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PC Devs "Shoot Themselves In the Foot"
By Kris Graft
November 6, 2008
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"Of course people are going to pirate your game more, because they don't want to invest in your game first. They want to try it first for free [to see if it's compatible with their hardware]."
No, PC gaming isn't "dying," but it sure would help if more game developers made games that work on lower-spec rigs.
That's according to Tim Holman, senior producer for Relic Entertainment and the Company of Heroes RTS franchise on PC.
"I think one of the things that hurt PC gaming is PC developers," he said. "If you make a game with such high-end requirements that only people with a $6,000 PC can play it at a decent framerate, of course your sales are going to drop."
Holman continued, "And of course people are going to pirate your game more, because they don't want to invest in your game first. They want to try it first for free [to see if it's compatible with their hardware].
"I think PC developers shoot themselves in the foot to a large degree. A lot of companies are guilty of that."
When Company of Heroes launched in 2006, it did require a decent PC to play the game as it was meant to be played. But over two years, Relic has been able to exploit the versatile Essence Engine and deliver a game that still looks superb on a modern rig, developing expansions without upping system requirements. The company recently announced the CoH expansion, Tales of Valor, due in spring 2009.
Holman specifically said that World of Warcraft house Blizzard has the right formula for reaching the mass market with not only accessible gameplay, but also forgiving system requirements.
"...Every game you buy from them is one you can play them on a PC from about five years ago. It's no big secret. I know when I buy a Blizzard game, I'm not going to have to upgrade anything.
"But 95 percent of the PC games out there, I have to read the back of the box."
PC games business
Along the same lines, Holman commented on the never-ending "PC gaming is dead/dying" debate.
"I laugh hysterically whenever I hear that PC gaming is dead. Every time I hear a person saying, 'PC games are dying,' or 'PC games are dead,' particularly if they're a competitor, I fully agree with them--and I encourage them to get out of the space as soon as possible, just so I don't have to compete with them," Holman said, laughing.
"I'm in downtown Vancouver right now and there are several skyscrapers, and in front of me I'm seeing probably 200,000 PCs, and not a single Xbox or PS3.
"Now granted those aren't high-end gaming PCs, they don't have 10 gigs of RAM and they're not all quad cores, but they can play games."
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Did he just say that people pirate games because the games are too high spec? Rubbish, I know he's trying to make a point but come on that's just a lie, most of friends pirates games on the pc and no matter how much they liked it there is no way they'd buy it...
I have to confess I've held and still do hold the belief that pc gaming, while maybe not technically dead, is on blizzard administered life support. Im not even sure its right to say that wow is holding up pc gaming because I believe the majority of wow players are not the same kind of customers that play/care about cod4, gow2, halo 3 etc. I think its largely irrelevant what platform WoW is running on it would make huge sums of money regardless.
Single mothers and chain smoking asian players who are able to play with one hand while holding a ciggarette in the other are not an accurate barometer of pc gaming health in my view.
I do agree with a fairly recent column from Ea employee peter moore, who in defense of some canned pc ports from the studio cited piracy, dwindling returns and a belief that a "lean in experience vs a sit back experience" is the way forward.
what exactly does a £1,000 pc machine experience of fallout 3 give you over a 42" hdtv powered xbox 360 version? in my opinion its very little and even arguably less.
I applaud Tim Holman.
The last PC game I bought was UT 2004, and I've not upgraded my PC since. I've a 360 and a PS2, and my PC runs everything I need at a 2003-5 spec.
Now, this has effectively locked my out of the PC games market, unless I spend £300-£500 upgrading my motherboard, CPU, memory and graphics card.
Not going to happen. I'm older, with too many other things to spend money on.
I have massive hard drives, and 1Gb RAM is fine for my desktop use for the time being. I'm a system admin, so I optimise my system to run very well in XP with 1Gb RAM.
I don't need to upgrade, my A-I-W card is fantastic for MPEG-2/4 video capture, so what am I upgrading for? To play badly optimised, glitchy games that freeze my system? There's nothing else apart from iTunes that demands an upgrade, so the game developers are shooting themselves in the foot.
I'm a big gamer, but maybe I'll buy another PC game in the next 3 years, when I can play Burnout Paradise and GTA IV on a cheap system.
Their loss.
I disagree with this article. PC games run just fine on pretty dated hardware. My system is 5 years old single core system, with a 3 year old 7800GS AGP card but I can play all the latest games, with mostly highest graphics settings so long as I'm happy with 1024x768 and do without anitaliasing and don't mind if I'm not getting 60 - 100 fps, but somewhere in the region of 25-30. The Witcher, Crysis, Far Cry 2, Assasins creed, gears of war, COD4, Race driver Grid and recently Fallout 3 all play very well on my system.
Only reason you might need to buy some expensive high end system for $1000 - $2000 is if you want something like 2560x1,600 with AA at high framerates. You can get by with a pretty dated system that was middle of the road 3 years ago.
Soon it will be time to upgrade, but it's not a requirement. If you feel you can't like with a game at max resolution, settings and FPS and want to spend a ridiculous sum of $6000 so be it. (would be quite a difficult thing to do unless you have multiple 30" monitors). Without those monitors I'd say you were being ripped off big time.
I couldn't play on a system like that. not now. maybe when I first got into PC gaming, but these days I won't compromise on quality, Do you find it spoils the experience ? Each to his own and all that, but I would just get too frustrated with the lag and the loading times.. Until recently I was running a dog of P4HT 3ghz with a 6800GT agp, I would run COD4 happily at 1024x768. Although I wouldn't have said it was the most satisfying of experiences. But at time is was a means to an end.
Console games get better and better as the lifespan of the equiptment matures, notice how newer generation PS3 games are getting really handle on the technology. Now that Dev's are starting to get a real grasp on the sdk.
The real shame is that PC equiptment bearly gets the chance to reach adolencents because within week or months the technology is bettered.. Surely the process of constant revision is no sustainable in the long term. Is THAT what we are experiencing now ?
Just thought I'd jump in here. It's a myth among non-PC gamers that you have to upgrade your PC hardware every six months or less. I built a PC for $1,000 a year and a half ago and it runs Fallout 3 prettier than any of the consoles on nearly the highest setting. I think only the hardcore technophiles will upgrade their hardware within a period of a few months. (Even those people can eBay their previous hardware to offset the price for the latest and greatest hardware.)
That said, it'd be ignorant to say that console gaming isn't more accessible for the masses, and it is interesting to wonder just how far PC devs could push hardware if someone magically said, "okay, no more new hardware introductions for the next five years."
But then again, that would take away a lot of the fun of PC gaming, which is its flexibility. I love my consoles too, but I think that console-centric gamers misunderstand PC gaming pretty often.
I'm not saying that you have to upgrade every six months. But that doesn't stop Nvidia from saturating the market with new cards. 8series, 9Series and the new 2series in the shops, all overlapping one another, all with various different models within the series. Isn’t this a little bit excessive ? That's all I'm asking.
Surely it's more difficult for developers to counter the hundred of different type of hardware that are availible for PC, much more so than if they were developing on the console.
Somebody, whether it be nvidia, ATi or Intel. Needs to set a benchmark that they can follow for the next 3 or four years. It's just taken me at least a year to build a high end computer that has already started slidding backward in terms of modern games. Yeah Fallout looks great on PC all that AA and AF to make everything look so lovely at 1680x1050 but Least PS3 or Xbox Dev’s don’t have to worry about the hardware changing at short notice.
Console are great, they can produce a very similar experience to a PC for a fraction of the price, appealing to a much wider audience. Picture quality doe degrade depending on the resolution in use, but the games are just a good, sometimes better. Your absolutly right, the console will always remain more accessible to the masses. But shouldn't the PC user base be entitled to the same accessibility. I have recently bought a PS3 and in my mind this illustrates perfectly my £300 console put my PC that cost 5times as much to shame. And that, I’m affraid is the sad truth about PC gaming.
You're absolutely right about the wide array of hardware that PC devs have to deal with. See our current top story. (Paul Wedgwood interview.)
First, it's 'adolescence'. Second, the statement that PC hardware is replaced with such frequency really doesn't hold any ground - sure graphics cards and cpu's get faster, but the underlying architecture remains the same, and from a programmatic perspective (as a coder) the tools change to much less a degree than the console sdk's do whenever they do change. API's like DirectX and OpenGL (even nVidia's CUDA platform to a lesser degree) standardize PC development rather than obfuscate it. It's even easier for upstart PC developer these days with platforms like XNA. Gone are the days where game devs are required to use C++ (although the best ones still do).
Thanks Teach, for the correction....
I agree with you that all the underlying tools and API's remain the same and I wasn't saying that it had kit had to be replaced with such frequency, but I am damn sure that with so many different CPU's GFX cards and motherboard on the market. Companies like Nvidia are damn sure that they'll encourage you to buy them through clever marketing or telling you that you games won’t be the same without it.
This has a massive knock on effect to how the dev's will develope a game and what feature it's given, because end user expects that the new feature gets used. There was a massive rush for DX10 cards at the begining of the year, everyone thought it would be the next big thing, especialy with vista. It was going to do so many things for PC games, a whole new level of fidelity. I'm sorry, but microsoft failed miserably and now there already talking about dx11, they haven’t even got 10 right and their scrapping it. Dx9 was just starting to blossom. But standby for 11 and yet another can of worms spilling out over the floor. These are my conserns and the conserns of many.
With the PS3 or Xbox, dev's play to the strengths of the hardware and everybody gets the same gaming experiences. On my own personal PC my experience of a game will be vastly different to say "Evaks" with his Single Core and 7800GS agp and that the point and the major limitation of PC.When you see a game running on a next gen console. You’d expect more given the money that you’ve weighed out on your new PC, whether is be a modest single core or a monster quad core, the gaming experience that you attain should at least be similar to the experience you get on a console. But in my experience this has never been the case.
PC gaming pre-dates consoles and is far to established to ever die, although with consoles in someway equalling them in terms of technical aspirations. PC hardware manufactorers and developer are really going to have to up their game
It sure is refreshing to hear the comments of people with actual intelligence. I wish him and his company well.
God bless Holman for stating the obvious. He should do seminars for cranky PC devs who think nothing is ever their fault.
**CLAP** **CLAP** **CLAP** Well said. I look at these buildings too and say every last one of those offices have at least 30-45 computers per floor...Imagining me being able to send them messages to each and everyone of them and selling my client's wares or advertisements...Its a beautiful thing... Downtown LA looks so beautiful...