Slashdot Mirror
Are Consoles Holding Back PC Gaming?
An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the excitement over Nvidia's upcoming Fermi GPU, there is still a distinct lack of DirectX 11 games on the market. This article points out that while the PC has returned to favor as a gaming platform, consoles are still the target for most developers, and still provide the major limitations on the technological sophistication of game graphics. Inside the Xbox 360 sits an ATI Xenos GPU, a DirectX 9c-based chip that bears similarity to the Radeon X1900 series of graphics cards (cards whose age means that they aren't even officially supported in Windows 7). Therein lies the rub. With the majority of PC games now starting life as console titles, games are still targeted at five-year-old DirectX 9 hardware."
No one really cares about cross platform on PC, other than those few people who run Linux on desktop. Most games already work on Windows (where all the gamers are and don't care about philosophical things with Linux) and Mac OSX has most games too, along with the upcoming Mac version of Steam too.
Thinking that the lack of gaming on Linux is what's holding back PC as a gaming platform is hilarious, and so wrong.
You have absolutely no idea how many linux and apple gamers use windows simply because it's the only thing that will run their games.
hint: a ton. I'd go so far as to say even half of all pc gamers.
Playing some recent PS3 titles, they are way out infront of anything even a high end PC can manage, it's clear to me the Xbox is not only holding back PC gaming, it's also holding back PS3 gaming.
It's also gimping PC and PS3 network gaming, by forcing developers to use P2P systems rather than the usual PS3 and PC Dedicated server setups (COD MW2 is a recent example of this).
The sooner the bodged abortion that is the XBox dies, the sooner we can all move on from the XBox disaster.
the game's probably going to suck
But will it suck more than stuff already approved for the Wii and DS? Lately, these platforms have picked up a reputation on Slashdot for harboring shovelware.
How do we know they're serious about putting out a game?
Ideally, one would start by making a playable prototype for PC, using the prototype as a pitch to obtain a devkit, and then porting it to the console by rewriting the graphics and input. By then you may wonder why not just publish on PC in the first place; the problem with that is not enough HTPCs in the market.
Will the thing even pass rudimentary QA screenings?
Ideally, documented QA procedures such as automated unit tests would help convince the console maker.
But the video game market is far from ideal, and console makers have been able to get away with a "we don't have to care" attitude.