One of PC gaming’s true innovators and heroes is pretty much done with it

Matt Hawkins Contributing Writer, Video Games

That’s John Carmack, a man who basically helped to set the course for PC gaming as we know it (via Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and more) has just said what every PC gamer absolutely hates to hear: it’s over, the consoles have won the war.

Maybe there’s a connection, or maybe there’s not, but I find it somewhat ironic that, during the same week in which the father of the Mac passes away, the man who basically helped to give birth of the modern PC game market (a market share that was perhaps the only thing Steve Jobs was unable to completely own and dominate, and the thing that kept many on Windows, despite OS X offering a superior experience on every other level) has also decided to throw in the towel.

As noted already, the PC version of Rage has been the source of much frustration and legitimate anger among gamers. Not just because of all the messed up textures, but due to the simple fact that it was created alongside the console version, instead of the normal developmental cycle: PC first, consoles later.

Many feel that it honestly dragged everything down, something that even Carmack himself stated in an interview a few months ago, during E3. Just fast forward to the two minute mark in which he states his biggest regret with developing Rage is how he viewed consoles and PCs equally, since they were in terms of graphical capabilities and processing six years ago at the start of the project…. but again, that was six years ago.

But now he’s singing a totally different tune, which completely infuriated PC fanboys that are turning in their id fanboy membership cards. Via an interview with Kotaku, he starts of by explaining the whole screw up involving the vast majority of everyone’s drivers not being up to snuff…

“The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$… We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions.”

“We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn’t work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn’t help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms.”

… Fair enough. id’s not the type of company to release a sub-par product on the marketplace and just sit back, shoulders in the air, and go “hey, what can you do?” They have been working their asses off to rectify the situation. But the future, as it pertains to other PC offerings looks rather grim, and the following statements is what has everyone livid…

“We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games… That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases.”

Needless to say, it’s been quite the discussion point over at places like Reddit. Here’s just one thread, out of many, and just one person’s response that greatly represents many…

“The PC gaming market (“hardcore” gaming market if you so like) is, by the worst estimates, comparable to the PS3 in terms of size, so no, we shouldn’t “be happy that we still get ports”, we should demand (very loudly) to receive the same level of quality console gamers get.

Carmack is being a whiny little bitch and has joined CliffyB and the rest of the whore brigade, this is just him trying to cover up what a huge and incompetent fuck up him and his company have become.

I am fucking tired of being treated as a second class citizen and continually getting shafted because I chose not to get reamed by MS or Sony. This isn’t about the PC being “difficult to work on”, or being “a small market”, it’s just the gaming industry doing everything on the cheap nowadays (with predictable results).”

Yet no everyone agrees, and some are actually happy for such a change (and pointing out things that remind me why I avoided PC gaming to being with)…

“Yep, blame me. I was a PC gamer from the age of 10 to 25. Now at 30 I greatly prefer my PS3 and 360. I got tired up the constant compatibility problems and the ‘release now and fix it in a patch’ attitude of developers. I no longer have to wonder if my system will be able to run the latest release and if I’ll get a good frame rate or not. Constantly upgrading for the latest game got old and now I’d rather just buy a system and have it run the games well for a number of years without worrying. The downside is I’m not on the cutting edge of performance or graphics anymore. But you know what? The older I get the more I realize that doesn’t really matter to me as much as the overall experience.”

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