The fact that developers have to cater to multiple platforms that have hardware limitations and different operating systems has led to worse quality of games of time. Console exclusives are anti-competitive, monopolistic, and they lead to a terrible consumer experience.
Most developers counter that they do console exclusives because there’s too much piracy on the PC gaming market.
No idea if that’s true, or if it even matters.
Personally I think the quality of games has suffered mostly through pressure from investors (and fans) to release them as early as possible, and focus is now overwhelmingly on multiplayer online experiences rather than carefully curated level and mission design.
too much piracy on the PC gaming market.
Nah, it’s not been about piracy for a while, and even when it was about piracy it wasn’t just about piracy. PC development is inherently harder because there isn’s a locked hardware target, so compatibility is difficult and expensive to service. And for a long time, PC sales were just much, much lower than console sales.
Both of those things have changed for a while, partially through the reduction of options in the PC market, partially through PC hardware manufacturers increasingly doing the job of servicing big games with dedicated drivers and partially through Valve becoming a closed, DRM-enabled platform more comparable to a console. You can chart that process, and it’s long, difficulty and full of ambiguity.
I have lots of thoughts on “game quality” as well, but it’s hard to know what people even mean with that sometimes (bugs? design? content?). In general games today are… kinda great. Last year in particular was mind blowing. That said, games can get huge, expensive and complicated now in ways they couldn’t really a few decades ago. But it’s also true that games are more varied. Every game in 1994 looked more or less like every other game because the hardware could only do so many things. Today you can play retro 8-bit games AND effectively CG film-quality narrative experiences on the same hardware. It’s crazy how expansive, varied and creative games have become.
Even if one thinks quality has gone down, though, it clear isn’t because of consoles.
Really? Some of the best games out there are (or were for a long time) exclusive to one platform.
Of much rather have a God of War, or Tears of the Kingdom, or a Half Life Alyx than a sea of endless Assassins Creed or Call of Duty games.
You want to look at who is killing PC games, look no further than Nvidia’s pricing and pushing devs to use RT features their competitors cannot match.
This notion that hardware limits hold games back is nonsense and could only come from someone with no development experience. Hardware benchmarks have only benefited the ecosystem of games. Without those benchmarks and the gradual standardization of architecture that the last two gens of consoles have provided the indie market would not be flourishing the way it is. Not to mention it forces AAA titles to actually optimize their shit. Imagine a world where developers had no incentive to care about performance? “tough shit buy a new GPU.” A true gamers paradise.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Water will reach its own level so to speak, if a developer releases a game that is far too much for a majority of gamers to run, those gamers won’t buy the game and it won’t sell. Obviously that also isn’t always necessarily true, but enough terribly optimized games have released recently to be met with 40% rating on Steam that I’d like to think this is the case. Are some developers going to do it anyway? Absolutely, but that’s true regardless. I think that no matter what, indie developers will always tend to keep their games lightweight either by principle or by design necessity, and bigger game studios would also sorta get the message and keep their games reasonable. With obvious exceptions… goddamn 400 GB games these days.
The hardware is only a part of it. A keyboard and mouse provide infinite controller configurations. How anyone can play a shooter without them has always puzzled me.
You do realize controller options exist right? (On PCs)
Consoles are shit. PC gaming is max.
Why is it the responsibility of, say, Nintendo to make all their games available on all platforms? They make their own hardware and games that are optimized to run on that hardware. Sure, the Switch is inferior to a modern pc in performance and all that but at the end of the day Nintendo chose what their hardware can do and make games accordingly. The fact that most developers and publishers want to release their games on all platforms is not the responsibility of Nintendo. If the most important thing is that every game runs the same on every platform there is no need for hardware like the Switch, which, like it or not, has done something new and interesting. Kinda the same with VR. I personally don’t care for VR but it’s at least something different.
Consoles like the Nintendo switch yes, but exclusives actually help drive competition, as long as they eventually come to other platforms I’m happy
I prefer platform agnosticism, but this is demonstrably not true.
Consoles are a set hardware target, which has been really helpful for the PC market. Once all consoles landed on a similar architecture (Xbox 360 era and beyond), consoles became very helpful to set a baseline for hardware that then PC can leapfrog over.
Exclusives are a different conversation, and those have pros and cons. It’s increasingly an irrelevant conversation, though, as every platform except for Nintendo becomes increasingly PC-compatible.
