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

[RA92]

Save us Blizzard Stardock! Save us Valve!

Fix'd that for ya. Blizzard is now just milking their old franchises without bringing anything new to the table, with outrageous DRM to boot.

I doubt you really want to point to Stardock when we are discussing polish and functionality on the PC. Demigod and Elemental:War of Magic were broken beyond belief on release, but hey, at least you didn't have a conceptual issue with DRM.

I'm willing to forgive them for a lot of things for the sake of Galactic Civilization and Sins of a Solar Empire.

 

[Iron Criterion]

That was an illogical statement and obviously a cover up for id's failings. But I appreciate it nonetheless since anything that makes PC fanboys cry is fine by me.

 

[Marudas]

We don't think the PC is an adequate gaming platform. But we will still release games for it that we charge the same amount for (or sometimes 10 dollars less) and expect you to buy them despite the fact that we half-assed the port and may have screwed the pooch in a few places.

If a developer decides they don't like a platform, its within their right, but don't release a crappy port and try to sucker people out of their money. I cannot overstate my respect for Eidos and the Deus Ex Port, which they had a third party company handle, and made it the very best version of the game.

As far as the Console VS PC debate? People should just play the one they want and be happy. I guess people can only really afford one platform and the games to support it, so they feel the need to justify their choice by angrily defending it against the alternatives?

 

[shrekfan246]

Quake IV was developed by Raven Software, yes. But so were about half the games in the id Super Pack, like Hexen, Heretic, and some of the Quake 1/2 mission packs.

No, as I recall the real reason why those games aren't included is because the id Super Pack was created on Steam before Quake IV was released there, and they don't want to retroactively reward all owners of the pack with Quake IV as well.

Fair enough. I don't actually know what games are in the pack, I figured it was just the big ones (Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake). Though id did publish Heretic and Hexen, while they merely "oversaw the production" or something and provided the engine for Quake IV.

 

[RJ Dalton]

Well, at least the graphics are pretty once they finish rendering.
But how does someone get away with releasing a game like that? An incredibly obvious graphical error like that ought to have been caught in development.

And while we're on the subject, why does something have to be the "leading platform" for gaming? As far as I can tell, there's really little difference between PC and console games anymore.

 

[punipunipyo]

I hate it when it comes to PC VS Console topics... people on both sides talks about how much Superior than the other... but this today... isn't about that, it's about ID soft trying to cover their asses by saying that they DECIDED not to put effort on their shelf product because it was not their "main revenue"... if you want to make a game, and shelf it in a store, it better be COMPLETE! Half ass product in the end, is still HALF ASS PRODUCT! and you just don't turn in unfinished projects, we learn this in grade school! If you turn in unfinished work, you get "F"! in this case... F! (but they DID fix the issue, my rage did run much better now)... so "C" for now...

 

[remnant_phoenix]

"Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on"

This. A million times this. If people prefer a certain platform, that's there bag, but quality game experiences are based on good development, not on how good the hardware must be in order to run it. See: the PS3 launch, a huge chunk of the indie market, Final Fantasy XIII, I could go on...

The PS3 was superior to the XB360 in terms of hardware, but in post-launch its game library sucked. It didn't matter that the PS3 had superior hardware because it didn't have well-developed games.

A huge chunk of well-developed and well-received indie games in years past (Limbo, Amnesia: the Dark Descent, Braid, Castle Crashers) could have all been produced on previous-generation hardware, yet they were superior to many Triple-A games of this generation. Good development by creative people with a good vision is what makes a game good. Graphics and gameplay that strive to push system specs aren't necessary to make a game great and not every game that pushes the systems specs is going to be great.

Speaking of which, Final Fantasy XIII looked great and had a fluid, dynamic, battle system that innovated the way we can see turn-based combat, but it sucked. Why? Because the people in charge of the story did not DEVELOP the characters, the plot, or the setting in a compelling way. And don't tell me "read the Datalog!" because turning to an outside source to understand the fiction as it is presented in game is exactly the "bad development" I'm talking about.

 

[poleboy]

Perfectly valid attitude. Piss-poor timing. Nobody cares about your stance on the downfall of pc gaming, they care about the product they just purchased that's not working. Let's deal with that first, shall we?

 

[ph0b0s123]

"Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on"
This. A million times this. If people prefer a certain platform, that's there bag, but quality game experiences are based on good development, not on how good the hardware must be in order to run it.

Shame he said this right above what you used to make your point.
"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."
Yes, that's right he contradicts himself as quick as that.

 

[Zer_]

In fact Nvidia drivers ARE still in beta But it's a very common thing with PC releases to have beta drivers to run them.

And while OpenGL driver updates are nice from both AMD and NVidia as a result of software vs.hardware developers showdown, it's really a technology that lost its stand quite a few years ago (for mainstream gaming market anyway). I'd be severely surprised if a major movie studio goes for HD-DVD release ignoring Blu-Ray media and end up blaming video-player manufacturers for not supporting it...

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

Read that link. I need to sleep, but it gives you a great deal of information on exactly why OpenGL isn't the top API for gaming.

Well, I'm not arguing that OpenGL is worse than DirectX nor the other way around. I'm simply stating that it's a walking corpse thanks to all the effort from Microsoft. Doesn't really matter if the patient died due to bad surgery or no surgery, he's still dead and for as long as Microsoft has such an impact on IBM-PC compatible hardware/software, that most probably won't change. We can argue all night, if perhaps voxel-based graphical engines are even better for the future, but reality offers little to no reason to swim against the flow.


I've just tested Rage patch with latest Nvidia WHQL driver (without updated OpenGL) and it works fine after update as well. So for NVidia, there were no driver problems whatsoever and there's no one to blame but the developer -> id Software.
Oh... and there's something Johnie said just few months ago, you might find interesting:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/11/carmack-directx-better-opengl/

Yup DirectX 10 was basically a complete redo of the DirectX API to be much more efficient, and easier to work with. RAGE was far into development when Carmack made that statement, so it's not like he'll switch the whole project to DirectX out of the blue.

OpenGL will never die because it's the only true cross platform graphics API.

 

[QUINTIX]

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.

>We would rather be lazy
You do realize that Id spent 6 years+ on this game, right?
>we're also ignoring Valve's business practice
You do realize that Valve has been a multi-platform studio since the orange box, right?

 

[ph0b0s123]

-sniped for length-

Yeaaaah, here it is, kids. Here's the perfect example of the kind of warped non-memory we get from gamers these days.

Look, I was in high school in the 90s. You don't get to tell me what we wanted. We craved console ports. We lusted for them. PC gaming was cool and all, but those days a lot of kids my age played on PCs because those got purchased for "studying" or "working" or your dad had one. Often you couldn't convince your parents to get you a console, but some crafty PC salesman managed to convince them that you'd become Bill Gates if you had a PC. They were dark days of pressing your noses against games stores for anything, from Amiga ports of Barbarian to SNES running Super Mario World.

So yeah, you don't get to tell me how *that* worked. Sonic CD's PC port? Loved that shit. Metal Gear Solid? Played it on the PC, because I had a Saturn. FF 7 and 8? Same deal.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've probably sinked more hours into Elite without even knowing what the hell I was doing than most modern gamers have put in any single game in their entire lives. I used to think that Warcraft (that's Warcraft 1) was a poor man's Dune 2, with all those RPG missions in which you didn't get a base and I played that first level of Doom more times than I can count. Those were great, great games. But you know what? I would have liked to take a shot at the NES's Duck Tales, rather than the shitty PC version, and I could have bought three SNES copies of Final Fight with the cash I wasted on the arcade.

Oh, and the reason why we didn't get ports? It wasn't the APIs. People ported Megaman to the PC (they did, look it up). It existed. The reason why we would want more good ports but couldn't get them?

No gamepads.

Now we plug a USB controller or a 360 controller and it just works. In the 90s you either used an analog stick made for flight sims or a keyboard. There were a few pads, but they were weird, required custom drivers and had no game support. Otherwise you were stuck on a keyboard, which sucks for platformers, side scrolling shooters and fighting games, which were the ports we wanted. The lack of JRPGs was... mostly a cultural thing.

Oh, and the exclusives.

Yeah, I get that you know that most of those games weren't exclusive because you called them "initially exclusives". I wonder if you realize that a bunch of those were released post-1998. There was an entire console generation in the first half of the 90s that didn't port games to PCs and that first half of the decade had... let's say "peculiar" exclusives. Sure, we had a few Ultima games. We had... eh... Elite. Elite was there. And Tie Fighter. That was cool. And a bunch of Lucasarts and Sierra adventures. Daggerfall came out in 1994. It didn't actually *work*, but it did come out.

No Super Mario World, though. Or Final Fantasy. Or Sonic. Well, I had a Mega Drive, so I played a bunch of Sonic, but not on the PC. You get my point.

Here's the truth about gaming. No platform is intrinsically better than the other. I had a pretty powerful PC for the time and a Mega Drive and I still would have loved to have a Gameboy, which I didn't. I used to trade my MD with friends for a NES just so I could play some Mario 3.

Games are cool. They are. I like them all, and I used to be bummed that owning two major gaming platforms wasn't enough to play every single game out there.

These days? Buy a PC and you're set. Buy a PS3 and you're set. Buy an Xbox... you get my drift. It's the best era for multiplatform gaming ever, and I'm loving it.

I'm sorry your parents lumbered you with a PC instead of the consoles you would have preferred, and that you and your friends were desperate to play console games but could not. That does not extrapolate out to the rest of the PC gamers of that time feeling the same way.

When my father brought home a PC in 89 when I was 13, I would have rather have had an Amiga. That was until Wing Commander was released in 1990, since then I have never wanted another platform. And this was common at the time with everyone I knew as well. So my memory of the period is just as valid as yours and not a "warped non-memory". As old war veterans say, 'I was there man...' But I also don't remember the PC being the most popular gaming system as some seem to, with the biggest audience or sales. That was always consoles. So this supposed new dynamic of consoles sales being the biggest is not something new, just the neglect by dev's due this this supposed change.

I am not going to argue about the reason you did not get the ports you wanted whether due to control issues, or whatever, as I really don't care what the reason was as they were not something I would have brought.

So now the time period you are complaining about is the early to mid 90's rather than the late 90's of your earlier post. Do I now have to go through a list of games on the PC from that period that also made me not care that there were not console ports. Just because they were not your preferred game type does not mean you can just ignored them.

I always use the some term like initial exclusives etc as the PC does not have exclusives / games that are not allowed to be ported to other systems as consoles do. Other systems are perfectly welcome to have any game that crops up on the PC, if controls and processing power makes porting it feasible. Oh, and Elite was not PC initially exclusive, but first made for the BBC model B which I loved playing when 7 or 8. That was the computer I got dumped with as it was 'educational'.

What you see as "best era for multiplatform gaming ever", which is true from one point of view. I see as forced homogenization, where everyone is forced to have the same level of experience driven by the lowest command denominator of technical capability.

 

[Skeleon]

Feh, I'm not exactly interested in the specifically console-style FPS that keep coming out nowadays anyway. Mind you, there are exceptions. Fallout 3 for instance is highly complex despite the existence of console ports. On the other hand, games like Bioshock lost a lot of their complexity from their spiritual predecessors, System Shock 2 in this case, and I don't doubt that this is due to console accommodations. How are you guys' aimbots doing, by the way? I kind of like using a mouse for actual aiming instead of vaguely pointing in the enemies' direction. Or did they fix that somehow? Can't imagine that they did considering you still use controllers for aiming, or don't you? Yeah, call me a PC snob if you will, but I grew up with Atari homecomputers and 386s. Keyboards and mice are like my hands and fingers to me now. Some games like jump'n'runs such as Commander Keen and third person games like MediEvil work well with controllers, but there are many game categories that just don't really work that well. FPS especially in my view.

 

[Mister Linton]

A LOT of people in this thread have major reading comprehension problems. NOWHERE in that article does Carmack attempt to defend or excuse the PC driver problems because PC is not the lead development platform. Look at the article again people, when the writer says "speaking of prime platforms" they are transitioning to a COMPLETELY SEPARATE CONVERSATION.

Stop being butthurt and LEARN TO READ. Yes, the business world focuses their resources on the largest consumer base. GROW UP AND DEAL WITH IT.

 

[Enslave_All_Elves]

Gee id, thanks for shooting games. I hate those... (The truth? Doom 2 and Wolfenstein defined my childhood. It was my GI Joe or baseball or whatever.)

Normally you dinguses support even the most filthy, underhanded, bullshit-laden excuses for a company to make money (BORROWING IS THEFT! I HAVE NO FRIENDS BECAUSE MY SOCIAL SKILLS SUCK!). But here when he has a legit point about PC being a small market and supporting it being inefficient you go nuts?

If I'm making a game why the fuck should I have to deal with your innumerable hardware set ups, hire more testers, make more patches you dimwits may or may not actually download, wasting the time of my employees who could be doing something else? Why would I devote more resources to a market smaller than the rest? Because you're special?

Orrrr I could just make a console game on consistent hardware, consistent software, and with mandatory patches. Which he basically explained. Many developers have said we aren't even done tapping the abilities current generation consoles have. Yet you are, typically, going to go hemorrhage money on PC parts year after year after year? Good work.

Jesus, I even prefer PC games. You're almost making me wish I was saddled with 11 year old Nazis on X Box 360 now (almost, I'd still prefer to force feed them gravel).

A LOT of people in this thread have major reading comprehension problems. NOWHERE in that article does Carmack attempt to defend or excuse the PC driver problems because PC is not the lead development platform. Look at the article again people, when the writer says "speaking of prime platforms" they are transitioning to a COMPLETELY SEPARATE CONVERSATION.

Stop being butthurt and LEARN TO READ. Yes, the business world focuses their resources on the largest consumer base. GROW UP AND DEAL WITH IT.

I'm no grammar nut. I make mistakes all the time (sometimes on purpose I admit). But I've seen three posts now that go something like, "Jon Curmick does am not kno what the heck games balls!"

Seems some of 'em do have comprehension problems.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

John, why not simply leave it at "sorry guys, we done goofed. We'll work on getting this fixed"?

I dunno. It just doesn't have the same dramatic flair as "This isn't our fault, it's your fault."

 

[RatheMcGrath]

So PC gamers will rage. So what? They were gonna rage anyway. It's about all they know. Pretty sure the people who wasted money on betamacs raged, too. They just didn't have the internet.

 

[Vonnis]

I understand why pc isn't the lead platform for developing games. I don't mind that. What I mind is when someone takes pride in getting the game to run on an iPhone (clearly the ultimate FPS platform), then utterly fucks up the pc port. I kind of want to play the game as it does seem fun when it works, but I'm not going to reward such perfect incompetence with even one cent.

 

[Vigormortis]

*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.

So they're "better for it" because, by concentrating on systems utilizing 6+ year old tech, they're putting out far buggier, crappier, and more mediocre titles compared to when they were PC-centric or centered on multiple platforms?

Sorry, I fail to see your point here.

Oh wait. No, I see it now. Console-elitism hating on anyone who games on a PC.

By the way, Blizzard has only talked about the possibility for Diablo 3 coming to consoles. As of right now, there's no console build in the works. So...you may want to remove them from the list for now.

snip

Unlike you, I'm not all that interested in having to buy a dedicated sub-standard computer for gaming when I already have a decent multi-purpose computer sitting under my desk, which I use for work as well as pleasure. Also, I tend to think that the games which all of these companies made when they were primarily PC-based are superior to the ones they've made since they started consolizing everything. I like complexity in my RPGs and smooth controls in my FPSes.

Oh, ninja'd. You beat me to the punch.

So PC gamers will rage. So what? They were gonna rage anyway. It's about all they know. Pretty sure the people who wasted money on betamacs raged, too. They just didn't have the internet.

Betamax. Unless you're talking about some early, test-bed version of the Mac/Apple computers.

And seriously? What is with all these console people coming in to the thread to bad mouth PC gamers? It's funny. All I ever hear are complaints about "PC elitists" and such, yet most of what I see are console people insulting PC gamers and touting the superiority of their platform.

Whatever. I game on multiple platforms so I can't be arsed to listen to people who want to hate on someone else for what them game on. It's juvenile.

I do have to say one thing, though. Had the roles be reversed, as in the console versions had been broken to hell, I imagine you and others like you would be expressing the same complaints as the PC players are having over this game.

 

[Mister Linton]

I built a Xbox 360 myself from random parts I got at different vendors. It doesn't match the specs of a "standard" 360 and doesn't have any of the same drivers or software as the real thing. For some damn reason the 360 version of RAGE doesn't work in it. Damn you to hell ID! You guys should make your software work on any janky thing I put together flawlessly and if it doesn't I have every right to piss and moan and say you are neglecting your base. Why don't you cater more to console gamers like me?

Oh yeah, that's right. I didn't build a generic system from scratch. I bought a name brand game console and my game works flawlessly. Cry moar.