Does the video game industry treat us as beta testers?

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Kantham

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Yeah. Like a lot of people have said PC gaming itself is a large 'playing' field for developers, so many different configurations, drivers, hardware, when they can just hop on something straight-forward and more crash-grinding.

Honestly I'm still surprised that PC gaming isn't even on a worse state. It's getting a little blatant that most developers will care only to port games already made for consoles to us, so they can make more profit on the end run.

Yet PC gaming is strong if you look at Valve and Blizzard. Taking them out of the picture would probably end PC gaming for good.

This thread is born from quotes from the BO thread. Yes, this product severely lacks attention on the PC version if we look at it in all honesty. There's no denying this fact.

To answer the question, I don't think we are the beta testers. I think we are (at some exceptions) late-night people trying to eat the donuts that are about to get dropped down the trash nightly, from a market/product quality point of view.
 
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Hadmar

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I don't buy the "supporting PC is complex because of a million possible hardware combinations" argument. Not in the all-encompassing way it's so often used. Sure, it's not completely unfounded but many times it smells like a cop-out. When a game crashes when you pick up an item, when important items or objects disappear, when ghosts get stuck outside the range of your beam, when scripted sequences don't kick in or NPCs get stuck on objects during those sequences making the sequence never end, all those and many, many more are problems with the internal logic of a game and not a problem with an obscure hardware configuration.
 
Rambowjo

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A lot of interesting posts in this thread. I'm definitely excited to see how this thread progresses.

As a die hard PC gamer myself (never had a console apart from Commodore 64), all this buzz about PC gaming going down is quite troubling. From what I've read, people have been saying that PC gaming is dying since the beginning of time, but right now with all the indie developers that are actually pushing out some really high quality games (Amnesia, The Ball, Machinarium etc.) and then big PC developers like Valve, id and Blizzard, I don't really see anything bad happening in the near future. I hope that PC gaming will become a little more important in the next generation, which will probably be in a couple of years, maybe 3 years. I'm not sure how that would happen though. It just seems that PC was really big, back in the mid-late '90ies and then until around 2005. All the big games came out on PC and then consoles.

What I really want to see is big developers like Epic putting a little more focus on the PC. I really hope that they take their time to make a better job of Bulletstorm for PC than they did with UT3.

Go on!
 
DarQraven

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To be honest, I'm not too bothered by that. The games that I tend to love on PC are ones that are never made for console anyway. I can live without Generic Action-RPG game 5 and Military Shooter 4.

Point being, developers making a game in the style I like to play are also typically PC-only developers. See: Starcraft 2, TF2, Quake 3/Live, etc.
There's the occasional singleplayer thing I'd enjoy, and quite often I'll run into bugs/sluggish mouse controls/other telltale signs of console ports, but the gross majority of my gaming is in these multiplayer PC-only games.

Could be a coincidence, though I choose to believe it's actually the attitude of these developers that makes the difference.
 
Jacks:Revenge

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Rambowjo said:
As a die hard PC gamer myself (never had a console apart from Commodore 64), all this buzz about PC gaming going down is quite troubling. From what I've read, people have been saying that PC gaming is dying since the beginning of time, but right now with all the indie developers that are actually pushing out some really high quality games (Amnesia, The Ball, Machinarium etc.) and then big PC developers like Valve, id and Blizzard, I don't really see anything bad happening in the near future.
Click to expand...
first: I agree with you here.

but to explore the argument further...
anyone can yell "PC GAMING IS DEAD."
but when you ask them to explain what they could possibly mean by that, they typically cite the fact that the game itself is losing complexity in favor of mass-market appeal. and they don't mean complexity in terms of the number of moving parts or bells and whistles. because surely, games are more complex in that sense. they often correlate complexity with difficulty and challenge. they will complain that games are being dumbed down so that they can appeal to a greater audience. the only complexity left is that of the graphics engine and extraneous features like multiplayer and replay capability.

people who have been gaming since the beginning (late 70's, I guess) always like to relish in how challenging their games used to be compared to all the point n' click/hack n slash that dominates the market today. the pretty colors and replay features don't justify making the games easier and more accessible.

I refute this notion.
obviously I'm biased, because I've only been gaming since Sega Genesis. my friends and I grew up with the onset of purty graphics and user-friendly controls that were intuitive and easy to pick up.
so why is this a bad thing?

it's not.
pining for the "good ole days" is no excuse for dismissing the present.
if video games had remained convoluted, simple, and very difficult to master then a lot of us would not be playing them. we'd still be reading books or watching movies for our escape from reality. bringing more people under the tent and going mainstream (selling out, if you will) is not such a terrible thing.

the reason I'm still such an adamant PC gamer is because of how lush the gaming experience has become as it's evolved. my favorite singleplayer PC games are those which strike the perfect balance between immersion and accessibility. they utilize today's technology to create a vivid and memorable experience coupled with user-friendly controls and a shallow learning curve.

if I want to do something that is super complex and requires high amounts of concentration to master, I'll learn how to fly a god damn military fighter jet. that's not what I'm looking for when I game.
when I game, I want to relax with something that I don't have to think too hard about. I'm concentrating all day long at school and at work. why should I have to do so all night when I want to fire up a good game?
 
KaL976

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Interesting thread & props for it not being a flame war inside 3 pages.
Sjosz makes good points given that he actually works in the industry but most everyone elses points are also valid. Different & conflicting but valid nonetheless.

Going back to the beginning of PC gaming for a moment...
My first PC was a ZX Spectrum in 1982 & games came on tape.
Most games were buggy but it was all so new & they were so much cheaper than the ROM cartridges needed for the consoles of the time that no one really cared.
[Or if they did we had no way of communicating that apart from word of mouth or a letter in the few gaming magazines assuming your letter got published]
If anything the bugs added to the charm [see jet set willy] & there was no hope of patches or updates. How it was shipped was how it was & we were just happy to have it regardless because it was all new & exciting.
Technically PC's back then were the same as consoles. A closed system that ran their own code.
This is not true of PC's today even though the OS is a standard product.
I think what annoys PC gamers now is that all games are written on PC's & yet the console ports of said games are less buggy than the PC version & so we feel like beta testers.
This may not be true of a lot of titles but the big hitters lead us to believe it should work first time out of the box & when it doesn't we cry foul.
I don't begin to understand the corporate side of game development & how the publisher can dictate terms to the dev team who presumably are less than happy about putting out a buggy game that they presumably want to be the best they can code, but at least these days we have patches & updates that can rectify [for the most part] those issues.
It still strikes me as odd that games are released when they are clearly not ready or when the minimum specs are below what the current consoles can handle & they still run like ass on more powerful PC's, etc, etc but personally I figure this is more about the money than the end user experience & the bigger the company [or publisher] the more prevalent this seems to be.
 
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DarkED

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DarQraven said:
I can live without Generic Action-RPG game 5 and Military Shooter 4.
Click to expand...

The problem is Joe Popular; he loves games like Halo and CoD and will continue to buy them over and over again, based solely on the fact that it makes him look cool. All of his friends are playing those games because it's a cool thing to do. For these people it's peer pressure and a desire to fit in, and games like Halo and CoD currently fill that niche because a LOT of people play them. This means that the developers and publishers of those game franchises have a target audience that is guaranteed to buy, no matter how crappy the game actually is.

If you think I'm full of **** here, just look at the Madden craze of the late 90's/early 00's. Why do you think EA kept selling the same damn game for seven years? It was because Joe Popular kept buying it regardless and EA made mountains of money with very little actual time and energy investment. Halo's rise to glory is a good recent example but it follows along the same lines.
 
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KaL976

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That's the other thing...
FPS games are better on PC.
No one with any grasp on reality can say aiming with a thumb stick is better than aiming with a mouse or if they do they just get laughed at however consoles are cheaper & more accessible than a gaming PC so it's understandable that the money people are more geared to that market.
This wouldn't suck so much if the PC version of said game wasn't an obvious port back to PC given that was the platform the damn thing was written on in the first place.
 
Plumb_Drumb

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KaL976 said:
That's the other thing...
FPS games are better on PC.
No one with any grasp on reality can say aiming with a thumb stick is better than aiming with a mouse or if they do they just get laughed at however consoles are cheaper & more accessible than a gaming PC so it's understandable that the money people are more geared to that market.
This wouldn't suck so much if the PC version of said game wasn't an obvious port back to PC given that was the platform the damn thing was written on in the first place.
Click to expand...

Depends on if it's one of those games that practically require altering the configuration file, to keep the mouse from skipping 5 pixels at a time.

If I were strictly a "controller" user, and decided to try and use M&K with some PC games out of the box, I'd probably say the whole control method sucks too, unless someone showed me otherwise.
 
KaL976

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Plumb_Drumb said:
Depends on if it's one of those games that practically require altering the configuration file, to keep the mouse from skipping 5 pixels at a time.

If I were strictly a "controller" user, and decided to try and use M&K with some PC games out of the box, I'd probably say the whole control method sucks too, unless someone showed me otherwise.
Click to expand...

It didn't used to be like that though.
It's only since dev's have ported back to PC that M&KB issues have arisen in my experience.
 
Sir_Brizz

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Plumb_Drumb said:
Depends on if it's one of those games that practically require altering the configuration file, to keep the mouse from skipping 5 pixels at a time.

If I were strictly a "controller" user, and decided to try and use M&K with some PC games out of the box, I'd probably say the whole control method sucks too, unless someone showed me otherwise.
Click to expand...
I really doubt that, particularly for an FPS. The thing is, even if you don't know what you're doing, the refined control a mouse gives you has got to be obvious even for the most novice user.
 
DarQraven

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Sir_Brizz said:
I really doubt that, particularly for an FPS. The thing is, even if you don't know what you're doing, the refined control a mouse gives you has got to be obvious even for the most novice user.
Click to expand...

Try Bioshock 1 before tweaking .ini files. Insanely high mouse sensitivity even on the lowest settings, and the sensitivity slider adjusted acceleration instead of mouse speed.

Meaning: high DPI mouse + low sensitivity settings = move mouse too slowly and your view doesn't move *at all*.
Move at normal speed = normal movement, although sluggish (input delay).
Move at high speed = still normal movement, since rotation speed is capped.
Also, skipping pixels both in the menu as skipping degrees/steps ingame. In short: HORRIBLE.

The reason? Mouse input is translated to controller input which is translated into ingame movement.
 
Sir_Brizz

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I honestly never had that problem with Bioshock.

But even with that problem, I fail to see how anyone could find a mouse less usable than an analog controller.
 
JaFO

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Hadmar said:
I don't buy the "supporting PC is complex because of a million possible hardware combinations" argument. Not in the all-encompassing way it's so often used. Sure, it's not completely unfounded but many times it smells like a cop-out. When a game crashes when you pick up an item, when important items or objects disappear, when ghosts get stuck outside the range of your beam, when scripted sequences don't kick in or NPCs get stuck on objects during those sequences making the sequence never end, all those and many, many more are problems with the internal logic of a game and not a problem with an obscure hardware configuration.
Click to expand...

Exactly.
Complexity is a non-issue when proper design and test-methodology is used.
Want proof ?
Why doesn't every car crash and burn ?
Why did the Airbus 380 only have 1 design-flaw that has serious consequences ?
Answer : because the designers used the tools and techniques that have been available for decades.

Game-developers otoh seem to be stuck in the dark ages.
Seriously. Did Epic really have to 'discover' that the best way to design a map was to map out a floor-plan and then add 'fluff' ?

Things get worse because in addition to poor planning and lack of design you now get managers demanding a new high-profile release. Of course things are going to fail. It's only a matter of time before high-profile console-releases start to suffer and then there'll be no excuses left.

The fact that indie-developers don't appear to have such issues is because they haven't hit that wall yet. It is however only a matter of time if they're making the same mistakes.

As such the issue BlackOps is facing is not a matter of the pc getting shafted, but a flawed design showing its ugly at release.

And to make matters worse we don't return the broken product.
OH no ... we simply start threads and wine about how it sucks and how pc-platform is getting the short end again simply because we enjoy being drama queens as proper long-term solutions would mean we'd be having fun playing the damned game instead.

Just imagine what would happen if everyone simply returned their game and demanded a refund instead of waiting for a patch (which probably won't fix anything ... ).

Just imagine what would happen if we accepted such things for cars. Toyota wouldn't have issued an extremely expensive recall to fix a minor issue in the braking-system.
 
Sir_Brizz

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JaFo, that difference comes down to one important thing: Software can't kill you. A bug in Black Ops might make you cry until your eyes bleed, but that bug isn't going to cause your death.

Unlike material sales (like cars, electronics, etc), software comes with no risk, does not have a manufacturing cost, and really contains no liability. Exhaustive testing for something like safety is not required, instead best effort testing takes place. Sometimes not even that is done, as seems to be the case on Blops PC, but, guess what? Nobody died.

To claim indie developers are not having the same kinds of issues that other developers are is simply wrong. Lots of indie games have issues that get fixed through patching. If anything, indie games tend to be tested less because they can't afford the range of system configurations required to completely test issues across computer configurations (even among simply processor/video card combinations).

The biggest problem is that publishers find it acceptable to release games that not only have issues, but are practically completely undesirable products because of that. What is a development studio to do that can't get their publisher to sign off on two additional months of development time, and will lose $10,000 a week for not releasing on time? Eat the $80,000 or release what they have? I can tell you what I would choose.
 
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