The fact that developers have to cater to multiple platforms that have hardware limitations and different operating systems has led to worse quality of games of time. Console exclusives are anti-competitive, monopolistic, and they lead to a terrible consumer experience.
This notion that hardware limits hold games back is nonsense and could only come from someone with no development experience. Hardware benchmarks have only benefited the ecosystem of games. Without those benchmarks and the gradual standardization of architecture that the last two gens of consoles have provided the indie market would not be flourishing the way it is. Not to mention it forces AAA titles to actually optimize their shit. Imagine a world where developers had no incentive to care about performance? “tough shit buy a new GPU.” A true gamers paradise.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Water will reach its own level so to speak, if a developer releases a game that is far too much for a majority of gamers to run, those gamers won’t buy the game and it won’t sell. Obviously that also isn’t always necessarily true, but enough terribly optimized games have released recently to be met with 40% rating on Steam that I’d like to think this is the case. Are some developers going to do it anyway? Absolutely, but that’s true regardless. I think that no matter what, indie developers will always tend to keep their games lightweight either by principle or by design necessity, and bigger game studios would also sorta get the message and keep their games reasonable. With obvious exceptions… goddamn 400 GB games these days.
Most developers counter that they do console exclusives because there’s too much piracy on the PC gaming market.
No idea if that’s true, or if it even matters.
Personally I think the quality of games has suffered mostly through pressure from investors (and fans) to release them as early as possible, and focus is now overwhelmingly on multiplayer online experiences rather than carefully curated level and mission design.
too much piracy on the PC gaming market.
How many video games have you paid for in the last 10 years?
