![]() ![]() With every new hardware generation adding a dozen or more additional components to account for, the cost of PC development grows, creating a diseconomy of scale for Windows PCs from which there is no easy way out from a business perspective, other than to cut bait and raise the minimum system requirements that a game will support, further locking out players from the PC gaming experience. There were hundreds of people on line, many of whom waited overnight just for a chance to buy a next-gen graphics card. One of 80-something fliers passed out at Best Buy in 2021 on a first-come, first-serve basis when the RTX 3080 Ti was released. With a shrinking user base, the math simply fails to math at some point: if it costs more to develop for a platform than you’re ever likely to make from releasing on that platform, you simply don't release it on that platform. Ultimately, it’s an obvious weak spot in a game studio’s roadmap, one that once made developing AAA games natively for Macs entirely unthinkable. Making sure that as many PCs can play your game as possible is a growing bottleneck in game development made especially problematic when developers regularly face long periods of unpaid crunch time, even for console releases. The release of Elden Ring earlier this year is a perfect example of a game that ran brilliantly on consoles, but ran into persistent issues when running on a PC, despite its more accessible requirements for major AAA launch. In a PC gaming landscape where so much different hardware exists that must be accounted for, it’s little wonder why developers are starting to primarily target consoles, rather than developing for high-end PCs and porting to weaker consoles afterwards. ![]() (Image credit: Future)Īgain, I think back to what Apple’s Sandmel told me when I asked him when Apple would develop and release a gaming MacBook: “All MacBooks are gaming MacBooks.” Mertro Exodus is a very demanding game, but it plays incredibly well on a MacBook with an M1 Max chip. Are Macs and MacBooks growing into gaming consoles? There’s another platform that shares this same essential characteristic: Macs, and particularly those with the Apple M1 chip and its more powerful variants. A lot of the quality depends on the developer itself, but knowing what your game is going to be playing on gives you a considerable advantage. ![]() It’s this advanced and focused knowledge that enables an AMD Zen 2 processor and an AMD Radeon RDNA 2 GPU with about as much power as the 1080p card in our AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT review to pump out 4K graphics, with ray tracing, at 120 fps on the PS5. Since Sony and Microsoft can tell game developers years in advance what kind of hardware to target, and even provide early dev kits years in advance, this gives developers the ability to optimize a game to a tightly controlled and specific hardware configuration. As more players migrate to next-gen consoles over gaming PCs, developers are realizing the benefit of targeting console development over the various configurations of high-end gaming PCs that exist on the market, and console gaming is now powerful enough to deliver PC gaming-like experiences at a much cheaper cost. This has shifted the way game developers are starting to approach the games they make. It might not be the face-melting 8K graphics teased by Nvidia for the RTX 3090, but at roughly double the price of the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, most gamers have long given up on experiencing 8K gaming on their PC. Most gamers have long given up on experiencing 8K gaming on their PC. The Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition costs $699 / £649 / AU$1,139 at MSRP, which is enough money for a gamer to buy a PS5 or XBox Series X | S and a cheap 4K TV to play it on. PCs were what the truly dedicated game developers targeted for their titles, since only PCs could really give life to increasingly cinematic games like Half-Life, Crysis, Call of Duty, and other legendary PC titles.īut for many years now, console gaming has shifted to become the primary platform for AAA gaming, largely because too many gamers are being priced out of PC gaming by the shocking cost of the required hardware. Consoles just couldn’t match the image quality and performance of even the best budget gaming PC and, later, gaming laptops brought to the table. Playing the latest games with the best graphics cards and the fastest processors used to be the raison d'être of PC gaming. One of the things that has struck me the most about the current state of PC gaming in the past few years is how a once exclusive hobby-by-choice has increasingly become an exclusive hobby-by-attrition. Capcom took the stage at WWDC 2022 to announce that it was bringing Resident Evil Village to the Apple M1 natively. ![]()
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