Microsoft ruined gaming

[Burning Bridges]

This is why to me it makes no sense to say that the forestalling of technical progress was actually beneficial to PC gaming when the very essence of PC gaming was pushing things forward in terms of what video games could do in every sense, including graphical fidelity.

Yes

P.S. Unity is the new XBox

 

[commie]

Here's a few other headings for OP:

"CD-ROM ruined gaming"

CD-ROM was a curse that destroyed PC Gaming, giving rise to Myst style puzzlers and the FMV adventure/shooter. Why play Xeen with antique pixel art and mechanics when you can find out who shot Johnny Rock with full immersive video where real live actors talked to you? Seeing Threepwood on the screen in quaint 320x200 res was nothing compared to BEING the protagonist going through the world in 3D with 360 degree movement and unlocking videos! Damn high capacity storage media!

"RTS ruined gaming and so did the mouse"

RTS killed most of the genres of the 90's. By the end of the decade half of the games on shelves were RTS ones. RPG's, sims, strategies...... anything that required more than click and drag and 1 or two mouse buttons became niche and increasingly harder to find...Mouse was just a dumbed down consoletard controller as shown by the fact that PSOne and two had mice accessories. Damn the mouse and the RTS!

"Intel ruined gaming"

Due to needing to buy a new computer every year, year and a half to play the latest games, it made it ridiculously expensive and people started to look to consoles as a more stable, longer tern investment. Damn Intel for doubling PC power each year in the 1990's!

"Steam ruined gaming"

Due to the thousands of RPG maker, Unity, retro 'hard' pixelart crapware released on Greenlight, Early Access, dollar bundles, that drown out the quality releases in an ocean of fecal matter. Damn Gaben and his hellish DRM platform for their lack of QC!

So what you are saying is that the xbox didn't actually make things a whole lot worse?

See, i can do that shit too bro.

So Dynamix, Microprose, BIS, SSI, NWC, Origin, Westwood died due to the poorly selling Xbox original, despite the fact that most were going under years before it was released?

 

[Archibald]

Truth is that America's "Nintendo generation" grew up and was in the market for games that weren't about plumbers and hedgehogs. Western devs, who had been developing more mature games for the PC the entire time, suddenly found themselves in the position to supply that demand. So the great console/PC mixup was probably inevitable to some extent.

This is good point, but I wouldn't say that its just western developers. At the time Playstation in general was seen as "grown up" version of Nintendo. For late 90s and early 00s many younger people thought about Final Fantasy 7 when someone mentioned RPG.

 

[a Goat]

The rest of you unwashed neckbeards, have no fucking clue whatsoever on just how bad things had gotten in the late 90s on the PC market with amount of conflicting hardware. Back then everybody with a bit of sense was running to the console market to save their business, because it was no longer financially possible to technically support all the myriad PC configurations.

It is a factor. Then with retardo-API's going to hell was fixed, and with middleware becoming much better recently it was more or less fixed.

Slowly we witnessed a change of discourse within the western gaming journalism that climaxed with the release of the 360; suddenly Japanese titles weren't received as glowingly, the journos started to push a very visible agenda of Japan lagging behind in quality and "innovation" while praising the "innovation" of western titles (all of them being dumbed down versions of the titles and genres you already know, showing that these "gaming experts" don't know shit).

The problem is that Tojo games stayed in shit place and refused to go forward while western devs actually experimented in the casual-bait-direction.

Tojos thought that the "it's like X but made in Japan" marketing will carry them until 2011 or something like that. I'll remind you that they've tried to sell Dragon's Dogma to Skyrim crowd right after Skyrim was out, it was a retarded marketing strategy, developed in times when the good western titles on consoles were still shit because they were dumbed-down PC games.
DD was a "moderate success" with like 2 millions units sold(including re-release). Meanwhile shovelware Sniper:Ghost Warrior racked like 1M because of the release being perfectly timed, probably costed 10% of what DD did. That's the difference between shitty business and good business. Japanese video game publishers couldn't do good business for the entire 7th gen.

The industry has changed during 7th gen. Games became even more expensive to make, that's the most important part of it. Tojos were making games like they've used to but:

• their cost was much bigger
• their user base didn't grow
• their corporate structure didn't changed, neither did their work organisation(so the efficiency of their business)
  
• Sony entertainment was loosing tons of money already, so they couldn't subside them anymore

The 7th gen set up the conditions where you either went full casual or stayed niche, without trying to compete with the big players head-on. If you didn't, you ended up like THQ. Tojonese didn't and almost ended up like THQ, but had get out of jail free cards at the ready - Sega had Creative Assembly, Relic and whoever makes Football Manager, Capcom had Street Fighter, Square had ex-eidos, Konami had PES. Of course companies like Koei were niche from the get go so they've never noticed it.

Right now they're pulling out and focusing on mobile, because they still have better budget than your mobile developer of choice, so it'll be easy for them to dominate the space, without having to reform their corporate molochs that caused them to step down from home entertainment devices.

Meanwhile less mainstream pubs like Bandai Namco, Koei and other shit will continue to flourish on those markets because they weren't retards, otherwise they would go down during the Tojocaust that was started by Sony being unable to subside another retardo Tojonese studios who got 100% reliant on their money during 6th gen.

The actual innovation doesn't matter here of course, it's a matter of appealing to new audiences or improving your structures and efficiency.

And I don't fucking mind Tojo devs/pubs getting smacked in the ass because infesting games with their cinematic bullshit and QTE's is good enough reason for that punishment.

 

[Archibald]

Very interesting narrative that completely ignores the fact that most "Japanese" publisher, Nintendo, won 7th gen.

 

[a Goat]

Very interesting narrative that completely ignores the fact that most "Japanese" publisher, Nintendo, won 7th gen.

By appealing to casuals, which proves that my theory about go casual or go niche approach is true.

Also the gen was 'won' by Ubi, EA and Activision, if you believe otherwise you're retarded.

 

[Archibald]

I'm sure you believe that.

 

[Lyric Suite]

So Dynamix, Microprose, BIS, SSI, NWC, Origin, Westwood died due to the poorly selling Xbox original, despite the fact that most were going under years before it was released?

Show me the correlation. Show me Origin and Westwood games selling millions only to go bankrupt after the success of the Fagstation.

 

[Infinitron]

"Tojocaust". Never seen that one before.

 

[a Goat]

I'm sure you believe that.

Believe what?

That Nintendo went full casual?

In fact in their case it's interesting, it's like they've had analytics that tracked down the traffic on various flash-games sites and discovered that there's a huge market for games with simple mechanics and control scheme. It's the reason why mobile gaming became a thing and is successful.
And then they threw out those analytics and released a console that's a cross between cargo-cult wii and cargo-cult tablet.

Or maybe that Ubi/EA/Acti didn't won that gen?

Just pick Activision.

From 2007 to 2013, aka. from CoDW to Ghost, they were selling over 15 million CoD games yearly, with several years of racking over 20M, it's easily 120M sales during that timeframe. On top of Guitar Hero being at its best and multiple other successes.

Ubisoft went from "will be bought by EA soon" to major player on the market, with ability to release not one open world game a year, not two, but 4(2014 saw - Far Cry 4, AC:Unity, AC:Rogue and Watch_Doge) while selling 4M with worst of them. They can saturate the market for those games by themselves.

EA went from the point where they've still had to try a little to the point where they can release shit yearly and will still be carried by Fifa sales alone.

 

[Telengard]

Name those companies.

There's two other threads just like this one that already have a list. You posted in at least the last one too. But I'll help ya get started, taking one of the primes from the list in the last thread - everyone's favorite, Deus Ex (it's even 3d!)

Looking Glass was in financial trouble in the mid-90s and laid off a bunch of people. One of whom was enticed to Ion Storm with the promise of making his dream game, which game became Deus Ex. And it was released for PC, Mac, and PS2. But Ion Storm was in financial difficulty too, and ended up selling out to Eidos Interactive. Eidos were initially friendly, but promptly converted their acquisition to console game makers, with titles including Invisible War and Deadly Shadows, as well as two attempts at Deus Ex 3. However, Eidos Interactive was in financial difficulty also, and after attempting mergers, was eventually sold to SCI, who soon sold them on to Square Enix. Square Enix was already the publisher for Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution, but now also owned the company, eventually releasing the game for PS, Xbox and PC. And recently Square Enix named a sequel prequel, bringing us to today.

'Tis a very common tale of multiple financial difficulties across the 90s and early 00s, with the IPs at last coming to rest in the hands of one of the big boys. Mergers and acquisitions were the name of the game during that period. So much so that there were even news stories about it in the financial sector, despite games not being financial monstrosities yet.

On a related note, the group of former Looking Glass devs who made Irrational also got into financial trouble, sold themselves to 2K (a large console game maker) and were promptly redirected to make multiplatform releases. With their first release under 2K being Bioshock.

 

[Infinitron]

You seem to be assuming that every developer that sold out did so due to "financial trouble". I haven't heard of Irrational being in financial trouble, but even if they were, in general, many independent businesses are launched with the intention of selling out at a later date, which is done when they're at their peak, rather then when they're in trouble. See: Your typical successful tech start-up.

 

[Lyric Suite]

There's two other threads just like this one that already have a list. You posted in at least the last one too. But I'll help ya get started, taking one of the primes from the list in the last thread - everyone's favorite, Deus Ex (it's even 3d!)

Looking Glass was in financial trouble in the mid-90s and laid off a bunch of people. One of whom was enticed to Ion Storm with the promise of making his dream game, which game became Deus Ex. And it was released for PC, Mac, and PS2. But Ion Storm was in financial difficulty too, and ended up selling out to Eidos Interactive. Eidos were initially friendly, but promptly converted their acquisition to console game makers, with titles including Invisible War and Deadly Shadows, as well as two attempts at Deus Ex 3. However, Eidos Interactive was in financial difficulty also, and after attempting mergers, was eventually sold to SCI, who soon sold them on to Square Enix. Square Enix was already the publisher for Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution, but now also owned the company, eventually releasing the game for PS, Xbox and PC. And recently Square Enix named a sequel prequel, bringing us to today.

'Tis a very common tale of multiple financial difficulties across the 90s and early 00s, with the IPs at last coming to rest in the hands of one of the big boys. Mergers and acquisitions were the name of the game during that period. So much so that there were even news stories about it in the financial sector, despite games not being financial monstrosities yet.

On a related note, the group of former Looking Glass devs who made Irrational also got into financial trouble, sold themselves to 2K (a large console game maker) and were promptly redirected to make multiplatform releases. With their first release under 2K being Bioshock.

You have to show how those companies were in financial trouble (assuming that's really the case) because they were chasing after graphic whores. Saying that they were in financial trouble doesn't mean anything in and of itself.

But since we are talking about Deus Ex, notice how the company still managed to pull that game off, where as when multiplatform became a thing we suddenly got shit like Invisible War. No connection there, surely.

 

[Telengard]

You seem to be assuming that every developer that sold out did so due to "financial trouble". I haven't heard of Irrational being in financial trouble, but even if they were, in general, many independent businesses are launched with the intention of selling out at a later date, which is done when they're at their peak, rather then when they're in trouble. See: Your typical successful tech start-up.

"All" - never. Common, yes.

Of those I listed, Looking Glass's troubles are well-documented everywhere. Ion Storm is well-documented because they made such an ass of themselves they were newsworthy. Eidos was forced to release its financials in the midst of its difficulties. News stories abound. And Irrational had rumors of financials difficulties surrounding it, but has never actually released anything definitive.

 

[Telengard]

You have to show how those companies were in financial trouble (assuming that's really the case) because they were chasing after graphic whores. Saying that they were in financial trouble doesn't mean anything in and of itself.

But since we are talking about Deus Ex, notice how the company still managed to pull that game off, where as when multiplatform became a thing we suddenly got shit like Invisible War. No connection there, surely.

So, I have to show explicit proof - beyond all the ex-devs complaining about rising graphics costs, beyond all the lists of cratered companies, beyond the huge mergers and acquisitions lists of the 90s and 00s, beyond all of the 90s dev talks about the difficulty of switching to 3d. And you have to show nothing.

Okay...

 

[Lyric Suite]

You are the one who made the claim, so yes, the burden of proof is on you. From my part, all i can see is the evidence. That the advent of 3D didn't necessarely lead to worse games being made, while the advent of "console first" style of multiplatform development did.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

More bullshit. 3D graphics didn't make games worse.

Yes it did. The move to 3D created a gigantic spike in costs of development, right at the time when a lot of developers were already struggling. Moving to consoles were profit margins were better, was often the last resort maneuver for people to save their business.

The Xbox did.

The Xbox saved PC gaming from total extinction by standardizing the APIs after the 90s clusterfuck and standardizing hardware requirements.

Yeah, and about the 90s. Let's be honest here. Who didn't obsess with playing the most cutting edge computer games back in those days? How many here learned to OC their CPU for the first time to try to squeeze a few extra FPS in order to play that fucking Unreal shit? .

Correct. We all did, and that's exactly what the problem was. You can't make games that run only on 5% of existing machines and stay afloat. Nowadays, thanks to consoles being so shitty, millions of people are gaming on 7-year old laptops. The fact that those people exist and you can sell them games, is the main reason why PC market bounced back from the total shithole it was 10 years ago.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Yeah, except the reality and the facts do not bear that narrative at all. PC gaming "bounced" back (if you can call it that) when companies started making PC games again. That is literally the only reason we are starting to see a modicum of incline.

Codex elitards being butthurt about 3D (b-b-but muh pixel 2D art) because they still live in the 90s when that shit was actually relevant are anachronistic as fuck if we are talking about the massively uniform decline that hit PC gaming during the 2000s, when the 3D issue was a done deal and when making 3D games was probably in no way such a huge expense. And i mean, it's not like graphic whoring didn't exist before 3D graphics were introduced. One of the reasons adventure games were so popular was because they sported some of the best visuals computer hardware could produce at the time, or have we forgotten about that shit?

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, i don't know if any of you fags ever talked to a console retard, or notice the type of arguments those people make to justify their preference. They literally think consoles are the true shit and that the PC is some kind of nerd machine that plays graphically inferior ghetto "steam" games (i've actually seen people say that). That's literally what they believe. Now, picture somebody making a Call of Duty game that takes advantage of current PC hardware and leaves both the PS4 and Xbox to dust. You think you wouldn't see a major shift in sales? Furthermore, if graphic whoring was such a burden to the financial viability of the PC as a gaming platform, why is that that "leet" computer hardware is still being made? Who's buying that shit, now that it serves no actual purpose?

 

[Archibald]

You are the one who made the claim, so yes, the burden of proof is on you. From my part, all i can see is the evidence. That the advent of 3D didn't necessarely lead to worse games being made, while the advent of "console first" style of multiplatform development did.

Problematic development on PC (advent of 3D was one of the reasons for it becoming problematic) pushed us toward "console first" style of development. It is not "A or B" type of situation here at all, but A + X -> B with X being massive amount of consoles being sold.

Believe what?

That Nintendo went full casual?

Yes, Nintendo did what Nintendo does. Gimmick of Wii proved to be popular with casual crowd, but core Nintendo games pretty much remained as they were. Besides, people tend to ignore another half of console generation - handhelds, where Nintendo won hard too, I don't remember DS being more casual than previous handhelds. Well unless we assume that Nintendo was always casual, then I would mostly agree with your point.

Or maybe that Ubi/EA/Acti didn't won that gen?

I wouldn't say so, but I don't have much time to look for numbers now. I'll try to write a bit more detailed response towards the end of the week, if I won't forget about this topic obviously.

 

[Karellen]

I don't imagine that anyone believes that 3D is inherently expensive, because of course there were early 3D games already in the 70s, using the incredible power of wireframes. That said, realistic, detailed 3D graphics with high-quality animation and voice acting require much more human labour than 90s graphics. It would be interesting to see a chart showing average budget sizes of professionally made video games, but I imagine that it would be something like hundreds of thousands in the early 90s, millions in the late 90s and tens of millions in the late 2000s. It should be plain as day that to support increasingly expensive production costs, you would need to aim for increasingly larger customer bases (which, incidentally, is also why marketing costs have skyrocketed since the 90s). It's pretty natural that the high-end games would go increasingly cross-platform, with a few retained as exclusives by being fed gigantic quantities of money by console manufacturers. The only way to avoid that development is to stop trying to compete in production values and start making niche games, which crowdfunding has made increasingly viable now, making PC gaming a lot more attractive than it has been for years. That doesn't really change the financial logic behind the development of cross-platform AAA games, though.

 

[a Goat]

Why has Origin sold itself to EA and why has NWC sold itself to 3do?

That's literally what they believe. Now, picture somebody making a Call of Duty game that takes advantage of current PC hardware and leaves both the PS4 and Xbox to dust. You think you wouldn't see a major shift in sales? Furthermore, if graphic whoring was such a burden to the financial viability of the PC as a gaming platform, why is that that "leet" computer hardware is still being made? Who's buying that shit, now that it serves no actual purpose?

Not that I disagree that you'd see a push from consoles to PC in that case but the actual question is whether it'll be big enough to care.

Remember that we're thinking in userbase terms.

Is flagship PC hardware popular enough to warrant pushing the technology to that point?

How will lower-performance builds suffer from that change?

Will the decently-optimised console port perform better on low-tier rigs?

It's this kind of calculation and I assume they'd rather push for the console experience, so people with toasters can play the games somewhat decently too. But then I've heard that the newest CoD has shit-tier optimisation so I have no idea what's happening really.

As for flagship hardware - beat me, I have no idea why are they still making it other than cock-waving contest reasons. No semi-sapient person who doesn't wipe his ass with money I know is interested in PC's over $1000. Unless it's laptop, but they'll have a hard time getting that $1000 performance even when paying twice as much. And it's not like your console ports of choice will perform that much better if you'd put more money into it. Of course I exclude that one guy who has to deal with movie-editing and he likes versatility so he usually has multi-gpu flagship setups because it's little different thing.

Then you have the problem with developing this stuff. Hiring graphic to improve some pre-release screens and claiming that this is how it looks on Playbox is relatively cheap and easy. Actually making ultra-high resolution textures, extremely detailed models, good lightning engine etc. is very expensive by comparison. With textures and(partially) models you have the advantage of easy scaling, so you can really make some impressive assets and just dumb them down for toasters/consoles while keeping the high-res for the future/ultra PC settings, but lightning, let alone - physics? That's gonna bite you in the ass - as we've said, development costs are higher, but you also need better hardware to run it, so people who somewhat ran shit on their craptops now are out of luck, console ports need severe modifications to even run the game etc. You can argue that the existence of such game would make many people buy good gaming rigs just to play it but it's a gamble nobody wants to take.

Of course for a company like Crytek going for the "wider console audience" was a suicide because they were mostly known for delivering wonderful, high end graphics, but nowadays, with laptops being much more popular and commonly used as gaming machines than in 2007 they would die after first Crysis, not after 3rd.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Yet small studios could make PC games with good 3D graphics and still push the envelope. Think of Operation Flashpoint, which was basically made in a lodge in Czechoslovakia.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Of course for a company like Crytek going for the "wider console audience" was a suicide because they were mostly known for delivering wonderful, high end graphics, but nowadays, with laptops being much more popular and commonly used as gaming machines than in 2007 they would die after first Crysis, not after 3rd.

The same way Star Citizen is bankrupting Chris Roberts?

I mean, this is a perfect example of trying to twist reality to fit the theory. It is mere speculation whether Crytek "1" in 2015 would have bankrupted Crytek, meanwhile it is a fact that Crytek is going under after going consoltard. Epic too was going under, and now they are coming back. Why? Unreal Tournament 4.

 

[a Goat]

The same way Star Citizen is bankrupting Chris Roberts?

Star Citizen is made for a special kind of autists that got bored off EVE and want something like EVE but decent. On top of it we don't know if it'll bankrupt him until he releases it in a state he considers to be finished. The more buggy and underdeveloped it'll be, the more it's bankrupting him.

Yet small studios could make PC games with good 3D graphics and still push the envelope. Think of Operation Flashpoint, which was basically made in a lodge in Czechoslovakia.

From then off they've also developed several military-training version of their games so you can assume that they have lots of money, despite of small size.