Ben Hussong said:
Why is there all this animosity between PC and Console gamers? * speaking as a dirty peseant console gamer here, but i do occasionally game on my PC*
Consoles tend to lose very little except graphic fidelity when a PC game is ported to consoles and even then, the quality of the end result will at least be as good as any console-native game. On the other hand PC loses a hell of a lot when a game is console-native and then ported to PC because the system spec budget curbs development ambitions. Had Grand Theft Auto been made for consoles first, there would have been no Grand Theft Auto even if the series won it's major fan-base on Playstation. Real-Time Strategy games are the only genre where PC-to-console ports have been complete failures recognised by most people. As first-person shooter migrated to consoles, only PC players noticed the drop in quality; the expanding console player-base didn't, they were just glad to be able to sit on a sofa and play deathmatches with friends.
The animosity from PC players is that we don't all have high-end machines. We go through cycles where our brand new comp is in the mid to high range and then after a few years it isn't, it's playing older or more simpler games and they are still good. These are games which can be made with smaller development teams, smaller budgets and smaller specs; we know good games should not be hardware limited and yet that is precisely what console-ported games represent. They have been limited by hardware and have suffered for it, compromises have been made that didn't have to be.
So if hardware isn't the problem, what does that leave? Only the consumer. Console players do not demand better; when they eventually get benefits that PC players have enjoyed for years such as online play or updated content, price-tags are attached to these things which were previously free and then they are re-branded as propriety services or 'DLC'. Console players are happy to pay for something they didn't have before, PC players are pissed to have to start paying for something that we know we've already paid for in the asking price on the box. This isn't a step forward for us, it's like history has reversed and we're now going down the alternate route it could have taken in the 90s if only it hadn't had to compete with the technical expertise of the user-base.
We had LAN and we could configure this to work over the internet, so no propriety online service or forced peer-to-peer. Now games are increasingly taking those things away from us as well as mod tools, dedicated servers and everything else that meant when we didn't like what publishers were forcing on us, we changed it ourselves.
All because console players don't demand more.