at it they put extra effort in to making it extra shitty as the pc version runs on openGL and the xbox version runs on directX or at least a modified version which would probably have worked better

 

[The Imp]

In other news: The sky is blue, water is wet and plants produce oxygen.

 

[GonzoGamer]

The time has come.
They need to start putting warning stickers on every game release now.
Warning: this game was made on the 360 and the footage that they hyped you up with is off the 360. If you got this for the ps or ps3, it will either be completely broken and/or look like shit.

It's not so bad that these publishers favor the 360 (considering MS is likely to have a hissy fit when they don't) but sometimes I think to myself that I would've preferred it if they just made it exclusive and didn't try tricking the other gamers into buying crap they couldn't bother to port properly.

My Eat Shit And Die list keeps getting longer and longer.

 

[DaxStrife]

"Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on," said Carmack.
Nice to see that attitude in a game developer because it's true, but when the technology it runs on doesn't work properly it becomes a hindrance to the finished product. He should have just apologized instead of grandstanding.

 

[ultimateownage]

ID used to be cool, man.

 

[Irridium]

It doesn't matter if the PC isn't a "prime" platform anymore. You are charging full price for a faulty product.

I'm glad I chose to avoid this game. I'd be pissed if I bought it for the same as a console game and found out it was a wholly inferior product.

ID, if your going to release an inferior product, don't charge it the same fucking price as the better versions you pricks.

 

[Smooth Operator]

So you knowingly released a broken game... well that really fills a potential customer with confidence.

And that "we will make a shoddy port" doesn't help much with sales, for me this became a 100% bargain bin game.

 

[Chimp]

It has come to the point where I avoid all games that are released on both the console and the PC. The reason is simple, it is basically a guarantee the game will be a bunch of crap on PC, with possibly horrible controls, brutal GUI and such awkward, buggy overall experience that's it's just not worth it.

Not to mention I refuse to play FPS games on console. A gamepad is not made for such games, when you know what you can pull off with a mouse and keyboard, you feel like an idiot with a gamepad in your hands.

And oh, mr. Carmack has obviously not had any media training. What he says might be essentially true, all the money is in the console gaming. He just sounds like a douche telling it like that, because of the current situation with his own game.

Too few game developers dare to develop the actual gaming genre. They just copy stuff that has worked before.

 

[Something Amyss]

Actually they are the exception because the vast majority of their profits in fact do not come from their games. Then on top of that they have things like the TF2 item shop.

That they were the exception was kind of the point.

 

[ph0b0s123]

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.

You know what the funny thing is making a super high end game for super high end rigs would send you out of business a lot quick because you limit your target audience to some silly low figure like .5% but you know common sense is lost on people who buy such machines

I love that everyone only focuses on the high end with these discussions. Fact is if the high end is more powerful than consoles, so is the mainstream of PC's as well. That is the mainstream of PC's are powerful enough that they could support AI and other game mechanics that console could not. So it is not just the top .5% you try to make out and therefore the lack of market argument is rubbish.

 

[Xyebane]

If they willing admit they won't spend resources making a game decent on PC, i won't waste money buying it.

 

[Eleima]

Bummer. I had unending respect for Carmack, but he just lost a couple of points there...
The PC NOT a leading platform? I'm not discounting consoles altogether, but can we please admit that the PC still takes up a major slice of the gaming pie? I mean, it's my *only* gaming platform (unless you count the iPhone, which I don't really).
Can't they just have the guts to come out and admit that they messed up their PC release? We won't hold it against them, I mean it *is* a bit more complex than a standard console release, look at all the different configurations available on as many different rigs... Just man up, Carmack, come clean, admit that you guys made a whoopsie, and are working hard on fixing it.

 

[shrekfan246]

Exactly, id were great. Were, it seems they really dropped the ball hard here.
At my college we have a Compyer Games Development course that we offer and all the students in it for all different years are all avid PC gamers.

I asked them if any of them played or bought Rage. 3 said they got it, and none of them could run it. Many of them don't know any other id games because they're so young.

This has already marked id as a second rate console hugging developer to them sadly.

That's . . . interesting. I feel I'm probably the same age or younger than the people in your class, and yet even I grew up with Doom and Wolfenstein.

But, I would actually agree with their assertion of the situation at hand. id spent seven years on this game. It was designed to showcase their new engine and the unique new "megatextures" technology. And while the release on consoles has been fine (save for a bit of texture pop-in as well, I guess), the PC release was one of the worst I've ever seen. I had to google how to actually get it to run after installing the Rage fix drivers from ATI, because honestly, who would think that the OpenGL "Triple Buffering" option would crash a game on launch?

After getting that fixed, I finally loaded up the game and was in awe at the sharpness of the textures at hand . . . at least until I was within five meters of them. At that point, anything that wasn't extremely well lit transformed into textures lifted straight from the 90's. It was then that I discovered the "Auto-Balancer" in the id Tech 5 defaulted graphical settings to "Blobby, Blurry Low" so that it could run on the kitchen sink and there was no way to force it to upscale anything. But, fine, that doesn't bother me enough to stop me from playing a game, so I trekked forth and entered the first enemy territory for my quest, the Ghost Hideout, and . . . oh? What's this? The game crashed during the loading screen? Problematic, but I'll load it back up and re-enter . . . oh, it crashed again. On the third try I managed to actually enter the hideout, at which point I wandered through the blobby, low-res dark rooms and found that the gunplay actually is quite nice and the enemy animations are amazing, so at least it does have some points in its favor. I get through the Ghost Hideout and move to leave, at which point the game crashed in the background during the loading screen again. So I spend half an hour trying to figure out why it only gives me a 50% chance of actually going through loading screen transitions, and when I get it to work a few times in a row, I travel through the empty Ghost Hideout a bit and find that the models for the bullets in my guns are now floating at the top-right side of my screen and my character's body occasionally clips through the camera - Despite being in first person view. At which point I closed down the game and haven't turned it on since.