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."

Comments

Beneficial, Easily

[MBraynard]

Essentially, the Xbox said to PC game developers: "If you can slightly tweak your product and make it work with our controller, we will give you a much bigger market of gamers to sell your product to."

Games that might not have been made otherwise, or PC games that would never make it to the Xbox but had financing because of a developer's/studio's profit from another game that was on the Xbox, are the benefit.

Are there really PC gamers who stopped paying PC games and went solely to the Xbox? Maybe a few. But are there people who never would have bought a PC game (or owned a machine capable of running said game) that _did_ buy that PC game for play on their Xbox? Yes, definitly a lot.

Re:Beneficial, Easily

[readin]

Are there really PC gamers who stopped paying PC games and went solely to the Xbox?

Maybe only a few, but I bet there a lot of people like me who, upon getting a console game, no longer felt the desire to upgrade their PC because the PC couldn't handle game graphics but was fine for business apps.