Shadow Complex

Mellowe

Join Date 02/2008

+41

Shadow Complex

I am quite upset about this game. While I lost all respect for Epic ages ago, they continue to demonstrate that they do not care about PC gaming. A company that owes its existence and success to PC gaming has abandoned its original followers to milk the console market. I'm sure they are getting a nice bonus for making this an Xbox LIVE-exclusive title, or hell, maybe they aren't, but they don't want to spend the pennies to port it to the PC.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it was intended to release on the PC and 360, but the PC version has since been dropped. Why the hell is Epic Games a top-tier member of the PC Gaming Alliance? Ugh.

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I'm just talking about the decision process, not the facts. After all, Starforce was able to scare/bully smaller developers into using their horrible DRM with horror stories of piracy and mirages of extra sales through this kind of reasoning. Regardless of whether piracy is really the big deal the overblown scare stories like to portray it as, the attention it's given is going to colour the actions of decision-makers. And if it's as easy as 'make it for console instead', especially when console development is cheaper, requires less technical support and for many genres has a solid playerbase...

Ironically, with regard to media centres, modern TVs already contain embedded systems to play a wide range of media. I can plug a drive into my television and play all the media I have (h.264, xvid, etc) without needing a computer or a 360 or whatever (which is good because the 360/Windows media streaming is a complete disaster of departmental infighting and competing systems).

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The move toward console development is about money. period.

When developing for a console, the companies do not need to worry about 10% of the sales being in pirated copies so they get more money that way. Also, they know EXACTLY the hardware the code will be running on and can optimize it for this purpose. If you look at the PS2, in the beginning it was rather lackluster with its performance, but towards the launch of the PS3 the games looked and played MUCH better.

When developing on a PC, the programmers have to worry about compatibility with all the different configurations of PC hardware (something directx help to alleviate). Unfortunately, this means that a game requires a more powerful PC to run it at the same settings as a less powerful console would.

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Don't forget QA and technical support that needs to be provided somewhere along the line. That said, PC developers porting to console often run into problems with the level of reliability required on console - it's okay to release a buggy mess and patch on PC, but this will not float on console. Sure, you can patch, but the market has a totally different expectation and a buggy game will lose sales in the critical first days/weeks.

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There's another problem. Console title support costs are negligable. PC costs for legit users are an acceptable cost...but assuming all people contacting support are legit users is unreasonable. Most developers keep their opinions to themselves, which is understandable but unfortunate.

One of them actually had the desire to go in depth on analysis rather than just have one off comments to the public - http://www.romsteady.net/blog/labels/Piracy.html

And unfortunately he's no longer in the industry because he felt swimming through the bullshit wasn't worth more than actually earning good money.

(Edit - I recognize many others have been vocal about it, but most of them have been CEOs. Certainly not a position everyone would trust on the matter.)

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