Picture removed due to bandwidth (it was ranked way too high in Google Image search) - original pic is from here
I just bought two games for the Xbox 360: The Orange Box and Call of Duty 4. Kind of funny, since I don’t own an Xbox 360 (yet).
If anything, I am a PC gamer. Red Baron 3D, the first game I really seriously overplayed, was on the PC, and ever since I have been playing mostly PC games. Not that I was ever a real hardcore gamer. I really don’t play that often - maybe a few hours per week at most. It’s like a weekly movie for me. But back to the point: I’m a PC gamer. I would prefer if all my games were on the PC. But I was recently faced with a decision: upgrade my PC so I could play the latest games or buy a console (such as the Xbox 360) instead, and be able to buy games that were custom-made for it and not worry about it becoming obsolete soon.
I’ve never had a great PC rig. I’ve never been able to run games on High quality settings and have them run smoothly. At best, I can play Battlefield 2 with medium quality settings, but even then I experience a lot of gameplay lag, especially in intense situations where a grenade has exploded nearby and the PC needs to calculate to velocity of all the projectiles and general chaos resulting from it.
The thing is - all of this gameplay lag is avoided with a game console. If there is intense lag during game testing, it means that they go back and revise the code so it’s compatible with the console. In short, the gameplay is equal for everyone. There isn’t someone who can complain about not being able to play because of hardware lag.
Picture removed due to bandwidth (for some reason it was super high-ranked in Google Images) - the original pic is from here.
But there’s a downside: people aren’t able to create custom content. This is what often time keeps a game going, years after it’s released. Red Baron 3D was released in 1997, and there are still people playing it today. That would’ve been impossible had it not been for the dedicated modding community that has pushed the limits of the game. Custom improvements are impossible to implement on console games, unfortunately. But this does have a good side: no opportunity for hackers. People still find ways to cheat, but it’s generally much much harder to cheat on the console. Plus, if you get caught, your account is banned!
Those are the reasons for the consumer to buy a game console. But why should developers want to move? Simple: they have a bigger market and more opportunities for profit. Unless a person has a modded console, they are unable to run pirated games. Or, at least it’s quite a lot harder than it is on a PC. Because of this, gamers actually have to PURCHASE their games (what a concept), which results in profit for the developer! More and more I hear about studios that are easing back on their production of PC games. Even the recent Grand Theft Auto IV (which I’m sick of hearing about lately) was released just for the consoles. As of now there’s no word on a PC version.
In short, the focus is on the console market. If I want to keep playing games, I can play a few on my computer, experience hardware lag, and deal with hackers and cheaters, or I can buy a game console and avoid all of that. Plus, technically it’s a much cheaper option: $350 for an Xbox 360 versus ~$700-800 to upgrade all the hardware in my computer, of which the graphics card I want to buy itself costs as much as a Nintendo Wii: $250!
So, consoles it is…