Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts talks up the PC, talks down consoles
By Tim Colwill on February 1, 2013 at 9:22 pm
Chris Roberts, founding father of Wing Commander and now Star Citizen, has used an interview with NowGamer to express his belief in the PC’s innate technological superiority.
“I think consoles will be there and they’ll do decent business but I don’t think that the next generation of consoles will be as big as the last generation,” Roberts told NowGamer in an extensive interview about the merits of Kickstarter. “Essentially,” he pointed out, “I can build a high-end PC now that’s much more powerful than the new consoles that will be announced this year.”
Asked if he would ever bring Star Citizen to next-gen consoles, Roberts answered: “No, I’m not totally against [Star Citizen] being on a next-gen console if those systems are open. The hardware in the next-gen consoles will be good enough to run Star Citizen, maybe not at the highest level, but it’ll be at a mid-level. ”
“But the biggest problem is the openness. On the PC we control the communication with the fans and we control the update cycle and we can rapidly deploy content, as soon as we can on a closed system, which is what Microsoft says it is with its Xbox Live or PSN. We’ve got to go through a whole approval process and it gums up the works and doesn’t make it easy.”
Roberts also expressed his interest in being able to create an ongoing story with those continuing updates. “I don’t want to work on a game for two or three years and it comes out and everyone likes it and it gets good reviews and then, bam! You’re done and you’ve got to start working on your next game. For me, I’m much more interested in working on a living, dynamic universe.”
Source: Nowgamer via
Star Citizen being built for PC gamers who like to take pride in building their own PCs
82% of surveyed players build their own rigs.
Fire up your spreadsheets: Star Citizen details ship components and customisation system
Oh man oh man
Star Citizen cracks $8 million mark from crowdfunding
Already the biggest crowdfunded game in history, but why not go a bit further?
You can use the following bbCode
[i], [b], [img], [quote], [url href="http://www.google.com/"]Google[/url]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
facebook
twitter
google+
rss
I don’t think he’s talking down the consoles, more like stating the blatant truth about them. I honestly don’t know how some of these other game developers can afford to get on the consoles let alone update the games on them. It boggles the mind.
Significantly higher userbase coupled with a common standard upon which to design a game that has a potential user base of 70 million across only 2 configurations?
Fair call I guess.
Good to see at least one developer remembers which fan-base put him on the map.
It seems to be an alarmingly rare quality these days.
I missed the part where developers are indentured into service to PC gamers for the rest of their lives just because we bought their games…
Consoles are for people who are happy with their average car, doing their average speed in a average suburb and with lots of road rules.
PC is like the autobahn, drive what you want, how fast you want, and you’re F***** if you screw up
Christ Roberts gets it.
I’m not sure what his point is.
Consoles have caused enormous growth in the video games industry, and they’ve also forced developers to optimise their games to run on aging hardware. They’re also much cheaper and more convenient than a high-end PC. Why on earth would the next gen be less popular?
There will probably be more AAA titles available on console than PC when they come out due to exclusive launch titles. There will be more people playing games, and more people in the world who can afford to buy a console. How, exactly, this is going to equal less people buying consoles is beyond me.
I don’t really see many ‘AAA’ games hit consoles these days, they always seem to be rehashed versions of previous games, in saying that, I rarely play my PS3.
Consoles will probably kick off slow, depending on their price, but they will still be a growth market. I just think pcs are becoming popular again with the rise in digital distribution platforms, mainly steam, however also digital game stores like GMG, Getgames, etc.
Still, you can see consoles are going to be popular, hell Valve who are seen as the supreme of PC game distribution are making their own console, so it must have some serious growth potential if Valve is going to start creating their own hardware to compete with the big 3.
I just want there to be less PC ports from Consoles, 75% of them work like crap and are just a shitty attempt at cash grabs. I’ll give a publisher more respect for flat out saying no to ports (like Rockstar) than attempting some shitty version to make cash (like EA).
>
helos,
The PC version of every Grand Theft Auto is far superior to the console version If anything Rockstar should be only making PC games which is where they started.
Except for GTA4 when it was first put out. Tho, that was because RS got lazy on the port.
Are you suggesting there can be no happy medium between “Indentured for life” and “Not completely screwing the fans that made you successful”?
Yep, GTA4 is one of the worst pieces of PC software ever. Two completely independent, completely broken types of DRM, and horrifically bad game code than ran like a dog on many high powered systems.
As for the mass market aspect of consoles, this is the genius of the Steam box IMHO. All the benefits of the relatively uniform platform, with relatively little in the way of being locked down (apart from Steam itself, of course).
caitsith01,
That is a pretty extreme statement. I play GTA IV on PC all the time. It’s gorgeous runs great. I don’t understand why people have this attitude, I’ve seen it a lot. I don’t like it because it might stop Rockstar releasing PC games in the future, and I would be very pissed if that happened. I think RDR was a kick in the teeth to the whining retarded know it alls that play PC games. The console version is sooooo freaking ugly and slow compared to the PC version I have no idea how anyone could prefer it. I have it on PS3 and first played it on there, It’s hard to look at it now I’ve seen the PC version.
It’s pretty simple. On certain pieces of hardware the game ran like absolute crap. It was extremely poorly written. Some people had no issues, but many people had epic problems with it.
Add that to the DRMfest and you have a super terrible port.
caitsith01,
Well they got rid of the Social Club system tray thing. GFWL is not as good as steam but I really have no problem with it. Also I’m running the game on a Q6600. Yep that’s a 5 year old CPU, sure I have a gtx480. But I mean, come on, it can’t be that hardware crazy if it runs on a 5 year old CPU with 4gb of ram. I’m not exactly pushing the limit of the PC world.