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The Xbox vs. PC Gaming
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad.com brought back their Face Off format to debate how the Xbox was beneficial or harmful for the PC industry. It's an interesting read with a special 3rd guest, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games, giving a few comments at the end." From the article: "The exact impact on Microsoft on the ATI/NVIDIA rivalry is difficult to know. NVIDIA received $200 million up-front from Microsoft for the Xbox. That was as much as the entire 3dfx company was worth in 1998, when the Voodoo2 was at its peak. Likewise, the original plan was for DirectX 8 to provide an API for the pixel shader in the GeForce 2 GTS. But something happened to the DirectX8 spec where all of a sudden, the minimum level of support was the GeForce 3. That something was Microsoft."
In principle, the idea is great. Why not release a game for XBox if you're already releasing it for the PC? And, like the article mentions, sometimes it leads to great games playable on both platforms, i.e. Splinter Cell. But most of the time, the duality screws things up. Take Deus Ex 2, for example. Playing the game on a PC is, at times, painful because of all the compatibility checks (and limits) that had to be put in. The area size is about 1/10th of what it was in the original Deus Ex, because the Xbox didn't have enough RAM for a bigger room. And that's just one issue. So, in principle, the idea is great; but the best games are made when the development teams split up during the Hardware consideration of the game and write different code from then on. Sadly, not enough companies are dedicated to making excellent games at higher costs and potentially lower earnings.