Rein, CliffyB Weigh in on PC Gaming Alliance
"Right now, if you have a laptop with integrated graphics and try to play our game, it doesn't play...So you just lose your interest in that. We don't want that," Rein told MTV Multiplayer. "We want all these people buying laptops and reasonably priced PCs, to at least be able to be exposed to gaming. They can go out later and upgrade to something better, but letÂ’s at least give them a baseline experience."
Added Bleszinski, "I think everybody coming together in that kind of way will essentially kind of help re-glue things back together and kind of help fix the market."
Officially formed at last week's Game Developers Conference, the PCGA hopes to serve as a forum for developers to collaborate on the marketing, production, and analyzation of the PC market. The body will act as an advisory board, with a focus on providing a single "voice" for the PC gaming industry.
Numerous PC developers have voiced their support for the initiative, and several others have spoken out on the future of the platform. Bleszinski recently said that PC gaming was in a state of "disarray" and evolving towards the casual gaming market. Earlier this week, Gas Powered Games founder Chris Taylor suggested that secure gaming—in which data is stored on a central server rather than home PCs—is the future of the platform.
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Horn
replyWhat the fuck does CliffyB and the rest of Epic know about making games to run on laptops? Everything they've been involved in has been aimed at the hard core PC market (excluding console titles).
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UT2k4 actually runs on a wide range of platforms. However, it's still funny to hear them talk about it considering how shit UT3 was on PC and how little attention they paid to that, especially in light of the fact that UT3 is essentially a PC franchise and would have done best on PC no matter what if it was done right.
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yeah it scaled quite nicely
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I remember they were big about it having a software renderer that wasn't shit. Was cool b/c most the soldiers I deployed with in 2004 didn't have awesome laptops and we could play the game fine.
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Their point is that an increasing amount of the PC market is focused around Laptops where either the person has Intel Integrated bullshit, or they have some way-behind-the-curve NVidia or ATI chipset whose drivers can only be updated when the OEM deems it (on Windows), which makes it either even further behind the times or worse, the OEM stops updating the drivers once the laptop is off the market.
Plus some gamers (not the insanely hardcore ones) are getting these "desktop replacement" laptops which at least fix the IIG problem but not the other problems, and laptops become a concern.
I don't think his bitch is so much that people are buying laptops, but that the laptop thing, as it stands now, is hurting their sales potential (whereas consoles don't have this problem). I think he was calling more for the problems to be addressed (out of date hardware, OEM-only drivers)-
The new laptop trend is to combo a shit CPU with a good GPU. My boss bought a Toshiba at bestbuy 2 weeks back. It was a 17" 1.4Ghz Duo with Dual 8600's. Pretty cheap too, $1200 or something. This trend might actually help fix the lowerish end laptop problem.
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