Id software has a special place in the heart of every PC gamer, responsible for legendary franchises such as Doom and Quake. When Id software makes a game, every PC gamer sits up and pays attention.
The PC launch of their brand new IP, RAGE, has had a disappointingly rocky launch. This was a major disappointment to the legions of PC owners who are die-hard fans of id software’s John Carmack.
However, just a few days ago we reported that the game’s disappointing launch could be attributed to driver issues rather than any big failure on id’s part.
Talking to Kotaku, Carmack insists that everything was thoroughly tested and developed before launch.
“We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch,” he said. We had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions.”
“We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn’t work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn’t help either.”
Carmack isn’t one to mince his words, being well known for his brutal honesty, sometimes to his detriment. This is clearly evident in this comment: “We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games.”
“That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it.”
It’s a little sad that one of the historical pillars of PC game development says it’s not their leading platform, but unfortunately sales figures don’t like, and it makes more sense as a business to focus on the larger audience.
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Are you serious WTH???