The State of PC Gaming

[D-Bone]

Well, I've seen this article mentioned and talked about in a few places lately. So I figured everyone should read it. Also curious to see what everyone thinks about it.

http://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?c=1&AID=21895&u=0

[Malice]

All in all, I think he makes some good points. However, I'm not sure I really follow two points. 1) The pizza analogy, hmmm, well if you ordered pizza and it came cold then you wouldn't pay for it. Just because you get excited for a game and expect it to be great but it comes out late and sucks does NOT mean you have to go out and buy it! So IMO companies that do that and do it often should just disentigrate on their own. 2) The reason PC games are more buggy and have a harder time meeting schedules is pretty obvious and this guy should know it. With a PC game you have to make it work on people's machines that can have a million different versions of HW, drivers and also multiple operating systems. People fuck up their machines and crazy things can happen and they are required to try to work around these issues. To develope for a console is very stable, the HW is all the same, the OS is the same, and you CAN"T fuck it up with spyware and viruses etc. So when you test a game on a console you know EXACTLY what its going to be like when the end user gets it, with PC games its harder to know. Now if they can just get consoles to look as nice as a PC game then I too will switch over but as long as I have to play on my TV and I can't afford a good HD tv I think consoles still look like crap and I'll have nothing to do with them.

The stuff he said about pirating and publishers, I pretty much agree with.

So who else thinks something about this?

[Ghost]

Well, first of all... Malice this is not school. No three page essays required. :P

I pretty much agree with his point of view. I do think that Stardock is one of the best game developers out there. I played Galctic Civilizations on OS/2 and it rocked. It was probably a better game than the original Masters of Orion, and that's saying something. I do also think that the new version they did for Windows was pretty much bug free. They didn't have to mess with 3D graphics and such so they didn't have to deal with a whole category of problems, but they really did a good job of testing the game before release. It really is possible to test a game enough so it works on the systems out there that aren't screwed up by user cluelessness.

[Dante]

Well, first of all... Malice this is not school. No three page essays required.

wurd

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