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Kalia
Eager Tradesman
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
Posts: 30
Location: Arizona |
| Was The XBox (original) Good or Bad for PC Gaming @ Firing S |
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An interestingly written debate between a Firing Squad staffer and a forum poster. In their virtual debate, each discusses the merits/demerits of the original XBox and its effect on PC gaming. Here are some of their thoughts: <blockquote><em>Alan: Fundamentally, PC gamers benefit from the rivalry between GPU manufacturers. As ATI and NVIDIA joust for your dollar, they need to introduce faster GPUs at more aggressive prices, meaning that PC gamers will benefit. As expensive as a SLI 7800 GTX 512MB or a Crossfire X1800 XT is, it would be even more expensive if either company had a monopoly. It was Microsoft's money that helped NVIDIA take the lead in the GeForce 3 and 4 era. It was also NVIDIA's pre-occupation with Microsoft that led to the GeForce FX stumble, allowing ATI to catch up and take the lead with the Radeon 9700. The evenly matched rivalry between ATI and NVIDIA that exists today was a result of Microsoft's meddling.</em></blockquote><blockquote><em>Ben: This has to be the first time anyone has congratulated Microsoft for encouraging competition. I admit that some of the money Microsoft pours into the gaming industry eventually trickles down to hardware advances. But you could have made the opposite point on competition just as easily—that the Xbox stifled competition by using NVIDIA exclusively for years when they had the upper hand.</em></blockquote><blockquote><em>At any rate, the 3D graphics market has never seemed monopoly-prone. Years before anyone had heard of the Xbox (e.g. 1998), gamers could choose between 3Dfx, NVIDIA, ATI, and maybe Matrox and S3 for your graphics.</em></blockquote> An interesting read all in all and a discussion that continues to rage in the gaming community. You can read the entire debate at <a href="http://www.firingsquad.com/features/xbox_360_versus_pc_faceoff/" target="_blank">Firing Squad</a>. |
Mon Dec 05, 2005 2:26 pm |
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doctor_kaz
Keeper of the Gates
Joined: 24 Mar 2005
Posts: 108
Location: West Virginia, USA |
The X-Box has been a complete disaster for PC gaming. It's the worst thing that ever happened to PC gaming for as long as I have been playing computer games (since the mid-80's). This is the worst period for PC gaming since at least the mid-1990's. Perhaps the worst ever.
Since the X-Box gained a decent market share, there was almost an instant decline in the quality of PC games that came out. The last three years has seen an unprecedented wave of dumbed down, crappy console ports with mediocre graphics and crappy interfaces that were clearly designed with the X-Box as the lowest common denominator. The goal of the X-Box appears to have been to function as a cheap, dumbed down gaming PC. It has fulfilled that goal perfectly, to the chagrin of the rest of us who actually like games optomized for our mouse and keyboard. To this date, there has not been much of a push to port RTS's or MMORPG's onto the X-Box. It's no coincidence that MMORPG's are the hottest selling PC games right now. Anyone want to speculate how good Rome: Total War or World of Warcrat would have been on the PC if they had been designed for the X-Box? Can you imagine playing WoW with only two customizable hotkeys and no keyboard support?
Countless franchises that were once great have been destroyed by porting them over to consoles, specifically the X-Box. Deus Ex, Thief, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, and lots of others. Remember the good old days, when you could play an RPG with drag-and-drop functionality and the ability to customize your hotkeys? When you didn't have to go through six layers of ugly menus to put on different armor, like you had to do with Kotor or Fable?
I don't buy the argument that console money has somehow helped PC gaming. If I have to pay $500 for the same ATI card that's in the X-Box 360 for only a fraction of the cost, then it's the PC gamers' money that is subsidizing the console, not the other way around.
As for the consoles subsidizing high production costs and great graphics, I don't buy that one either. Where's the benefit? Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R., Far Cry, Painkiller, Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines, Earth: 2160, and Battle for Middle Earth all have far better graphics than any console port that I have played, except for perhaps Chaos Theory. Half-Life 2 was all internally funded by Valve from the profits made from the first game, if I'm not mistaken. So don't tell me that a game has to come out on a console to have great graphics. If anything, lately, a game coming out on a console almost ensures that it will have crappy graphics.
I often find myself wondering why Microsoft made the X-Box in the first place. They have lost huge amounts of money on it, and in the meantime, they have driven people away from PC gaming (and thus, buying copies of Windows). It was a big strategic mistake, if you ask me. What is the point of selling hardware at a loss when it competes with a profitable software business? |
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Mon Dec 05, 2005 2:54 pm |
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Ratavuk
Noble Knight
Joined: 08 May 2005
Posts: 213
Location: I-Net |
@ doctor_kaz
Well. i'll make it short: I agree with you completely. I think that the X-Box wasn't good for PC gaming. I tried to play Kotor and after half the game i hated it because it was slow and it felt like a console port - the same with Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3. Thank god that Gothic 3 will first arrive on the PC... |
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Mon Dec 05, 2005 8:45 pm |
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