Zero Punctuation: Exclusives Showdown

IceForce

Is this memes?
Legacy
Dec 11, 2012
2,384
16
13
Batou667 said:
I don't usually comment on ZP threads, partly because I'm almost certain Yahtzee doesn't read them
It's true, he's doesn't read them.

He says so right here: http://youtu.be/-WTD35UOBJo?t=6m35s

Actual quote from him: "I tend not read my comments at all these days."
 

Jacob Wisner

New member
Mar 10, 2012
5
0
0
Yes for a cross platform title, where it is ported to each platform with some bare minimum of competence, the best *potential* PC gaming experience - just in terms of modability and graphics - is far superior to the optimal experience of any console. It may even be true - and it is for some games - to say that of the *average or better* PC experience. As a long time PC gamer who has owned several consoles, including the PS3 and Xbox 360 most recently, I have to emphasize that as only being true across a subset of the range of experiences. This is not just because there is more variability in PC hardware capability and so the optimal experience on a given setup can be significantly different from the best possible experience, but also because the actual experience on a given setup is sometimes far from what should be optimal.

This is particularly true for any gamer who has a PC they would tentatively call mid-range in terms of performance capabilities (for reference my $600 heavily discounted Core i7 3770k with Radeon 7770 would fall into this category due to the middling radeon 7770.) It is here where users may find they are able to run some new games at maximum or near maximum settings flawlessly while the default settings of a few games yields terrible slide-show performance. More often than not having the power to run it at the resolution they want and acheive the visual fidelity they expect appropriate to their system's capabilities, this is a matter of features being used being ill-supoprted by or espescially taxing on their hardware. It is then that tweaking settings, sometimes using Nvidia or ATI tools or editing INI files, becomes the price of getting the experience that your system is capable of. Users who can not be bothered must settle for either lower fidelity than their systems can reasonably produce or worse performance. That there is no "mid-range" of performance or feature sets (or DX feature levels) to run afoul of inappropriate default/automatic settings for console users to have to worry about can not be understated. That a console gamer can *generally* be assured that they are having the optimal experience in this sense should not be undersold - even if a game is crap at least a on a console you know that it's probably just as crap for everyone else as it is for you.

For me, I don't mind the tinkering and actually kind of enjoy figuring things out in cases where games (Skyrim on my system at launch for example) run far worse than they should. At the same time I know the possible frustration well enough (Skyrim 4 days after launch on my system at the time for example) that I can't really see judging someone for how they weigh the costs and benefits in this matter. So I don't think one can flatly hand it to PC gaming based on performance and presentation. I'd say that in that regard it's really a matter of individual preferences and tradeoffs; often the choice seems obvious for the individual but neither the weights nor the apaprent obviousness of the balance should be presumed in any way universal.

I think the only unequivocal advantage that PC gaming provides is that it has some semblance of a competitive marketplace. I mean that you have a number of content delivery services vying for usershare; Battle-Net, Steam, Origin, Amazon, GoG.com, Desura, The Humble Store, U-Play, etc. Now anyone familiar with more than one of these services can immediately point out some of the flaws in this marketplace - most big titles are exclusive to either Steam of a publisher's own service like Origin or Battle-Net. Additionally, some services like the Humble Store or Amazon don't serve all or even most of the content themselves but once again rely on the publisher's services or Steam.

It's fair to say then that whatever competition there is, it's not as much over who can provide a specific game at the best price and with the best customer experience. None of the other services are competing with Blizzard to offer better prices and a better experience purchasing and downloading Diablo III obviously. In this way the PC marketplace is far from ideal, in terms of consumers being served by competition to the extent that one might imagine.

There are several real competitions going on though that do benefit PC gaming consumers quite a bit. Steam and Origin, and to a lesser extent services like Uplay's store, are in competition over the install base and engagement of their customers. While it may seem one sidedly going in Steam's favor, the emergence of publisher-owned content delivery networks has kept Steam on its toes and it strives to maintain hegemony by both keeping customers engaged and making itself valuable enough to other developers/publishers that they do not see creating their own services as worthwhile. At the same time, services like Origin actively strive to justify themselves in the face of Steam. While I still question the worth of the service in comparison to Steam, EA's commitment to it has prompted them to offer periodic significant sales and I believe was their impetus behind participating in a 100%-to-charity humble bundle (to attract users to Origin.)

A purer form of competition exists on the indie level where games will be offered simultaneously across multiple services and served by each of those content networks directly instead of as a voucher for Steam. GoG for example had gradually improved its accessibility to smaller indie titles and become quite a popular service-of-choice among Kickstarter backers. This in turn has driven Steam to make their service more attractive and accessible to quality indie titles, though whether or not the execution of such programs as Greenlight hit the mark is another topic for debate.

Piracy also plays a role here as content providers in the PC space are much more acutely aware that they are also in competition with the pirates. To some degree at least they almost all realize they have to offer something the pirates can't. While I think Blizzard and EA have made miscalculations in how they have dealt with this realization, Steam and GoG have not. They both realize that the best way to compete with pirates is to try to offer a better service and experience where possible - though GoG's view brings them to the conclusion of forswearing all DRM while the reality of Steam's dual service to both publishers and consumers requires more of a balancing act.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-24-newell-stop-piracy-by-offering-superior-service
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/126015-Good-Old-Games-Pirates-Are-Our-Competition-Not-Steam

I think why these sorts of competitions matter and are of as significant a boon to PC gamers as they are is because they are interchangeable in one way that services offered by/for specific consoles are not. While, even more so than consoles, games can be exclusive to one service the services are not exclusive to hardware. That is to say that Steam has to care about users spending time, money, and attention on other services because there is no hardware-purchase barrier to them doing so. They might not be competing with many of the same products, but they are competing over the same wallets and there's nothing to stop most of those users from spending it wherever they want besides grabbing their attention and offering them a reason to spend it with your service first.

Hopefully what Sony is doing with Amazon in terms of allowing them into their ecosystem may produce at least the same sort of imperfect and incomplete competition which benefits PC gamers. Sure PC Gamers like me will lose the one true advantage I think our platform of choice has, but I'd trade any imagined bragging rights over one more platform where the market works slightly better for consumers than it does now. Besides it's not like the market works perfectly in the PC gaming realm, so anything that makes Steam and various PC services feel like they have to improve even a little bit more would be welcomed.
 

ToastyMozart

New member
Mar 13, 2012
224
0
0
Jman1236 said:
Not to flame but if you think about it, PC is more expensive since you have to upgrade individual hardware pieces every 6 months or so just to play the latest games and there's no grantee that they will run because a program you have in the background or your current hardware configuration will not get along with the game.

This is why I mostly stick to console gaming, since you only have to take out a loan every 5-7 years.
Erm, if you have to upgrade your rig every six months, you either are getting seriously conned, have some obsession that you should probably talk to a psychiatrist about, or have a hazardously large hardon for bleeding edge tech.

As a rule of thumb, a rig build from scratch for around $650 should last *at least* around 4 years before having to drop anything to "low" at 1920x1080, at which point about $200 can be spent to replace the video card with a new midrange card (or just get a duplicate of your old one for about $100, if you feel like using Crossfire or SLI). In the meantime, the cash saved by the PC being an open marketplace will have more than reimbursed your original investment.
 

Anaphyis

New member
Jun 17, 2008
115
0
0
LGC Pominator said:
all of whom seem remarkably incapable of noticing the fact that they are just that, obsessives, people who define themselves more by their fucking choice in entertainment hardware than the actual things that they do in life, whilst at the same time possessing an air of victimisation by a society that bends over backwards to allow their preferred entertainment medium to be taken seriously
Yes, console gamers are truly chill and enlightened when they post big and massively ironic text wall rants about pc gamers. Because it's just obsessive fanboy behavior when the others are doing it, right? Are you just trolling or are you seriously not noticing what you are doing?

pumping £2500 into a computer every 6 months
Ah, okay. Trolling it is. Or did you fall into a TARDIS in the 70s where that hyperbole would've been slightly accurate? In that case, watch your mortgage around 2008.
 

Anaphyis

New member
Jun 17, 2008
115
0
0
Jman1236 said:
Not to flame but if you think about it, PC is more expensive since you have to upgrade individual hardware pieces every 6 months.
Uh huh. And your console is visited by a magical moon fairy to regularly improve the 5-year-old hardware that was already bottom-shelf when it was new? Yeah, digging out that worn-out blatant lie is certainly not you trolling, bro.
 

ToastyMozart

New member
Mar 13, 2012
224
0
0
Jacob Wisner said:
Yes for a cross platform title, where it is ported to each platform with some bare minimum of competence, the best *potential* PC gaming experience - just in terms of modability and graphics - is far superior to the optimal experience of any console. It may even be true - and it is for some games - to say that of the *average or better* PC experience. As a long time PC gamer who has owned several consoles, including the PS3 and Xbox 360 most recently, I have to emphasize that as only being true across a subset of the range of experiences. This is not just because there is more variability in PC hardware capability and so the optimal experience on a given setup can be significantly different from the best possible experience, but also because the actual experience on a given setup is sometimes far from what should be optimal.
Snip.
This was a very well thought out and explained assessment, kudos!

I'd say that the main advantage that consoles have is that they -are- more accessible than PC gaming, since everything's laid out very simply (I've even met people with good gaming cards who've never even heard of Steam), and it's pretty much nearly impossible to screw yourself over by doing something out of naivete/stupidity (like those poor bastards who downloaded 8 gigs of malware thinking it was the PC version of GTA 5).
And I do hope that Sony's move with Amazon marks the beginning of a trend. After all, honest competition is good for everyone (look at GPU prices since AMD started turning up the heat in October!).

What bugs me about the perception of PC gaming (and one of many good reasons why the people who use the term "PC Gaming Master Race" need to shut the hell up), is that many people will post about how expensive setting up a gaming rig is using a desktop packing an i5 and in excess of 8 gigs of DDR3. They're a dedicated video card away from a very solid gaming rig! If one with a somewhat flimsy case.
Got a desktop bought within the last 4 years or so? Slap in a 7850 and go for it!

PS: I'd say that for a ~$600 build, I'd advise getting an AMD CPU to make room in the budget for a 7870 (Or R9 270X if you prefer), pretty much any CPU since the Phenom II won't be a bottleneck unless you go start going high-end.
 

Church185

New member
Apr 15, 2009
609
0
0
LazyAza said:
Love how you listed three incredibly bland shooters none of which have anything new or interesting to offer to the genre and thus serve only to prove my point of why buying a console day 1 is silly.

I'm well aware of all the business nonsense behind things needing to sell well upfront but that still doesn't stop the whole situation from being incredibly stupid. At least with the PS3 and 360 their were some ok games that did something new and different, janky and broken many were, but at least they were trying.

This gen its been a whole launch of nothing but bland this and pointless sequel that. And no downloadable games don't count, big budget games are what matter with a console launch and both of them this gen failed to be compelling in that regard and from the looks of the release schedule will continue to be for a while still.
Well, that's like, your opinion man. I'm still having a blast with the games that I have for the system. You may think that the shooters I listed are bland, but Battlefield 4 is one of the most fun multiplayer games I've played in ages. Different strokes for different folks, but I wouldn't say that the games available at launch were pointless.
 

ph0b0s123

New member
Jul 7, 2010
1,689
0
0
Wow what's all this love for PC's from commentators, all of a sudden. It's really nice that people like Yahtzee are waking up to....



Oh, yeah I forgot...
 

Spud of Doom

New member
Feb 24, 2011
349
0
0
If only it was actually affordable to buy a competent gaming PC. Coming as somebody with no existing hardware at all (would need case, PSU, all peripherals, OS and monitor), it comes to something like $1700-$1800nzd for me to buy a new machine. Now making the assumption that you upgrade it for like $400 every 3-4 years, that's going to push it up to about $2000 for a 6-8 year cycle or gaming. Simply put, that's a really hard sale proposition for someone like me. I have a 4 year old laptop that can already play most 2D stuff and older games, so all that expense would basically be just to get onto some of the higher end PC games (e.g. Planetside, Star Citizen) and to me it simply isn't worth it. Those $2000 can easily cover 2 new consoles and a pile of games, especially if I wait a year or so to get them.
 

Zac Jovanovic

New member
Jan 5, 2012
253
0
0
Spud of Doom said:
If only it was actually affordable to buy a competent gaming PC. Coming as somebody with no existing hardware at all (would need case, PSU, all peripherals, OS and monitor), it comes to something like $1700-$1800nzd for me to buy a new machine. Now making the assumption that you upgrade it for like $400 every 3-4 years, that's going to push it up to about $2000 for a 6-8 year cycle or gaming. Simply put, that's a really hard sale proposition for someone like me. I have a 4 year old laptop that can already play most 2D stuff and older games, so all that expense would basically be just to get onto some of the higher end PC games (e.g. Planetside, Star Citizen) and to me it simply isn't worth it. Those $2000 can easily cover 2 new consoles and a pile of games, especially if I wait a year or so to get them.
Are prices really inflated in NZ? Or you're confusing a competent gaming PC with a pointlessly overpowered one :p
I've got a 550 euro machine here I built last night that's running Rome 2 on extreme with 45 stable FPS.
PC gaming is quite a lot cheaper here than console over a longer period, firstly because console prices are a bit inflated and PC parts are not (though they are about to increase VAT on both:( ), and secondly because of big difference in game prices. PC titles get discounted pretty damn fast these days and console titles stay at full price for a very long time.

We calculated my friend's 360 game collection and when you remove the handful of exclusives from the equation we figure he payed almost 1500e more for games than he would've on PC, over the period of 8 years or so. That's enough for 2 great gaming PCs that would easily last 4 years each.

I get that a lot of this is very region dependent, some places have a big used games market for consoles that evens things up somewhat and some have just different pricing on different stuff.
 

LGC Pominator

New member
Feb 11, 2009
420
0
0
Anaphyis said:
LGC Pominator said:
all of whom seem remarkably incapable of noticing the fact that they are just that, obsessives, people who define themselves more by their fucking choice in entertainment hardware than the actual things that they do in life, whilst at the same time possessing an air of victimisation by a society that bends over backwards to allow their preferred entertainment medium to be taken seriously
Yes, console gamers are truly chill and enlightened when they post big and massively ironic text wall rants about pc gamers. Because it's just obsessive fanboy behavior when the others are doing it, right? Are you just trolling or are you seriously not noticing what you are doing?

pumping £2500 into a computer every 6 months
Ah, okay. Trolling it is. Or did you fall into a TARDIS in the 70s where that hyperbole would've been slightly accurate? In that case, watch your mortgage around 2008.

Clearly my comment was misconstrued as an attack, which it was intended to be far from that, being, in part, a response to a massive amount of frustration with personal attacks that have been going on both here and elsewhere online over this whole PC vs Console issue.

I wasn't trying to claim that console gamers are in any way better than PC gamers, if for no other reason than I don't even categorise myself as either a console or a PC gamer, merely someone who plays and enjoys video games, the "rant" as you described it was less of an attack on the specific side that favours PC gaming, rather an expression of a building frustration with a very toxic and intolerant part of the gaming community that has become very prevalent online, having been exposed to a variety of absolutely abhorrent discussions and commentary that can only really be described as bullying of people whose "sin" was to ask about the best way to get good performance out of their GPU for one particular game, and then proceeding to get themselves attacked due to the apparently outdated and "useless" nature of their GPU... which was released in 2012, a whole year more in date than the GPU that I have recently installed in my machine.

Beyond that, I will apologise for the hyperbolic nature of the pricing definition, it was certainly innacurate, though it simply came as a result of an attempt to embellish a point that was clearly lost on the folks here, which I strongly regret, though I do not appreciate being called a troll for expressing a viewpoint.

I hope that this may work towards smoothing over some of the upset my comment seemed to have spawned, that was certainly not my intention, I was merely trying to make an honest criticism of an attitude that seems to be hurting gaming more and more these days, I do love gaming, and it is something I do in a lot of my spare time, I just feel that to a disproportionate amount of our community it is starting to come at the cost of having a healthy life outside of our "gaming lives" and when this devolves into personal attacks based on the fact that people want to do other things than just play video games (I have literally been called out as "not being really one of us" for going to the gym and clubs here before), there is no ill intent in my commentary, simply interest in mutual personal growth.
 

LazyAza

New member
May 28, 2008
716
0
0
Church185 said:
LazyAza said:
Love how you listed three incredibly bland shooters none of which have anything new or interesting to offer to the genre and thus serve only to prove my point of why buying a console day 1 is silly.

I'm well aware of all the business nonsense behind things needing to sell well upfront but that still doesn't stop the whole situation from being incredibly stupid. At least with the PS3 and 360 their were some ok games that did something new and different, janky and broken many were, but at least they were trying.

This gen its been a whole launch of nothing but bland this and pointless sequel that. And no downloadable games don't count, big budget games are what matter with a console launch and both of them this gen failed to be compelling in that regard and from the looks of the release schedule will continue to be for a while still.
Well, that's like, your opinion man. I'm still having a blast with the games that I have for the system. You may think that the shooters I listed are bland, but Battlefield 4 is one of the most fun multiplayer games I've played in ages. Different strokes for different folks, but I wouldn't say that the games available at launch were pointless.
Battlefield 4 is a PC game as well. And it's better on PC to boot so it doesn't really count either. Right now their are no exclusives on PS4 or One I'd buy either system for. I don't really want a One regardless but I'm sure a PS4 will be nice to have once Naughtydog or Insomniac release something cool for it.
 

144_v1legacy

New member
Apr 25, 2008
648
0
0
Anaphyis said:
LGC Pominator said:
pumping £2500 into a computer every 6 months
Ah, okay. Trolling it is. Or did you fall into a TARDIS in the 70s where that hyperbole would've been slightly accurate? In that case, watch your mortgage around 2008.
How is that trolling?

Hyperbole is by definition inaccurate.
 

144_v1legacy

New member
Apr 25, 2008
648
0
0
Anaphyis said:
Jman1236 said:
Not to flame but if you think about it, PC is more expensive since you have to upgrade individual hardware pieces every 6 months.
Uh huh. And your console is visited by a magical moon fairy to regularly improve the 5-year-old hardware that was already bottom-shelf when it was new? Yeah, digging out that worn-out blatant lie is certainly not you trolling, bro.
If you don't keep a PC up with improving technology, games will studder and run badly in general. This is not true for consoles. Because they are completely devoted to their purpose (or at least they used to be), they don't require the same specifications to run games that look graphically comparable to PC's while running smoothly for the length of the console's lifetime. That's why tech faeries aren't required. I don't see how moon faeries would help, but I will say that unnecessary and hyperbolic insults come dangerously close to trolling.
 

Church185

New member
Apr 15, 2009
609
0
0
LazyAza said:
Battlefield 4 is a PC game as well. And it's better on PC to boot so it doesn't really count either. Right now their are no exclusives on PS4 or One I'd buy either system for. I don't really want a One regardless but I'm sure a PS4 will be nice to have once Naughtydog or Insomniac release something cool for it.
The gap between the console Battlefield and PC Battlefield isn't nearly as drastic as it was last gen (Battlefield 4 looks like a PS2 game on 360). I would have to spend much more than $460 to get my PC running Battlefield to the point that I would notice a difference. On top of that, I have way more more friends that would rather play it on console. You may argue superiority all you want, but it's not going to diminish my experience.

I respect that there isn't anything you would like to play on it yet, especially if you already own a powerful PC. But, to a person in my position, trying to talk others out of something they want just sounds like arrogance. Don't add to PC gamers having a bad name.

EDIT: This is my final word on the issue. Debating between platforms is pointless, PC is more powerful, but I think preference is more important. The gaming community as a whole needs to quit shaming each other for what they enjoy. I won't respond to any replies.
 

Spud of Doom

New member
Feb 24, 2011
349
0
0
Zac Jovanovic said:
Spud of Doom said:
If only it was actually affordable to buy a competent gaming PC. Coming as somebody with no existing hardware at all (would need case, PSU, all peripherals, OS and monitor), it comes to something like $1700-$1800nzd for me to buy a new machine. Now making the assumption that you upgrade it for like $400 every 3-4 years, that's going to push it up to about $2000 for a 6-8 year cycle or gaming. Simply put, that's a really hard sale proposition for someone like me. I have a 4 year old laptop that can already play most 2D stuff and older games, so all that expense would basically be just to get onto some of the higher end PC games (e.g. Planetside, Star Citizen) and to me it simply isn't worth it. Those $2000 can easily cover 2 new consoles and a pile of games, especially if I wait a year or so to get them.
Are prices really inflated in NZ? Or you're confusing a competent gaming PC with a pointlessly overpowered one :p
I've got a 550 euro machine here I built last night that's running Rome 2 on extreme with 45 stable FPS.
PC gaming is quite a lot cheaper here than console over a longer period, firstly because console prices are a bit inflated and PC parts are not (though they are about to increase VAT on both:( ), and secondly because of big difference in game prices. PC titles get discounted pretty damn fast these days and console titles stay at full price for a very long time.

We calculated my friend's 360 game collection and when you remove the handful of exclusives from the equation we figure he payed almost 1500e more for games than he would've on PC, over the period of 8 years or so. That's enough for 2 great gaming PCs that would easily last 4 years each.

I get that a lot of this is very region dependent, some places have a big used games market for consoles that evens things up somewhat and some have just different pricing on different stuff.
The prices for PC hardware here are on average about 30% higher than they would be in USA, after considering conversion rates. I'm not sure how it compares to EU, since I haven't really checked. One major factor is the cost of monitors and inputs, which end up being about 20% of the cost on their own ($300-350, roughly), and another $100 for the OS. The price I quote above is for building a PC with an i5 (3rd or 4th gen, non-overclock) and a GTX770 or R9 280X. A mid-high PC, but nothing crazy. If anything, our console prices are inflated less than PC parts here this time around. Although that wasn't the case early last gen.

The game pricing thing is pretty arguable, since I never buy my games on release. Console games are usually below half price within like 6-12 months of release, at which point I start considering them. The difference really is not as big as people seem to think it is. In fact for major releases by big publishers it is almost always cheaper for me to buy a physical console import shipped from the UK than it is to spend $90usd for the latest COD game on steam [http://i.imgur.com/K4OgjCU.png] or something.
 

mokes310

New member
Oct 13, 2008
1,898
0
0
Absolutely spot on about Forza 5. I was a huge fan of the series...then XBOX made their announcements about the One and I was like, "I dunno..." Then I read about how much less 5 has compared to 4 and I said, "well, I'll definitely not be buying an XBOX now. Thanks for taking the decision out of my hands, Microsoft & Turn 10."