Are Consoles Holding Back The True Potential of Video Games?

MP1st - "...This is where I see consoles beginning to hold back innovation in gaming. The consoles are designed to last for 7-10 years, which is great as far as long term electronics investment is concerned. The only problem is, the hardware market cycles almost every 2 years. While the locked down and uniform nature of a console certainly gives developers a lot of leeway and to push its hardware as far as it can go, it can still only go so far."

[faysal]

how the hell is console holding back anything? when you have a vision to create amazing things, no matter what you have you will try to achive that vision. at the end of the day games are ART!... games like journey wasnt hold back by anything!, all you need is imagination.
at the end of the day DEVELOPERS AND PUBLISHERS are the ones who decide where they want to create their games! no body is forceing them, if they think console is not good enough then dont develop for it simple as!. money and greedyness is what holds back potential not the TOOLS to create games...

[Vladplaya]

If only things worked like that. Sorry but if you are developing for closed system hardwear, you are limited with what you have. Sure Journey and small games like that are fun, but there are developers who want to create realistic looking games, and they have to work with what they can. And good rule of thump is that you make your product work for the slowest system first, and then pump it up so it works on better ones too, hence why a lot of potential is lost from the start of development. If they would build for gaming PCs and then turn down settings, I bet the games would be much better than a lot of ports we have been getting in the past.

[faysal]

i agree and like i said there is a lot of money spending when you are making games.... developers can only develop for the best tech (pc) and achive their original idea but cz of how expensive it is they have to develop for as meny system as they can to make money.. yes consoles are less powerful but that didnt stop games like, uncharted, killzone, beyond two soul, heavy rain, last of us, gran turismo, LBP, god of war....
the only advantage pc has over console is graphics... all that talk about crysis 1 will never work on console yet it ended up on console, yes graphics was good but nothing like pc.. my point is at the end of the day if you have the will and money, you can make anything possible on less able system.... it doesnt have to be the best graphics ever... gameplay creates joy, graphics creates eye candy.

[ShinMaster]

And we should stop pretending that high-end set ups are the standard, when they are the minority.
Everyone's set up is different. While the higher common denominator is PC, the lowest common denominator is ALSO PC.
PC games aren't developed exclusively for high-end hardware and specs only.

The only thing holding PC gaming back, is PC gaming itself.

[_QQ_]

The Console market is much larger than the gaming pc market, they aren't being technically"forced", but in reality they really don't have a choice. First party studios like naughty dog or santa monica actually are being technically "forced", they are Sony owned so their games have to go to a sony system.

[ATi_Elite]

YES! YES THEY ARE!

Pubs see the consoles as Easy cash cows so they Force Devs to make games that are cheap and that will make easy money no matter how bad they are.

and before you disagree just look at ALL the Call of Duty clones and Single Player games with Multi Player modes stapled onto them this Gen.

Sure you have the Skyrims, The Bioshock Infinites, The Red Dead Redemptions the Fallouts but way too many RENTALS and Not worth my time games get made in between the really good ones.

Consoles have Lost ALL Core gaming credibility and are simply for the CASUAL driven market which has ruined Gaming as Pubs cancel good games or go bankrupt trying to chase the Casual market for a big pay day instead of catering to the dedicated CORE GAMER.

Sure casual games like Call of Duty generate so much money to make CORE games BUT that money usually ends up being spent on CLONES or another casual failure from various Pubs/Devs trying to Copy COD.

CORE GAMERS are why Call of Duty became huge in the first place. So stop pandering to the Casual but instead build a Solid foundation of CORE Gamers and maybe your game will just catch on due to all the COOL CORE GAMERS playing it.

[ShaunCameron]

Um. No they're not.

<Pubs see the consoles as Easy cash cows so they Force Devs to make games that are cheap and that will make easy money no matter how bad they are.>

And what about the lower-end PC owners? This is the audience developers are catering to with the console-ports since they make up the majority of all PC gamers.

[6DEAD6END6]

It's up to the developers to take a game and make on a PC from the ground up with nothing holding them back. That's when you'll see a mind blowing game that takes advantages of a PC.

[Thatguy-310]

Has that happened yet? Consoles are holding anything back. If a publisher had a vision that vision will come to life soley on the pc market. Pretty sure there are pc only games and yet they still provide similar content than games on consoles. Only thing it improves upon is graphics and that's about it.

[Anon1974]

If you ask me, Piracy is what's holding games back. Developers would be more willing to spend the money to push PC hardware if they knew it would be worth the extra expense involved in development. If the market was there and lucrative enough, they'd be all over it. The problem is the market of PC gamers with top end hardware is limited, even before you factor in the 90% piracy rates that PC games are suffering these days.

The rise in PC game sales we've seen these past couple of years are rather skewed as it's not the AAA games that are driving the increase, it's social games on sites like Facebook. PC versions are often an after thought because the effort required to really push PC games above their console counterparts just isn't cost effective. If it was, developers would be doing it more.

So developers move to platforms where they have the greatest earning potential.

[MysticStrummer]

That's when you'll see a mind blowing game that takes advantage of the top 5% of PCs.

PC gamers like to pretend that most PCs are bleeding edge gaming rigs, when in reality most are off the shelf vanilla PCs that are several years old.

Those plain old PCs couldn't be holding PC gaming back, could they? No. It's the consoles.

smh

[asderland]

yes...

[2pacalypsenow]

Nope game developers are . afterall they are the ones who make the games not the Consoles

[AtomicGerbil]

No, publishers are holding back the true potential of video games.

[_QQ_]

They are, imagine if Naughty Dog developed a high end pc game,The game would excel in every spec based category, the only exception is Nintendo because they don't rely on specs to sell their systems and actually think of new ways to play not available on pc.

[PCfan4life]

im imagining it but i have never seen uncharted or last of us graphics on pc so i cant say that itd be mind blowing

[McScroggz]

People probably don't realize how difficult it would be to constantly create games with the ever-changing most powerful PC specs. There are so many different variables to take into account, and it's idiotic to think a game developer would make a game that will only run on a machine owned by 5% of the market. It's just not business smart.

Games take years to make, and there's new and more powerful PC parts coming out pretty much every year. Seriously guys, think about this...

[Brazz]

consoles hold back the potential for games on pc > yes, for sure, but publisher do it as well...
majority of publisher have no interest in making expensive new engines end graphics in the same speed that pc envolve, that is madness!!
Thank god for the consoles, they make the graphic standard !! thinking in Buying a new Video card after 1-2 years of use is just crazy!

[mamotte]

Why? A good game is a good game, even if it isn't running at, idk, 4k and 60fps.

[Rusty515]

This is so ignorant. It's not like PC exclusives look significantly different than multiplats. It has nothing to do with consoles holding back the PC. Video games cost money to make you know? The more better looking the game is, the more it's gonna cost. At this point in time, it costs a lot to actually even develop a game that takes full advantage of a high end PC. Stop blaming the damn consoles.

[Thatguy-310]

Exactly there are PC exclusives that don't back up the statement that consoles are holding video games back.

[tiffac008]

I think finances is the one holding everything back. The better the graphics the bigger the cost.

So whatever innovation or leaps that can happen in a life cycle, you cannot just openly implement it without weighing the cost it would incur.

[pop-voxuli]

What kind of stupid ass question is that??? Thats like asking if our eye balls are holding back our true potential of seeing things. Thats what the fu*king things are for man!!!!

[soultecc]

pc gamers have standards and console gamers dont so when we see a crappy lazy port then yes it will get pirated because the developer does not deserve our money, but you console gamers accept any old crap and thats whats holding all gaming potential back.

and just to let you all know microsoft had a rule this gen which was if any game being made looked or ran amy smoother on the ps3 then they did not want it on there platform GOOGLE IT

thats why you see games like uncharted on the ps3 which look amazing yet a game like call of duty which doesnt take much power to run works better on xbox. so you could also say that its microsoft holding everyone else back

so if microsoft have that rule in their terms and conditions this up coming gen ps4/xbox one then even if the ps4 is more powerful all multiplat games will all run and look better on xbox one, all thanks to microsoft for being a bunch of greedy whiney babies.