Cliffy B: the current PC model is broken

It went wrong whenever i became the norm to have to upgrade your PC to the uber best specs every 6 months to enjoy any new games.

Why PC developers insists on ALWAYS embracing the newest hardware to make their games run the best is beyond me. They should make them work the best at a standard set a year earlier and then if your rig is beyond that strength, that kudos to you, you get to enjoy it, too.

The graphics chip makers don't help, either, as they roll out $800 chipsets that become the new "standard" every couple months.

Disarray isn't even strong enough of a word to describe PC gaming. Ruin is more like it.

Can't argue with that logic. PC gaming is far from dead but the landscape is going to look more and more like what he described in the future. Especially with pirating being so easy on the platform.

i agree with bradicate & if your the type that feels mouse and keyboard are more responsive there are consoles where you can use mouse and keyboard to play fps. i think its jus a matter of time before consoles begin to cash in on the mmo experience that pc games have and once that happens pc gaming will have even less cash flow but even so i dont see pc gaming disappearing.

Shows how much that twit knows.

He forgot to mention that Gears is broken on the 360 too.

oooo snap!

Just because his game didnt do so well doesnt mean pc gaming is dying to 'casual games'. obviously he's never played sins of a solar empire.

I agree with BRadicate.

That is EXACTLY what happened. Vanguard (lol), Crysis, Oblivion, all of it required the highest spec possible at the time to be enjoyable. Even going back to SimCity 4, it chugged a bit even on the high end machines of the day.

I play WoW on a computer that's nearly five years old now, and probably will continue to for at least one more. My wife plays the Sims2 on a PC that's as old as mine, and only now, at the 6th or 7th expansion pack, is she really concerned about not being able to run the new content, and that's only for lack of RAM/HD space.

The titles that rule the day right now run on damn near anything, and that's built into the business model. Considering consoles come ready to go, don't have hardware specs that you may need to tweak on an individual basis and are not plagued by external factors like OS and driver updates, its easier for people to get in and just play.

Oh shit, I thought I was having fun with my PC. Oh well, I guess I'll sell it and buy a 360 so I can be one of the cool kids.

Oh and sorry for the post assault here, but another thing came to mind.

If PC ports weren't so damn shoddy, maybe they would do better and that includes Gears of War. If a new 360 game can run on a console that came out almost 3 years ago, why can new PCs often hardly run them. Often these PC games are produced as an after thought "better get some money out of it, even if little, than none at all"

I predict Mass Effect will be a lag fest on most machines.

Nice debate.


For me it came down to the almighty $$$$. I played PC games until the Xbox came out and that was the first console I seriously got involved in. Plus I didn't have the money to continue to upgrade my PC to the necessary specs to play the games I wanted, and I'm not talking top of the line either. Also there wasn't a lot of games on the PC that interested me.

Keep in mind too, that playing a console game with a friend is as simple as having them come over and pick up a controller or just logging onto Live. Can't do that with a PC. And sometimes getting all the crap to work just so you can play with a friend online is frustrating.

PC gaming is not dead by any means, WoW proves this. But the type of game on the PC that is popular is different from popular console games. RTS's, RPG's(western mostly), certain FPS's and Simulations will all be better on the PC, without a doubt.

X3 and B-radicate both have good points. But the simple truth is this, consoles are easy for everyone. For the devs, for the consumers, for the manufacturers, it's just easier. And there is obviously more money in making games for consoles first and then PC's.

Unless you are Blizzard.

Cliff Blezinski, if you look up douchebag in the dictionary, you see his face. Right in between of doofus and dumbass.

See, the problem is, there are plenty of games for the PC! "Hardcore" gamers are just snobs who are all, "Oh, I can't play _____ old game because the graphics are from 2 gens ago and look like shit." We perpetuate this, and thus kill the fun. I go back and play older games I missed out on, maybe smaller awesome games, and some newer ones too like the Orange Box, and they all run fine. So what if a game is old? Is it fun? Can you look past the older graphics? That's what we should be doing; graphics do not make every game. If we don't look past them, then it's not going to get any better, esp. in the "games as art" department.

"There is still Crysis but that's pretty much it. and I'm pretty sure Crysis will hit consoles un altered"

That's not true, because the biggest gaming franchise is to this day still on the PC and that is World of Warcraft.

Just think about it, 10 million suscribers paying an average of $10 a month (adjusted for asian market pay as you go) that is 100 million dollars of income right there. Subtract from that the upkeep required to keep the employees happy and servers running and you still have a huge profit margin. This is the type of profit that even Rockstar could only dream to achieve with their GTA franchise.

As Tubatic already mentioned, I think the successful PC games of the future will go the way of the Wii - you won't need the best hardware to run them, but they will use the unique capabilities of the system to make it attractive (see MMOs for example).

I think one reason PC doesn't sell as many copies of a game is because there's too much pirating anymore. You know one PC owner with the orange box from a store and 7 more who got keygens and illegally installed it. I think that we, the gamers, are killing PC gaming because we want everything for free and it's pretty damn lame...

I just hate to spend SO much freaking $ on PC gear just to play games. Otherwise I would PC game all day. I'm a graphics whore, but I can't afford gpu's that cost 8 or 9 hundred bucks.

hell, games like Crysis are part of the problem. Sure its beautiful buy its impossible to run in in full specs. Maybe they should of spent less time on graphics and more on gameplay. Cause if you require your audience to spend 3K on a computer and then 60 on the actual game your really cutting your market into a small segment.

Also: You don't need to play Crysis at very high to have it look stunning. I've already posted about this in the PC Gaming Alliance article, but I've built a $800 machine that runs Crysis as a great framerate on high. Very high was meant for the theoretical future PC, just like Doom 3's ultra setting.

There's no secret EA mandate demanding you to play Crysis at very high or not at all.

I think cliffyb is right, whithout getting into a lenghthy post, HD consoles replace the need for a beefy pc.

To those saying it's a temporary phenomenon, there's a key difference this time: consoles can hit high resolutions at steady framerates. Sure, in a couple years there will be some graphics whore game come out, but by then new consoles will be on the way.

While I agree with you in principle, Mr Lazy and martinine, you are both grossly over exaggerating. A GOOD new GPU will cost you in the region of $250 and a high end PC in the region of 1k.

But that is still a lot of money.
A) Buy a new GPU
B) Buy a Wii or add $100 and buy an Xbox

In theory the PC is a cash cow. We talk about the console wars here a lot - Wii vs Xbox360 vs PS3, but look at the distribution of the PC. Even people that don't have a Wii have a computer! The saturation of PCs in the population is much higher than that of any console.
Companies like Blizzard got it right, because they optimize their games, spent a lot of time on art direction over polygon count and make game that almost anyone can play on any machine and still look attractive. Look at SC2, it looks like something that could have been made over a year ago. Does it still look good? Yeah. Will I still buy it? Of course! And a legit copy too because the multiplayer is so damn good.

I think a lot of you are missing the point. It isn't about whether a game plays better on console or PC, it's about where it SELLS better. And that, hands down, is the console market. there will always be good hardcore games on the PC and specifically made for PC, but the console version of any of those will 9 times out of 10 outsell the hell out of it and that's the point.

Also about M&K control vs Dual Stick for FPS: Let's stop arguing about this since it's really preference and it also depends on the game. Personally, I prefer the controller since I value analog movement over pixel perfect aim. Aim assist doesn't make the game any less fun for me so that's not a big deal to me at all. But if a game is not optimized for the controller, then I 'd rather play it on PC. Orange box for example controls kind of shitty on the consoles because it wasn't optimized for the controller.

AgentMOO: I don't call 720p a high resolution.

People here are exaggerating the cost of PC gaming. I have a 3 years old PC and the only thing I upgraded was the graphics card and that cost me less than $150. And I can still play current games. Not at very high resolutions but you don't need that to enjoy a game.

About the piracy, it's not a recent phenomenon and it didn't hinder PC gaming in past very much so I don't see why it will now. Look at things like The Sims that sell like hot cakes even when you can find them easily on the likes of TPB. If a game is good people will buy it.

don't care what the point is, the fact that cliffyB, the ignorant asshat, goes on the MTV blog, blurting out stupid opinions about "where pc gaming is going", when he obviously favors consoles, is infuriating.

it's not supposed to only be about sales numbers, it's about making fun games. i'm (hopefully) going to make games as a career, and while paying the bill is nice, repeatedly churning out crap for sales numbers isn't good for anyone.

and saying they're "first and foremost PC devs" is stupid. if pc's were their focus, gears, and unreal would be optimized for pc, and would have come out first for pc and been ported, instead of building the game around multiplatform playability

(this is me just ranting because a book i have to read for one of my game history classes plays him out to be a hero in the game industry during the post columbine era, which is fucking stupid)

and have people noticed that as we approach a more user friendly and application capable console, the price has slowly been approaching that of pc's? (with the exception of the wii)
ps3's cost just under a thousand dollars to make! put that same amount of money into a pc, and you can play all the same games and have them look identical, if not the pc looking better.

this whole pc vs console crap is played out. we don't know if one will go under. stop predicting otherwise. just let the market fucking play itself out, instead of bickering incessantly about things that don't even matter that much.

I grew up useing a controller, I will countinue to use a controller for my games. There are some good games on the computer but it will never replace a nice controller in my hands.

I'm gonna agree with everyone saying the constant need for better hardware is the problem. I'd be more into PC games if developers would get over using up as many resources as possible. Just because computers exist with 4GB of RAM doesn't mean the designers should be expecting everyone to have it to play their games...(and yes, I'm being hyperbolic)

Plus, system requirements can get blood confusing. "Recommended: 128MB graphics card" - okay, mine's 256MB, that should be a problem, until I install it and it still won't run...an hour of going through forums looking for answer later, I find out it's because I'm missing something called Shader 3.0 Support...even though it's not mentioned in the system requirements anywhere.

At least I know if I get a PS3 game, all I need to play it is a PS3.

That and it bugs me that this compy I bought a year ago, Intel dual core, 2GB of RAM, and 256MB video can't run anything besides the Orange Box. Gimme a break...