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DirectX creator defends PC gaming
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 25th March 2008
Alex St. John is one of the creators of DirectX technologies, so we assume he knows his facts.
In a recent interview with ExtremeTech St. John claimed that Tim Sweeney of Epic, who has been vocal in his on-going support for consoles despite being a member of the PC Gaming Alliance, was wrong when he said that consoles are surpassing PCs. St. John believes that the PC will always have more power than any console.
Speaking about the future of the platform, St. John (pictured) said that he believes digital distribution is the future for the industry and that retail stores are doomed to fail if they continue to rely on pre-orders as a way of generating cash.
Remembering a recent trip to his local computer game store, St. John said that he saw entire shelves labeled "Coming soon!" and trying to entice preorders. St. John described this as "selling futures on unreleased games."
"You can think of it as walking into a grocery store and saying, "Hey, I'm a customer for some chocolate, do you guys have any chocolate?" And the grocery store says, "Yeah, we have 50 pound barrels of it over there. They're a thousand bucks a barrel." You say, "Well I like chocolate, but not that much." The store says, "Well go to hell, that's all we've got. A thousand bucks or no chocolate for you." That's how retail games are sold. And it's an extremely inefficient business model. It's very crude."
Ugh - please St. John, don't mention chocolate again so soon after Easter. We feel sick enough as it is.
Do you think consoles are the future, or are you resting your hopes on PCs and handhelds? Let us know what you think in the forums.
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Comments (11)Stats: 0.126 seconds
But he's the slag who created DirectX as well???? .....We are all doomed. :(
I think we all can agree that console gaming and PC gaming are probably going to meet in the middle. At least that's probably what Microsoft are trying to direct things towards.
-Indybird
When you buy a console, your buying into something that will guaranteed be outmoded within 3-5 years. With a PC, your constantly configuring it, changing it, updating it with the newest coolest stuff. Is it costly and time consuming? Sure. But you either love it or give up the title.
Same thing with cars, motorcycles, etc. If your a generic gamer, buy a wii or an xbox. If you have to be cool, buy an expensive car(s) like a WRX or something like that.
Or, you can be really cool, get a decent sports car, and upgrade and mod the hell out of it. Otherwise, go buy a ford or a honda, knowing you'll end up being part of whatever latest fad that you'll end up throwing away in a relatively short period of time.
It doesn't matter where the gamers are, it matters where the developers are. They're going to move more and more towards The largest install base. This is not about making games fort the consoles OR the PC, this is about making games you can sell on the consoles AND on PC. The PC market is too small and too difficult to be worth the effort on it's own, and so I think more and more you're going to see games released across all platforms and the limiting factor will be the state of console hardware.
I don't really like his comparison.. Most pre-orders that I have seen actually cost less than the actual game, and you usually get a t-shirt or something.
And wasn't this St. John guy from ATi Technologies?
I think the problem is in how we define "PC gaming". In the most general sense of the term, you're right, it isn't going anywhere. The issue comes up as a lot of people here think of PC gaming as AAA, bleeding edge, PC-exclusive titles like Crysis. I believe that thses are an endangered species which will soon become extinct as developers move to a pan-platform model where games are made to play across the PC and le multiplke consoles to maximize revenue. In this situation the hardware requirements are driven by the lowers common denominator, which is still better than integrated graphics!