Invalid characterset or character set not supported For someone who worked on DirectX, Alex St. John has a shockingly poor grasp of the gaming industry...





For someone who worked on DirectX, Alex St. John has a shockingly poor grasp of the gaming industry...
March 23, 2008

Have a look at this interview.

Basically, Alex St. John claims that Intel and Microsoft have diluted the PC's potential by mass-marketing machines with crappy hardware and a bloated OS, and that once the People realize it the PC will undergo some kind of revolution and emerge as a better, stronger, purer Master Race - er, excuse me, gaming platform. In short, the consoles are doomed.

Couple of things wrong with his arguments:

1) Mass-market PCs with crappy stuff are mass-marketed because the mass market is massively lazy. The casual gamer (being the one that makes up most of the market) doesn't want to waste time setting things up, which is why most buy prefab computers right off the shelves of Future Shop and Radio Shack (or whatever the fuck it's called now) and stard playing games with them. Consoles are quick and easy to set up, no fiddling with installation disks and configuration options, just pop in a CD and turn it on. Point is, even if St. John finds some Final Solution to Microsoft and Intel's contamination of the Aryan - sorry, of the PC market, people will still opt for prefab PCs from Best Buy because they're lazy.

I should probably lay off the holocaust references before people start writing letters. For the record I was inferring that St. John was the PC equivalent of a Nazi.

2) Consoles are accessable; to users, because they don't need to continually spend money on upgrades just to keep up with the bellcurve; and to programmers, because consoles provide a universal standard. If you're writing a console game, you know what kind of hardware you're working with, and what kind of limitations it has. If you're writing a PC game, you have to make a best guess based on an ever-changing benchmark, then figure out how far your playerbase deviates from it, and even then you'll run into problems with unique configurations of software and hardware that interact in ways you couldn't have anticipated.

3) No fair quoting World of Warcraft as the most profitable PC game ever. World of Warcraft is the gaming equivalent of crystal meth; inexplicably popular among people who don't know any better, mostly because it's addictive. Is it innovative? No. Is it unique? No. Everything it does has been done before and done better, mostly by Everquest. It's basically Diablo 2, redressed with Warcraft flavor and persistant gameworlds. I don't mind so much because it puts money into the coffers of Blizzard, who are busily working as we speak on Starcraft 2, but World of Warcraft is not that great. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not a bad game by any definition; a game is good as long as its players have fun. But World of Warcraft doesn't deserve half the praise it gets, doesn't deserve the perfect scores and stellar reviews thrown at its feet, and it doesn't deserve them because it's nothing we haven't seen before. It doesn't break the mold, it brings nothing new to the table, but the thing is, people don't care. The gaming industry is built on stagnation, on winning formulae that can't be deviated from lest money be lost; that's why every year you see the same sports titles re-released with nothing but updated rosters, slightly different music, and marginally improved textures.

That last argument really has nothing to do with the interview, but it needed to be said. Point is, consoles are accessable, user-friendly, and cheap, three things hardcore gaming PCs will never be, and that's why they will always be around.

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pup pup - March 23, 2008 (05:01 PM)
Did you read the ENTIRE article, including Part Two?

- Your first point is actually in agreement with him. Yes, he does place some of the blame on MS and Intel, but he also says that the average consumer will not take the time to learn these things. He says right in the interview that most will buy prefab computers.

- As for point 2, again, it is in agreement. Consoles are easier to understand, which is why he is helping to develop Orb.

- First off, your next point is all opinion. Secondly, I have a problem with that opinion. Just imagine a world where every game had to be 100% original. We'd be be lucky if we weren't still playing Galaga. Game development is largely about refinement and inspiration. One of the amazing things about WOW is that it's hardly even the same game that it was 3 years ago. That sounds like progress to me.

St. John isn't pitching the PC as the future leader of gaming. His point throughout the article is that technology, the desires of consumers, and gaming as a whole is changing.
WilltheGreat WilltheGreat - March 23, 2008 (05:30 PM)
I'm tired and grumpy. Sue me.
Halon Halon - March 23, 2008 (06:45 PM)
I don't know if this is the same article (didn't look at it), but in one article someone said that Intel is responsible for the death of PC gaming due to shipping PCs with integrated graphics. I kinda agree with that. Most people buy a PC with integrated graphics for their general needs, some hoping to play a few games. When they find out that their PC can't handle games due to the lack of a graphics card and they will need to spend hundreds of dollars on a new graphics card and power supply capable of handling the GPU they don't want to bother. If every PC sold was capable of some degree of modern, 3D gaming then there would be a lot more PC gamers out there since nowdays pretty much everyone who plays games owns a computer of some sort.

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