Do you think we'll see PC focused, groundbreaking games ever again?

Ray2097

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 31, 2004
Messages
128
I think 2005. was the year when it all went downhill for pc centric game development. We have better resolutions and frame rate, but true big pc titles like Half-life once was (for example) are not happening anymore.

We used to get Doom 3, Far Cry and Half-life 2 in the same year. We used to have AAA RTS titles like C&C and Warcraft (ok, that's another story).

I know what happened with bugdets and team sizes skyrocketing, but is there anything that can be done? Should Intel, Nvidia and AMD start financing or forming game development studios directly? Would it push their business forward by making exclusive games that would be plain impossible elsewhere? Does that even make sense (to me it does)? Nvidia being that huge, buying ARM for billions, what would forming a few teams be for them?

I know there are a lot of people who think that the answer is in the indie space, but I don't think that is true at all. Back in the day we had small teams, but those were industry's best teams with biggest budgets possible working full steam on PC platform. Indie teams of today can't replicate that, they are too small, too financially and manpower limited. We have indies trying to replicate something that small teams did decades ago. So, for me - indies are not the answer.

Game design would change naturally with pc focused titles, of course. Shooters made around m/k insted of a controller would make sense again. I can't ask for that now when everything has to work on a gamepad too. Is there even enough audience who think this is a problem in the first place?

Is there an answer and what could accelerate pc centric development again? Could ANYTHING like that work in today's industry at all?
 
Last edited:
You have to ask, "Why does a PC focused game need to be made?"

The problem is anything outside of competition and MMOs, the game can be played just fine on consoles.
As big publishers buy out small devs, the pubs will try to appeal to a mass audience. Big pubs have made game development very expensive to their advantage.

Unless it's a huge hit from day 1, the cost of the game will need be less than $30 and on sale regularly. It's hard to make money and hire the right talent if you're not make big profits.

Would I like to see another PC focused game like Hard Reset again? Yes, but even that died due to lack of money or interest.
Crytek said Crysis 2/3 couldn't be made without money from consoles. DICE had to include consoles to help with production costs. Valve stopped making PC games. The list goes on.
 
Last edited:
Adventure out of triple a and there are plenty of PC specific (or at least centric) titles, PC by far has the healthiest non-triple a game market.
 
But that's not what I'm talking about, right? I understand those games might be ok for you, but they just aren't having the same impact for me.
 
I agree with that. Triple A games aren't for PC anymore i.e. 2042.
Their fine on PC, its just their not built specifically for the PC. one bad apple doesn't mean everything is, but it sure has you and a lot of others nickers in a bunch.

CP2077 was fine on PC, especially compared to consoles. All the AC games run well, the PS ports run fine, Halo infinite runs very well.
 
But that's not what I'm talking about, right? I understand those games might be ok for you, but they just aren't having the same impact for me.
Great, go buy a console. Frankly the main stream of gaming ruined main stream games, if thats what you are looking for I'm happy to not have your concept of good games pollute the games I like.
 
I too miss the days when games were made for the PC, or, PC first and ported to console, OR, separate game engines for both releases.

Some of the games I fondly remember and love were PC first then ported, such as HL2, F.E.A.R., Doom3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and some others.

Really it's when Epic made Unreal Engine more accessible and console developers started using it when PC gaming took a backseat.

Though we're seeing a resurgence, we'll get another PC centric AAA title one day, just hang in there.
 
There sure is ground still to be broken in AI and physics simulation.
Early days for both of those.
 
Their fine on PC, its just their not built specifically for the PC. one bad apple doesn't mean everything is, but it sure has you and a lot of others nickers in a bunch.

CP2077 was fine on PC, especially compared to consoles. All the AC games run well, the PS ports run fine, Halo infinite runs very well.
You have low expectations and that's FINE.
 
Last edited:
Simulations aren't exactly games, but this looks pretty pc focused to me.
Come on man, of course I didn't mean there are literally no pc focused games, of course there are a ton of them. But those games are not of that type we're talikng about here, something that made you fall in love with pc gaming back in the day. Pushing technology etc. Who would get excited about that "game"?
 
Come on man, of course I didn't mean there are literally no pc focused games, of course there are a ton of them. But those games are not of that type we're talikng about here, something that made you fall in love with pc gaming back in the day. Pushing technology etc. Who would get excited about that "game"?

If you think about it, there's really not much to innovate anymore.
Graphics can't be pushed much farther, raytracing is going to get perfected and games will look great, Epic's lumens technology will also help games achieve photo realism, Nvidia is working on face tech.
Physics were innovative when HL2 was released, but now they're expected in every game.

I really don't know what innovations are left, I think we're all out of innovations, so now companies need to rely on storytelling and enhance what we have.
 
I think we already learned this lesson with movies. The technology doesn't substitute for an engaging experience, no matter how advanced it gets.

We continuously see smaller devs come up with a particular idea (battle royale I guess being the latest?) which then gets picked up and run with by AAA studios. Those guys seldom innovate or evolve as much as they iterate -- with them it's mostly bigger faster shinier.

Admittedly though, I haven't owned a console since the PS3 so I am not well versed on how that ecosystem might be affecting PC titles (other than half-assed ports)
 
I think 2005. was the year when it all went downhill for pc centric game development. We have better resolutions and frame rate, but true big pc titles like Half-life once was (for example) are not happening anymore.

We used to get Doom 3, Far Cry and Half-life 2 in the same year. We used to have AAA RTS titles like C&C and Warcraft (ok, that's another story).

I know what happened with bugdets and team sizes skyrocketing, but is there anything that can be done? Should Intel, Nvidia and AMD start financing or forming game development studios directly? Would it push their business forward by making exclusive games that would be plain impossible elsewhere? Does that even make sense (to me it does)? Nvidia beind that huge, buying ARM for billions, what would forming a few teams be for them?

I know there are a lot of people who think that the answer is in the indie space, but I don't think that is true at all. Back in the day we had small teams, but those were industry's best teams with biggest budgets possible working full steam on PC platform. Indie teams of today can't replicate that, they are too small, too financially and manpower limited. We have indies trying to replicate something that small teams did decades ago. So, for me - indies are not the answer.

Game design would change naturally with pc focused titles, of course. Shooters made around m/k insted of a controller would make sense again. I can't ask for that now when everything has to work on a gamepad too. Is there even enough audience who think this is a problem in the first place?

Is there an answer and what could accelerate pc centric development again? Could ANYTHING like that work in today's industry at all?
Check out star citizen. Imo that will be the game that will be groundbreaking once its done
 
If you think about it, there's really not much to innovate anymore.
Graphics can't be pushed much farther, raytracing is going to get perfected and games will look great, Epic's lumens technology will also help games achieve photo realism, Nvidia is working on face tech.
Physics were innovative when HL2 was released, but now they're expected in every game.

I really don't know what innovations are left, I think we're all out of innovations, so now companies need to rely on storytelling and enhance what we have.

Earlier I said 2 that are barely used, AI and physics.

While we see physics in use, its barely implemented, often very low resolution and simplistic.
Most objects are static and indestructible, those that do move use very rudimentary physics and movements.
There is a long way to go making realistic objects and environments without specific fixes to just look ok.

AI in games is pretty low quality, theres a long way to go here too.
Being able to truly interact with living beings will raise gameplay to another world!

Both need a lot more memory, processing power and a lot of data describing each objects character.
Not to mention coding.
But it is something to very much look forward to in future games.
 
Come on man, of course I didn't mean there are literally no pc focused games, of course there are a ton of them. But those games are not of that type we're talikng about here, something that made you fall in love with pc gaming back in the day. Pushing technology etc. Who would get excited about that "game"?
Can't get any more ground breaking than using a backhoe.
 
A game like Cyberpunk 2077 could have been such a game had they not rushed it out of the door, still a game that is pushing tech pretty hard.

Also the fact that it runs decent on PC and crap on consoles shows it was mostly designed for PC and adapted to consoles, though very badly atm.
 
Doubtful. Profit just isn't there for single platform games. Even Sony has opened up to PC gaming. Sure, they can make the money back and some good margins on most of their exclusives, but you're leaving money on the table. The concept of single platform games is largely dying.

As for ground breaking you'll need to do more than make it PC based. You can rehash Counter Strike, a classic PC game, but it won't be ground breaking. The game doesn't even have sights. Considering how many genres have come/gone, how many have merged, it will be hard to make something really groundbreaking. Much like movies and stories. It has all been done before.

There certainly can be games that introduce something groundbreaking. Smarter NPCs with realistic movement would be nice. Realistic hit and damage reactions. In general everything has largely become an action RPG hybrid these days though so I doubt we'll see much innovation.
 
Because the hardware differences aren't as extreme anymore. Consoles are closer to PCs than they have ever been.
A much lower percentage of PC gamers own hardware more capable than the newest consoles.
And there is very little those PCs can do that a console can't. It isn't like 2003 where consoles didn't have the CPU power to be able to do the physics calculations to even make the game playable.

Now days the only things you would be getting by only targeting high end PCs is stuff like 50% more players in a game, 50% denser forests and other things that can simply be scaled back and work fine on inferior hardware.
Nothing revolutionary like real time shadows or physics based gameplay that just wasn't possible on consoles before

The only thing you could really do is make a game that relies on ray traced reflections for it's core gameplay which would mean it could only be played on the 20 and 30 series Nvidia cards.
And no one is going to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars making a game very few people can play.

The only real area PC gaming can do things console hardware isn't capable of yet is in VR.
 
Back in the day we had small teams, but those were industry's best teams with biggest budgets possible working full steam on PC platform. Indie teams of today can't replicate that, they are too small, too financially and manpower limited. We have indies trying to replicate something that small teams did decades ago. So, for me - indies are not the answer.
I will agree but even this description this is now OLD News.
Today most work of games development this is made by software tools.
Much lesser interaction of software developers, and this is why most games they seem identical speaking of game engine.

For example, DELTA FORCE - Land warrior - NOVALOGIC, this was a game changer speaking of game engine, for a first time an game engine was made for accurate shooting within a game.
Today I am playing BF5, and shooting this is totally inaccurate at long distance. ( they simply do not care, its all about making money without delivering quality).
 
Sword and Fairy 7 Tech Review: The High-End PC Exclusive Nobody's Talking About


I was expecting another fucking Chinese MMO, but it looks like this is actually a single player game, which is cool.
 
Because the hardware differences aren't as extreme anymore. Consoles are closer to PCs than they have ever been.
A much lower percentage of PC gamers own hardware more capable than the newest consoles.
And there is very little those PCs can do that a console can't. It isn't like 2003 where consoles didn't have the CPU power to be able to do the physics calculations to even make the game playable.

Now days the only things you would be getting by only targeting high end PCs is stuff like 50% more players in a game, 50% denser forests and other things that can simply be scaled back and work fine on inferior hardware.
Nothing revolutionary like real time shadows or physics based gameplay that just wasn't possible on consoles before

The only thing you could really do is make a game that relies on ray traced reflections for it's core gameplay which would mean it could only be played on the 20 and 30 series Nvidia cards.
And no one is going to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars making a game very few people can play.

The only real area PC gaming can do things console hardware isn't capable of yet is in VR.

This. A dev could make a game that takes full advantage of 10-12 core processors and 3090s, but wheres the market? It was be insanely expensive to do so and there would be absolutely no way they'd turn a good enough profit to make it worthwhile. If you're spending 80-100+ million dollars on a game, you want to try as hard as you can to see a good ROI as your entire company will be riding on that single product. AAA titles can't survive on long term sales anymore, they need a quick return or else one failure means the doors close and potentially hundreds of people are out of a job.

I imagine the PS5 (and the Series X, for that matter) can do reasonably good VR. Though, until Sony gets around to releasing the second generation of PSVR we won't know.
 
What happened with games is the same thing that happened with music and movies. The cost of making "AAA" stuff went up astronomically. So to justify doing it you have to sell the most or it's a financial mistake. This means AAA stuff is all really multiplatform and is not going to take risks. That's just the way it is.

There are plenty of good smaller devs that take risks though. GTFO is great.

Times change oh well.
 
I keep seeing this topic being brought up recently across various corners of the internet. Bottom line is you need to stop looking at AAA+ games. Games with huge budgets are like those will never be locked to PC again since it would be impossible to make back their budget. "PC first" is the best you can hope for in that arena, but they will still ultimately be held back by the lowest common denominator of hardware used on the game consoles. At the same time developers will need to continue pandering to idiots who refuse to upgrade their decade-old hardware and then bitch about it publicly.
 
Star Citizen certainly has that feeling to it (and if ever end up on some console it will be the afterthought) and I imagine that the only type of game which will ever happen, where a mix of:

1) Target audience mismatch with living room audience
2) Number of needed buttons does not fit on a console controller
3) Require and use a Big budget

The doom 3, Half-Life example, that purely because of some mismatch between console and pc of that era because standard shooter now there is little reason not to have a console version and they were ported to the console of the time not too long after release I think.

Some giant game do still feel very much PC first, like Cyberpunk yet to have a next gen port (and the game being a little bit too much for the previous gen) released do show that the focus was mainly on the PC version I think.

Is there an answer and what could accelerate pc centric development again? Could ANYTHING like that work in today's industry at all?
For giant games, a giant market of pc owners able to do things (that are not easily scalable like resolution, bits of colors/hdr but essential to the games) that popular console can't, which is hard to imagine.
 
I keep seeing this topic being brought up recently across various corners of the internet. Bottom line is you need to stop looking at AAA+ games. Games with huge budgets are like those will never be locked to PC again since it would be impossible to make back their budget. "PC first" is the best you can hope for in that arena, but they will still ultimately be held back by the lowest common denominator of hardware used on the game consoles. At the same time developers will need to continue pandering to idiots who refuse to upgrade their decade-old hardware and then bitch about it publicly.

The thing is that it's not just about making back their budget, though that is mandatory. If I could make X profit selling a game on one system, but I could make XXX by selling it on three systems I should sell on three. And I should be fired on the spot for cause for arguing to sell it on one. That's how capitalism works, that's how markets work. This is basic stuff.

The other issue is gamers, particularly enthusiasts, dodge their own guilt in all this. I know I took part in it. For a long time everyone kept demanding a silly graphics race to photorealistic visuals with all the bling and amazing sound and then pow! Games cost too much to care about gameplay and go single platform. Same shit that happened with movies, and there the consumers share a huge part of the blame as well. So everyone moping about the lack of exclusive AAA stuff that was running about buying SLI, nvidia 8 series, extreme edition CPUs also is to blame in this cluster fuck. So is everyone who really cared about the advancement of graphics. Everyone was furiously kicking the ball into their own goal screaming "master race" at the top of their lungs.

It's going to get worse. The OP doesn't know it but he owned himself good hard here. He wants help from intel, nvidia, and amd? This is as dumb as it gets. That help is coming but it's not coming to a box you build under your desk. What you're going to get is gaming as a streaming service from those vendors. Where you pay a monthly fee for the performance level you want and lease games. Gone will be the tower of power to show off, what you will show off on forums is your monthly bill. That was always the end point of the hardware arms race and everyone has known it's coming as well. And just you watch the tiers you pay to cloud on this will determine what frame rate you get, what detail settings you get, what resolution you get, and even what games you can access!

To an extent everyone right know is complaining that "Technology advances we screamed and advocated for killed the old business model. We want the old business model back", all while not realizing the technology advances they are drooling over now are going to lead to an even crazier situation down the line when the new business model hits.
 
Odd that this question always pops up shortly after a PC Exclusive has came and went.

But, I tend to be one of the few that played Half Life: Alyx.
 
Odd that this question always pops up shortly after a PC Exclusive has came and went.

But, I tend to be one of the few that played Half Life: Alyx.

I think it's mostly frustration and rage over series or even genre's leaving the "exclusive" area. FPS is usually the biggest thing brought up. Was PC only, now pretty much consoles rule the roost for FPS games with some versions of the game being played competitively on the PC. But to 99% of the people out there FPS Halo or Call of Duty on Xbox and PC is just weird idiots. Hell the OP is mostly raging about FPS in his post, which is sort of LOLOLOLOL in concept now. Ditto MMOs and other stuff.

And a lot of the stuff is just blind ignorance platform snowflakery to start with and there is no slowflakery like "enthusiast" level stuff. Put them back in the crib.

In lots of cases like say RTS consoles always had solid ones that were in many ways better. And PC gaming has gained stuff such as Soulslike games. Those were consoles for generations. The first game of that type was back on the SNES and the first Souls game itself was Demons Souls on PS3. Fighting games don't suck on the PC anymore and a whole slew has come to it as well that' better than ever. If anything PC gaming has gained vastly more than it lost by crossplatform being the name of the game.

What this is really about is wanting to keep all the gains but still get special snow flake at the same time. And thats comedic in and of itself. Those almost as fun as "why are there women protagonists and where are the boobies in my mortal kombat" talks. In both cases hand them an anime pillow and call it a day.
 
You have to ask, "Why does a PC focused game need to be made?"
Also even if a game is PC focused, or PC first, it doesn't mean it can't work on consoles. An example is Xcom 2 (the new one). It was released only for the PC when it came out as the previous Xcom game did by far the best on the PC and they didn't want to constrain themselves by worrying about other platforms. However, it did well and it turned out that porting it wasn't a problem so they did. A focus on a given platform doesn't mean the others are going to be excluded, particularly today. I mean the new consoles have 16GB of RAM, SSDs, Internet, etc. They can run the kind of shit PCs run. Ya, you might have to downgrade some graphics from the max PC settings, but you are going to have multiple settings for PCs anyhow because not everyone has a PC as powerful as the consoles, let alone more powerful.
 
For something going big budget, PS5 / Xbox not able to run it with lower resolution would almost certainly never be the issue of why it would be PC centric (even if a simplified version control wise is made later on), exclusive is I agree a bit useless to worry much about.

Absolutely require mouse and keyboard or throttle + stick to make sense is more likely, a game with a control scheme like this was not worrying about console sales:


GL2pWeaUPhrBCF4Delq4JUaDQgcWAe6OTFJPVNJS2js.png
 
For something going big budget, PS5 / Xbox not able to run it with lower resolution would almost certainly never be the issue of why it would be PC centric (even if a simplified version control wise is made later on), exclusive is I agree a bit useless to worry much about.

Absolutely require mouse and keyboard or throttle + stick to make sense is more likely, a game with a control scheme like this was not worrying about console sales:



Once everything moves to the cloud, which is going to happen in the next decade all of this is going to be a moot argument. Do you pay the 20 dollar a month tier for features/details/graphics/game library access/release date time frame, or do you pay the 100 dollar a month tier. Do you lease the game for 10 bucks for the basic version, or would you like the 20 dollar version with the DLC.

Xbox, Playstation, PC are all going to go to gaming as a service.
 
When GPUs are $2500 and you have to camp out in the streets to get one, probably not.
 
I know that Capcom has said they're focusing on PC first & consoles second. That's big news to me since I think many of their game series can benefit from PC's strengths.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/capcom-want-pc-to-be-their-main-platform-and-make-up-50-of-sales

I'm curious to see if more publishers and/or developers follow suit & actually admit that PC can garner great sales numbers if done correctly. The idea that sending crappy ports to PC gamers is abysmal.

There's a backass reason for this as well. Way back in the PS3 era Capcoms arcade hardware platform was a Taito which was literally an intel/nvidia based platform running embedded XP. So Capcom has been developing on PC since that era. Capcom's games also sell well in the US so it makes sense for them. Other Japanese devs don't bother with PC ports as much because PCs aren't as popular there outside of hentai rape games, which are now all over Steam.

But for PC keep in mind the target PC is still a quadcore 8gb, with a gtx 1060 and that's not going to change anytime soon.
 
There's a backass reason for this as well. Way back in the PS3 era Capcoms arcade hardware platform was a Taito which was literally an intel/nvidia based platform running embedded XP. So Capcom has been developing on PC since that era. Capcom's games also sell well in the US so it makes sense for them. Other Japanese devs don't bother with PC ports as much because PCs aren't as popular there outside of hentai rape games, which are now all over Steam.

But for PC keep in mind the target PC is still a quadcore 8gb, with a gtx 1060 and that's not going to change anytime soon.
Yes, Japanese devs generally don't see PCs as lucrative as one might hope. But due to more people working from home, they've seen an uptick in PC gaming there as well.

I do know that many console development kits are actually PCs. The issue is that some devs (not just Japanese) don't seem to care that using a true PC development cycle would allow them to port their games downwards faster instead of the crappy upwards garbage.
 
In lots of cases like say RTS consoles always had solid ones that were in many ways better. And PC gaming has gained stuff such as Soulslike games. Those were consoles for generations. The first game of that type was back on the SNES and the first Souls game itself was Demons Souls on PS3. Fighting games don't suck on the PC anymore and a whole slew has come to it as well that' better than ever. If anything PC gaming has gained vastly more than it lost by crossplatform being the name of the game.

This is a real bonus that I think gets overlooked. I tend to game like 95% of the time on PC, and I'm super grateful to have titles/series that used to be console-centric be released on PC with increasingly better support.

A game like what OP is asking for would have to take advantage of PC capabilities in a wholly unique way and still be capable of general widespread success...I just can't imagine what that might be.
 
You know what you get when you do what OP wants nowadays? Star Citizen. Most PC gamers do t have the latest and greatest hardware either. The 1060 is still one of the most used GPUs from the steam survey. Why make a game that only the 1% can truly experience? When you are not targeting the latest and greatest what can't be done on the latest consoles that can be done on the PC? Consoles are no longer holding back PC gaming like it did in the past.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top