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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."
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.
Why so?
Did you also complain when the Lord of the Rings trailers didn't mention the books?
Or when commercials home versions of arcade games don't mention that arcades had it first?
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.
Direct X has been a PC API all along, I didn't even think XBOX games were based on it, or at least, some offshoot from it different then the PC API. As for Microsoft changing Direct X on nVidia, well, MS could do what it wants, Direct X ISN'T an industry standard, its an MS standard. Neither is OpenGL an industry standard, but OpenGL is a cross platform API which ATI and nVidia could make more robust by optimizing their drivers for it, if they wanted to. Has the XBOX really impacted PC gaming? Well, considering that the most innovative and technically advanced games are released for the PC first, I don't think so. Quake, Half-life are two rendering engines that have been ported over to XBOX games. There is so much porting of PC games to game consoles, I would suggest that the only reason why game consoles exist today is because of PC gaming. Lastely, as long as PC technology evolves and improves every 6 - 8 months while game consoles remain static for 5 - 6 years at a time, I can't say the XBOX has had any impact on PC gaming. The Xbox360 may be revolutionary today, but give it 3 - 6 months and nVidia/ATI will release a video card that outperforms the 360 by a factor of 2, followed by one a year from now by a factor of 4, etc, etc, etc until the Xbox720 or whatever.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Umm, there are two of him?
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