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[Uykered]

Pretty bad if money is an issue, only need to spend 20-30% of that price for a decent computer.

[Alevice]

My asus g73jh back from 2010 can run nearly every game i put at it, and its connected to my hd tv for the full experience. If it slows at 1080, i usually just go down to 720, which is fine for me on plenty of games.

[Sik]

Why I'll never get a beefed-up pc, basically. Buy a console, you're good for a decade. Buy rec spec'ed pc, good for a couple of years.. for more money.

Where I live a PC is much cheaper than a console (you can probably thank import taxes for that, as well as retailers willing to abuse prices knowing that people will buy them at a much higher price than needed).

[Alevice]

plus what you spend on the hw you save on the games. at least over here recent console games cost up to the equivalent of 80 usd or more and take a looong while to go down in price.

[s0]

plus what you spend on the hw you save on the games. at least over here recent console games cost up to the equivalent of 80 usd or more and take a looong while to go down in price.

its not as drastic here but the differences are still pretty big. its often 60 vs 40 euros for pc and console versions of the same game. some console exclusives are 70 euros.

also some pc games have extreme longevity due to multiplayer and/or mods, so you can get a lot of mileage out of a single game. thats actually one of the reasons why many former pc centric devs switched to consoles and also why a lot of pc games have dropped mod support: during the "golden age" of pc games (90s/early 00s) there were "hardcore" gamers who only bought 1 or 2 games a year.

[vinheim3]

Devs, whether console or PC, have always strived to make better looking games. It's only natural that PC games will require higher specs when it can demand higher specs

[gimymblert]

solution: mod down the graphics

[Sik]

also some pc games have extreme longevity due to multiplayer and/or mods, so you can get a lot of mileage out of a single game. thats actually one of the reasons why many former pc centric devs switched to consoles and also why a lot of pc games have dropped mod support: during the "golden age" of pc games (90s/early 00s) there were "hardcore" gamers who only bought 1 or 2 games a year.

I was under the impression that paid DLC had a bigger impact regarding that (since a good modder can easily be seen as direct competition for DLC). Now that the idea of developers making money from mods is floating around though that may change...

[Richard Kain]

There is never going to be a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to technology. There is always going to be someone who wants bigger and better, and is willing to spend more time and money to get it. PC-enthusiasts are a smaller, more niche market than they used to be, but they will never fully go away.

It's just so much fun to put together your own system. Once you've caught the bug, it's hard to go back. I've assembled almost every desktop system I've owned for the past decade and a half. (the Mac-mini is an outlier)

[s0]

also some pc games have extreme longevity due to multiplayer and/or mods, so you can get a lot of mileage out of a single game. thats actually one of the reasons why many former pc centric devs switched to consoles and also why a lot of pc games have dropped mod support: during the "golden age" of pc games (90s/early 00s) there were "hardcore" gamers who only bought 1 or 2 games a year.

I was under the impression that paid DLC had a bigger impact regarding that (since a good modder can easily be seen as direct competition for DLC). Now that the idea of developers making money from mods is floating around though that may change...

"paid DLC" has existed for a long time, except it was called expansions back then.

[Alevice]

it was dlc minus the dl. and usually exp packs modified the codebase and such and a few introduced more modding options.

[Sik]

Expansion packs were also usually much bigger than most DLC, often they could have easily been games in their own, really =P These days there's a lot of DLC that barely adds anything (and in many cases is just locked out stuff), it's not hard to imagine how that stuff can be seen as easily threatened by modding.

[vinheim3]

They're the same concepts with different names, but obviously even with indie games, there's been a much stronger focus on squeezing as much profit so extra content isn't as expansive or as creative as it used to be. So modders are now able to create things much closer to the extra content that is already provided whereas previously you'd have to be really talented to come up with things like new mechanics, storylines, worlds, characters in a mod package by yourself.

How that affects devs being turned off from developing PC is another story, but just gotta get it out there that it's not exp packs vs dlc, they both have their bad and good, but they're essentially the same concept, just applied to the core game differently

[Boreal]

AAA developers don't spend time or money making PC ports run well because they can just throw up their hands and say "they'll just buy better hardware".

There are (conspiracy theorist) arguments that say it's a way to enforce parity and to devalue a PC version to sell more consoles but in the vast majority of cases I'd say that can be taken out of the picture.

The oft-parroted stigma against "premature optimization" is another issue.  Hand-optimized assembly is a waste of time, yeah, but that's not the only way to make your game more efficient, dammit.

[s0]

AAA developers don't spend time or money making PC ports run well because they can just throw up their hands and say "they'll just buy better hardware".

or alternatively, it makes more sense, as a AAA publisher, to focus on the platform that will get you the most profit. plus, AAA games are very expensive to develop. i mean we live in a time where games that sell 1 million copies are considered "commercial failures" and result in layoffs and studio closings.

There are (conspiracy theorist) arguments that say it's a way to enforce parity and to devalue a PC version to sell more consoles but in the vast majority of cases I'd say that can be taken out of the picture.

whats more likely is that theyre trying to get you to upgrade your graphics card lol. a LOT of pc games are sponsored by nvidia or AMD

[Boreal]

<rant>
One of the big reasons I went AMD + AMD for my rig is that I don't want to support either Intel or Nvidia.  Intel makes "better" CPUs for games, but that's only because most games are still confined to 2 threads at most.  Nvidia makes "better" GPUs for games, but that's only because lots of games use their proprietary tech.  In both cases it's a vicious cycle that I really don't want to contribute to.

Meanwhile, AMD is working on pushing open standards that benefit everyone from hardware developers to programmers to consumers, mostly on the graphics side of things.  Just look at the adaptive sync fad - AMD pushes Freesync into a display standard (DP 1.2a), Nvidia pushes G-sync which is more expensive and refuses to support the new standard.  You can argue that it's "just business" but I don't think that's justification to screw over the consumer.
</rant>

[starsrift]

Boreal:
Picking a side in the hardware marketing wars is stupid. Triply so for a developer.

But what really boggles me is that you're anti-NVidia because they make things easy for developers to use! That's just silly!

[ProgramGamer]

Can we make the <rant></rant> thingies into a real thing please?

[gimymblert]

That would be [rant][/rant]
essentially it would be quote with a red background

[Sik]

The irony here is that AMD absolutely refused to support OpenGL (a standard) properly and would wish it never existed and Direct3D (a Microsoft-only API) was the only 3D API to have ever existed. No, seriously, their OpenGL support has always been atrocious. Fair enough, it used to be worse (OpenGL 3 forced them to start maintaining their OpenGL drivers again) but it's still atrocious in comparison to Nvidia's support for it.

Of course the fact that basically any game that wasn't made by id was using exclusively DirectX wasn't helping matters, but if Nvidia can keep OpenGL in good shape, so can AMD (or ATI back in the day). I guess it may have to do with the fact that some of Nvidia's biggest clients are involved in the CAD business and CAD software does expect the less common parts of OpenGL to, um, work.