The big problem with PC gaming

Now you might think I’m bashing PCs: yes, I love consoles, but that’s for personal reasons, for my confort and spending on hardware, knowing everything will run without me first tweaking when starting up BUT I actually support PC gaming. Especially now that it seems more games are starting to support gamepads. I started out gaming on the PC and I hope to always have something to play on my PCs. Still, like I was saying I probably am biased. But then I read this amazing interview on tomshardware.com. I’ll just say WOOOOW. Things are worse than I thought. I thought it was just people buying more on consoles, piracy, confort… but it turns out things are much more serious. Well, actually I had suspected that, but still, amazed to see Tim Sweeney, one of the programmers I’ve admired most in the last decade, talk this seriously.

There are many overpriced computers out there. It’s like sports cars. They are everywhere, everybody writes about them, but there are only a few who can afford them. There isn’t a great amount of people that will spend large amounts of money on that. In the case of PCs, they mostly don’t deliver that amount of performance that you would expect to justify that cost. You pay twice as much money for 30% more performance… That is just not right.

But that’s just half the story, more seriously:

If we go back 10 years ago, the difference between the high end and the lowest end may have been a factor of 10. We could have scaled games between those two. For example, with the first version of Unreal, a resolution of 320×200 was good for software rendering and we were able to scale that up to 1024×768, if you had the GPU power. There is no way we can scale down a game down by a factor of 100, we would just have to design two completely different games.

The problem with this, is that while everybody may be talking about a new system or a new high end game, very few will be buying it, thus discouraging developers from taking PC gaming seriously. You know it’s insane when with a $1800 video card + the rest of a high end system you can’t even set a game to max details… This interview totally deserves a full read IMO.