The arguement "consoles hold back PCs"

Is totally false.

PCs hold back ultra PCs.

Developers will take into account lower powered PCs because countries like Asia don't have the latest i7 and GTX 680. They don't even have 2GB of ram. They have salvaged parts and they need games that are super optimized.

This is why LOL and DOTA are so popular in Asia. The games look decent on fast PCs but look decent on the slowest PCs too.

The argument is that the lowest common denominator holds back the "pc". That includes consoles and low end PCs. Why make a game if no one can play it?

Realistically, not many Western developers care if their games run in Asian net cafes. If their game is multiplayer and NOT an FPS, like LoL or Starcraft, yes, they make sure it scales down to work on those machines, but devs sure as fuck don't care if the kind of Asians you're talking about can play Max Payne 3, Borderlands 2, or (ironically) Sleeping Dogs.

This thread will go bad places.

Countries like Asia, eh?

To address the supposition in your thread title which you claim is false, all I have to say is 

@BisonHero

Realistically, not many Western developers care if their games run in Asian net cafes. If their game is multiplayer and NOT an FPS, like LoL or Starcraft, yes, they make sure it scales down to work on those machines, but devs sure as fuck don't care if the kind of Asians you're talking about can play Max Payne 3, Borderlands 2, or (ironically) Sleeping Dogs.

@believer258 said:

This thread will go bad places.

Gotta love those first post like this one.

@herb_roy_33 said:

Is totally false.

PCs hold back ultra PCs.

Developers will take into account lower powered PCs because countries like Asia don't have the latest i7 and GTX 680. They don't even have 2GB of ram. They have salvaged parts and they need games that are super optimized.

This is why LOL and DOTA are so popular in Asia. The games look decent on fast PCs but look decent on the slowest PCs too.

I know that this is a troll post, but I'm going to bite anyway.

Low-end PC's can't be responsible for holding technology back because they are modular. That is to say, at any time they can be changed and upgraded incrementally without any manufacturer involvement. You can not define what a "low-end" PC actually is. We use it to describe different technical specifications as the years go on.

However, a console is not this way. Consoles are not modular, and they have very specific limitations within a life cycle. Because consoles are such a large market with such defined limitations, they have a huge impact on what games are being made. You are seeing this come to an end with things like the dissonance between Far Cary 3 and AC 3 PC/console counterparts. These represent the developer saying "It has to look at least this good to keep up with where we're going." and your frame rate becomes atrocious on consoles.

TL;DR: The longer a console life cycle continues, the more delayed the market becomes with introducing more taxing games and more able hardware.

You are hilarious. Really, please, continue.

To more explicitly state my point, Asian PC gamers primarily play MMOs, competitive multiplayer that scales down graphically, and other genres like visual novels where low end PCs can run them. So mentioning Asian markets is a complete non sequitur to this discussion, because the mediocre graphics of those PC-only games has NOTHING to do with how far the graphics are pushed in Sleeping Dogs or Crysis 3 or whatever. The limiting factor there is how much tone they're willing to put into prettying up what is essentially a console game for the PC port. The bummer is that most series that used to be primarily PC series (Deus Ex, Hitman, etc.) now aim for console markets because there's more money there.

The aging console generation isn't just holding back PCs, it's holding back gaming. AAA titles not having a consistent 30 FPS on consoles is a joke. The technical limitations of current hardware are making themselves more and more obvious as devs try to push capabilities harder and harder. This has nothing to do with PCs. Being able to play the same game on a PC just further highlights the problem.

1/5 stars for OP

Better luck in the future, buddy.

Pro tip: If you don't know the difference between a continent and a country, no one will respect your opinion.

I thought I had a good argument. I still stand by it. But in future I will not tell others my opinion.

@herb_roy_33 said:

I thought I had a good argument. I still stand by it. But in future I will not tell others my opinion.

You had a few sentences. You'd have to have a hell of a lot more information than that to convince anyone otherwise, though it's worth mentioning that your argument isn't completely without merit. I would guess that a large number of PC gamers, like me for instance, became PC gamers this generation because the cost of entry has greatly lowered. For $800, you can build a fairly good gaming PC, whereas 5 years ago $800 would get you an OK PC or a 360 with a bunch of games that, at the time, ran well. However, the people who play games on cheap PC's in internet cafes are hardly the concern of the kinds of publishers or developers who might make something that could really push a PC's graphics.

Regardless, if consoles weren't so long in the tooth then yes, many games would look much better than they already do. We would have moved beyond Crysis-level graphics by now, something we haven't quite done yet. Even Sleeping Dogs and Far Cry 3 don't quite reach Crysis's graphics.

@mordukai said:

@believer258 said:

This thread will go bad places.

Gotta love those first post like this one.

Putting the word "those" in there had me questioning what you're trying to say here. I think you're trying to say "Gotta love first posts like this one"?

Maybe I'm out of my depth here since I'm not a PC gamer.

But even while I perfectly acknowledge that PC is the absolute best way to play videogames, far better than consoles indeed, it's still seems like a bad choice for people who are not flowing in cash.

As long as building a high-end gaming PC costs what it costs, I'll stick to consoles thank you very much.

I think the truer statement is that the PC drives the new console cycle.

I hate how this whole PC vs console thing has grown again in the last few years.

@feliciano182 said:

Maybe I'm out of my depth here since I'm not a PC gamer.

But even while I perfectly acknowledge that PC is the absolute best way to play videogames, far better than consoles indeed, it's still seems like a bad choice for people who are not flowing in cash.

As long as building a high-end gaming PC costs what it costs, I'll stick to consoles thank you very much.

Yes, you're right, the cost of a good gaming PC is more than that of a good gaming console - but the cost is quickly made up by all the savings you get from the much, much lower cost of games. PC games are discounted all the time, and heavily, and are often bundled. I've only spent $50 on one game since buying a PC - Far Cry 3 - and that will probably be discounted by at least %25 over the Steam or Amazon Christmas sales.

Also, you do not need a high-end PC to PC game. I spent $730 on mine and it has served me quite well thus far. I haven't come across a single game that I can't get to run at 60 frames per second, at a resolution of at least 720p.

...I should stop now, the level of misinformation that comes through this topic from both sides is unfortunately massive.

this is dumb as shit .. we all know the cheapest pc parts come from asia

@feliciano182 said:

Maybe I'm out of my depth here since I'm not a PC gamer.

But even while I perfectly acknowledge that PC is the absolute best way to play videogames, far better than consoles indeed, it's still seems like a bad choice for people who are not flowing in cash.

As long as building a high-end gaming PC costs what it costs, I'll stick to consoles thank you very much.

I've had my current PC for... I think three years. It wasn't all that expensive, it was never super high end, but it's still good now, still runs anything I'd want it to on high settings. It does cost more to build a PC than buy a console, certainly, since console manufacturers make their money off the actual game sales, not the hardware. But examining the game sales is where it gets interesting. If you're playing everything on console, you would probably be paying way more for all your games. If you want a game day and date of release, you can probably get it for PC from somewhere like greenmangaming for about $20 cheaper than console RRP. If you don't need the game immediately, you'll probably end up getting it for a few dollars in some steam sale or something. Steam Christmas sales start tomorrow, I believe. I rarely get super obsessed about playing games as soon as they're available anymore, so most of the games I get are cheap as hell. I have about 15 PS3 games that I've amassed over the last I think... five years that I've had the console. I reckon I paid more for those 15 games than I did on the 250+ games I have for PC.

The 360 launching without a HDD crippled the entire generation.

Do you want to know what the core of this argument is?

The product life cycle.

All you early adopters of high end tech will always be held back by the majority. That's how it is for a lot of tech products. A ton of people are not going to buy brand new, high end PC parts. Games that utilize that hardware will come out when the majority is running hardware of that caliber. Why even complain, unless you're hopelessly narrow minded?

@believer258 said:

@mordukai said:

@believer258 said:

This thread will go bad places.

Gotta love those first post like this one.

Putting the word "those" in there had me questioning what you're trying to say here. I think you're trying to say "Gotta love first posts like this one"?

Yup. This...Those...Why do we have label everything maaaan...lol

Thanks for the correction BTW.

@believer258 said:

PC games are discounted all the time, and heavily, and are often bundled. I've only spent $50 on one game since buying a PC - Far Cry 3 - and that will probably be discounted by at least %25 over the Steam or Amazon Christmas sales.

That's a great argument, I would certainly use services like Steam if I had a good gaming PC, but at the same time I'm not very concerned in that area, I buy a new game every four or five months, so in my very particular isolated case, I don't think it would help a lot to save up on that end.

Also, you do not need a high-end PC to PC game. I spent $730 on mine and it has served me quite well thus far. I haven't come across a single game that I can't get to run at 60 frames per second, at a resolution of at least 720p.

Good grief friend, you don't think 730 $ is a lot of green ?

To be honest, I do want to get into PC gaming, specially with things like Project Eternity on the horizon, but the market for it is a little fucked up right now, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to tackle the issue.

@feliciano182 said:

@believer258 said:

PC games are discounted all the time, and heavily, and are often bundled. I've only spent $50 on one game since buying a PC - Far Cry 3 - and that will probably be discounted by at least %25 over the Steam or Amazon Christmas sales.

That's a great argument, I would certainly use services like Steam if I had a good gaming PC, but at the same time I'm not very concerned in that area, I buy a new game every four or five months, so in my very particular isolated case, I don't think it would help a lot to save up on that end.

Also, you do not need a high-end PC to PC game. I spent $730 on mine and it has served me quite well thus far. I haven't come across a single game that I can't get to run at 60 frames per second, at a resolution of at least 720p.

Good grief friend, you don't think 730 $ is a lot of green ?

To be honest, I do want to get into PC gaming, specially with things like Project Eternity on the horizon, but the market for it is a little fucked up right now, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to tackle the issue.

Yes, it's a lot, but then I play (and buy) video games a lot.

Countries like Asia, eh?

If a dev makes a game for the highest-end PC currently available, no one will buy it because the amount of people who own those are very, very low. On top of that, if developers want to make money from ports, they will have to do all this other extra work to scale the game down and possibly run into other issues in the process. It just doesn't make any sense on multiple levels.

Look at the E3 build of farcry 3 running on a high end PC. Then look at the retail version running on PC at maxed out settings. See a difference? The E3 build is what the game would have looked like if the game was made solely for PC using current technology. The retail version was what happens when you have to make the final engine scalable enough to run on both consoles and PC. You still think that consoles don't hold back PC?

As soon as games start coming out on next gen consoles we will see equivalent jumps on the PC as well. You think thats just a coincidence.

@feliciano182 said:

@believer258 said:

PC games are discounted all the time, and heavily, and are often bundled. I've only spent $50 on one game since buying a PC - Far Cry 3 - and that will probably be discounted by at least %25 over the Steam or Amazon Christmas sales.

That's a great argument, I would certainly use services like Steam if I had a good gaming PC, but at the same time I'm not very concerned in that area, I buy a new game every four or five months, so in my very particular isolated case, I don't think it would help a lot to save up on that end.

Also, you do not need a high-end PC to PC game. I spent $730 on mine and it has served me quite well thus far. I haven't come across a single game that I can't get to run at 60 frames per second, at a resolution of at least 720p.

Good grief friend, you don't think 730 $ is a lot of green ?

To be honest, I do want to get into PC gaming, specially with things like Project Eternity on the horizon, but the market for it is a little fucked up right now, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to tackle the issue.

It's a lot, but not really when you consider the price of a console + a PC/mac/whatever for general usage

The 360 launching without a HDD crippled the entire generation.

@feliciano182 said:

Good grief friend, you don't think 730 $ is a lot of green ?

Why do people always make it sound like we're spending $700+ for machines that just play games. We're not, they are multi-function machines, way more so than consoles. Yeah you can buy a dirt cheap PC to do things just as well as mine in a lot of cases (web browsing, word processing) but a higher end PC is still going to be faster and able to do more advanced workloads better. (like video editing, photo editing, 3D modeling)

I play consoles in addition to PC, but people who make an issue out of PC gaming being 'expensive' (which it isn't) confuse me, we get games dirt cheap all the time and again, these are not just machines for playing games and watching video on.

My PC manages files on my phone, it outputs glorious sound quality through its sound card for music, it's connected to my TV for when I want to watch films/TV or switch to pad, it backs up all my important files, it lets me do all my work/study and it plays games at 1080p/60 FPS. It's an investment that keeps on giving.

Microsoft are so out of the console market in my eyes at this point, the 360 has no exclusive anymore and the only combination that makes sense for me is PS3 + PC. I do wonder if it'll be the same next generation too, or maybe Microsoft will actually evolve from only having Halo, Gears of War and...Forza, I guess?