Carmack: PCs “an order of magnitude” more powerful than consoles

Shamikebab · 8 Jun 2011 at 23:37

LeJosh said:
But Blizzard and Valve were making games before those?

Now they have more money to run more projects at once and actually take their time making games, it seems. But nonetheless there is a nice polish to their games when finally released.

Yeah but games are far more expensive to produce now than they were when Valve and Blizzard were growing. Now one failure can mean the end of a company.

I'm not saying the casual approach isn't good, obviously it's ideal for fans but it just isn't possible for 95% of projects.

Gerard · 8 Jun 2011 at 23:38

AWPC said:
Yeah but even Valve are not doing PC specific right now & keep re-using the dated source engine its all obviously down to money & it seems no-one is willing to make PC only or PC optimised big budget games anymore

Source will be replaced eventually. I feel that when HL3 is announced it'll have a new engine to boot. Source may be dated but its still capable of nice visuals

NZXT30 · 8 Jun 2011 at 23:40

lol at valve fanboys their games are console ports these days.

Shamikebab · 8 Jun 2011 at 23:41

Source Engine is still capable of stunning, Portal 2 looks brilliant.

Gerard · 8 Jun 2011 at 23:43

NZXT30 said:
lol at valve fanboys their games are console ports these days.

One word response to that: Balls

ic1male · 8 Jun 2011 at 23:49

AWPC said:
Yeah but even Valve are not doing PC specific right now & keep re-using the dated source engine its all obviously down to money & it seems no-one is willing to make PC only or PC optimised big budget games anymore

That was one of the things John Carmack was on about. Although he's an engineer and likes making new engines, it's not cost or time effective to keep starting from scratch. He said he is going to start reusing a lot more code and just adding new bits here and there. Like Valve do with Source.

Valentino · 8 Jun 2011 at 23:50

IMO the only way to get pc as big as consoles again would be to start producing pcs like consoles. Make them smaller, HTPC sized and make them run from the word go, provide a website that will tell you exactly what graphic options to run certain games at depending on the pc model you bought. The reason consoles have a bigger market is because you don't have to be smart to use one.

Princey · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:02

The biggest boost to the PC games industry would for PC and Laptop manufactures to include more capable GPUs. Most desktops and Laptops these days have fast multicore CPU's with 4GB+ ram but with shoddy cards such as Intel HD3000 or other types of intergrated GPU's. Hell even some of the 'Gaming' machines you see today at Best Buy or PC World have i7's ect but have Geforce 430 or a Radeon HD 4530. It's a shame it really is and annoys the hell out of me. I'm supprised the intergrated GPU's haven't advanced as quick as they should have.

ic1male · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:04

Yes that's a ^^ good point. id are almost there with getting RAGE running at 30fps on Intel integrated GPUs.

AWPC · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:07

Gerard said:
Source will be replaced eventually. I feel that when HL3 is announced it'll have a new engine to boot. Source may be dated but its still capable of nice visuals

HL3 is vapourware

Valve are not bothered about it & Gabe is very rude whenever asked the question which is strange considering HL made him close to a billionaire by now according to Wired!!!

I think the people @ Valve who made HL2 are quite wealthy because of Steam so their motivation is not what it was to sit down for years & make a stunning HL3.............

Gerard · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:08

AWPC said:
HL3 is vapourware Valve are not bothered about it & Gabe is very rude whenever asked the question which is strange considering HL made him close to a billionaire by now according to Wired!!!

Ive never heard anyone say he was rude when being asked about HL3, by all accounts he seems a very community driven guy.

James J · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:14

Shamikebab said:
Yeah but games are far more expensive to produce now than they were when Valve and Blizzard were growing. Now one failure can mean the end of a company.

I'm not saying the casual approach isn't good, obviously it's ideal for fans but it just isn't possible for 95% of projects.

Even thats not trust for indie developers though, which are doing disturbingly well in the PC market. Just look at terraria or minecraft as examples, with seriously impressive sales figures for very low development costs.

Every company has to start somewhere and you cant really dive straight into $100 million dollar budgets for a game when you have no proven back catalogue, as you wouldn't get funding from banks or partners for a start.

danewesley · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:32

i love the fact that all these arguments are essentially about graphics, not content, as said above minecraft and terraria have amazing sales figures for such low development costs, constantly patched and most people i know play them. i think it comes down to the user, people like to have things maxed out, looking as real as possible etc, they dont give a crap about gameplay, storyline etc as much anymore.....if they did we wouldnt have these silly arguments in every other thread.

Nerusy · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:37

James J said:
Even thats not trust for indie developers though, which are doing disturbingly well in the PC market. Just look at terraria or minecraft as examples, with seriously impressive sales figures for very low development costs.

Every company has to start somewhere and you cant really dive straight into $100 million dollar budgets for a game when you have no proven back catalogue, as you wouldn't get funding from banks or partners for a start.

As was stated PC is left with indie, mmos and occasional strategy games. Rest of the genres want to be on consoles.

For last last couple of years as far as I know the PC games market has been shrinking. There's only so much money a project can get from a PC game. There is no incentive to do a big budget PC game because the market is no big enough to return a profit to it. While in the console market the horsepower is not big enough to require big budget to drive the technology forward.

Blizzard has been living off WoW and not trying anything new or exciting, sc2 is not moving technology forwards its unbalanced sc1 with better graphics that was a sure thing...that still got much less sales than mw2.

Valve has been living off old engine, they even admitted in heignsight they should have invested more time and money into improving their engine. Portal 2 ps3 steamworks, L4D x-box exclusive, they're tasting console money and they're liking it. They even already said they're not developing a new engine, they're just threw a lot more people to improve the source engine...and only recently.

Now with both Valve and blizzard(diablo 3) dipping their toes in the console market you can only expect them to start concentrating on console sales more instead of PC.

There is absolutely no incentive for the developers to invest lots of money into PC only games and drive the technology forward because the market is not big enough.

Look at ps3, its easier to develop it for xbox and then port it to ps3, ps3 has more horsepower but all games run worse on ps3 because they're all ported. It breaks my heart when such amazing ps3-only games get poor poor sales and no surprise money is primerely...at least was last year in xbox.

You can see how the industry's progress is slowed down by what creates most profit with least cost(effort time). Why make a PC games when the same game released on x-box would yield more money? The answer is what is happening right now.

Ozzie Dave · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:40

So basically, Carmack needs to spend $100m on making a game eh?....how about you make a deep and creative pc game for $10m instead? (CDP made Witcher 1 for about $8m) so its doable.

Oh wait, its all about fancy graphics, cinematics and mega hype campaigns these days though...

Princey · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:45

Last figure I read was around 230m gaming capable machines out there. Thats more than the entire combined console sales this gen.

Ozzie Dave · 9 Jun 2011 at 00:53

^ yeah, but its too much hard work for them to be creative and capture that huge market. Much easier to dazzle the casual crowd.

Nerusy · 9 Jun 2011 at 01:05

It's not just graphics, the game play is limited, its dumbed down, the story is banal and repeated. They do the same game for consoles and its paying off, why bother with trying to be creative? Rare stories of success is not the representation of the current well being of the industry.

You can see that developers with each year create the same game barely with any new features and try to shift it as new, l4d2, COD series and now they are charging absolutely criminal amount of money for map packs and guess what people are buying them, what does that mean for us? It means its only going to get worse.

I heard new cod will have a subscription fee. Why? Because they tried it with map packs and they saw average gamer is stupid enough to dish so much money for so little content.

They produce crappy games becasue that's good enough for the average player (consoles) there is no drive to move forward in any direction be it story, graphics or gamplay.

This post may be more rant than anything else

Helveticat · 9 Jun 2011 at 02:02

There are far more great games on PC than I ever get the time to play, so it's all fine for me.

Smokey Deza · 9 Jun 2011 at 03:18

I don't think the PC market has shrunk as much as people claim. Yeah there is more money in the console market but there are still companies out there besides Valve and Blizzard producing successful PC exclusives. Creative Assembly and Best Way are a few.

Stronghold 3 is coming out soon so if Firefly Studios can profit selling a game that lets you build a castle then it really can't be that bad surely?