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How To Make PC Gaming Better
New submitter RMingin writes "Bruno Ferreira at Tech Report has a number of suggestions that he feels could improve PC gaming. Some are quite thought-provoking. For example: 'When technology advanced [in the '90s], the industry came up with a certification specification to ensure punters didn't miss out—and consequently spent more on better PCs. That spec was called MPC, short for Multimedia Personal Computer. The first version of the MPC spec said, in simple terms: Thy computer shalt be blessed with a sound card and speakers.
Thou shalt be provided a CD-ROM drive in which to receive silver discs. Thy processor shalt not be completely crap. At the time, this spec meant a lot—and, to be honest, I think it worked marvelously. We need something like that again. People wanted MPC, everyone sold the better hardware, and everyone was happy. Let the powers that be come up with a new baseline specification. Call it MPC-HD or whatever acronym the marketing Nazgûl want to give it. I'm fine with whatever, as long as it gets the job done.' He also calls for an end to the unintuitive model numbers for GPUs and CPUs, and more consistent driver support."
Stop thinking every title needs to be a triple AAA title with millions of dollars in cost, that has to sell a large amount of copies to turn a profit.
Stop putting crappy DRM on your software, since that only hurts your customers.
Stop making crappy consoles ports.
And quit fucking blaming everything on piracy.
Be seeing you...
There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, it's miles better than any console. An I5/I7 paired with a midrange graphics card blows them out of the water. The problem isn't the hardware, it's the software writers who write for consoles and then port that back to PCs... Case in point, Skyrim, which has about the most awful interface ever inflcited on the keyboard & mouse using public ever. More first-person shooters that all look the same. No innovation any more. No, the problem is the game companies and their crap.
Port everything over to Linux so we can ditch Wine and Windows. Someone had to say it.
OK. First convert all GPL-based libraries to LGPL so that they are non-viral, sometimes you have to statically link. Someone had to say it.
Every time I try Linux, even recently, I spend more time trying to get everything to work than actually doing what I want to do. Wireless STILL didn't work. A driver was installed but it wouldn't find any networks. Wired LAN randomly didn't work, and for some reason was dependent upon for booting. Most of the time I end up having to compile a newer kernel to sort some things out. I could go on. Eventually I give up because I'm tired of spending my entire time trying to get things to just work.
I'll add get rid of X-Server and give us something better than Pulse which seems to crap itself on update more times than I can count.
But personally I don't know why anybody would bitch about PC gaming now, if anything I'd say we are in the middle of another golden age. I have NEVER been able to get games as cheaply as I am now under Steam, I'm talking whole catalogs for less than the cost of a single console game (such as the THQ bundle for $30, great set) and the cards and chips? Cheap as cheap can be. When I started if you spent less than 2 grand you were gonna be struggling 6 months after you got it, now I can build a PC for $450 that will play games for years AND make me a profit. Hell you can buy a fully loaded 6 core AMD for like $250 in a Tiger kit, slap a $50 HD4850 and tada! You can play the vast majority of games with plenty of bling. Spend a little more, say $100 for an HD6850 or $120 for an HD6870 and you'll be gaming on it for the next 4 years, no problem.
So what is there to complain about? The games are cheap, the hardware is cheap, hell you can buy Win 8 for $40 and just use Start8 to kill that Metro crap and have you a cheap gaming PC that will get updates until 2022 and I wouldn't be surprised if the games would all still run on it fine, its rare to see a game require more than a dual core for a minimum even today. These kids just don't realize how good they got it...now get off my lawn!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually, a power tool is precisely the model to go after, really.
I insert the safety key and press the on button. The motor turns on and it just works. Dangerous? Mildly to extremely depending on the tool. But it Just Works and that's what matters whether it's some skilled artisan who has turned more bowls on his 25,000 dollar lathe and hand-sharpened every tool he's forged himself or something absurd like that or an underpaid illegal immigrant sticking screws into a wall frame with a handheld drill/screw gun. It just works - pull trigger switch, motor turns, screw goes in. Obtuse things like spitting out errors that are purely a number just doesn't make sense in this era of 64-bit monster rigs that can churn out well-encoded, efficiently compressed video at or above the native framerate - can't we spare a couple bytes to stick a descriptive error string after looking up the error in a stored table? It isn't like we're dealing with featherweight embedded computers with barely enough space to stick a primitive FORTH in. Maybe I just need to turn in my geek card in, or something. I don't know.