

How to ruin your PC port in five easy steps - carusen
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/ars-guide-how-to-ruin-your-pc-port-in-five-easy-steps.ars

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ordinary
As a PC gamer who regularly encounters this problem, I'm a bit disappointed
that they made no serious attempt to uncover the reasons why publishers
release gimped PC versions of console games. Surely good games sell better
than bad games, and if the "features" enumerated in the article are indeed so
universally reviled (I'm certainly no exception, myself), why not make them
worth playing? Any HN'ers want to take a stab?

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jameskilton
The games industry is one of the worst industries at learning from their
mistakes. They're also downright _awful_ at listening to customers. For a lot
of publishers these days, PC gamers are "the other guys" (which is ignoring
the fact that we are still far more numerous than console gamers), so PC ports
are seen as "appeasement measures" rather than versions fully deserving their
attention.

Dungeon Siege 3 is an unmitigated disaster. I will never buy anything Bethesda
again, and Ubisoft might as well just roll over and die.

It's the time of indy games. Braid, Minecraft, Terraria, etc, go play games by
people who actually care about their customers, and they're usually a hell of
a lot better than the AAA shit we get these days.

~~~
Symbol
As someone in the AAA games industry, let me address the following quote:

"It only takes a little extra work to make your PC games play on the PC, and
make gamers happy"

Sadly, that's naive. Like any other software company, there are diminishing
returns for features / revenue. When the product is slated for release on
Xbox, PS3, and PC it is typically done with one codebase with platform
specific code where necessary. You often end up with a common denominator
where the PC people usually feel left out in the cold.I can attest that it
takes a monumental amount of work to support the myriad graphics card
configurations for the sole purpose of getting your game to look/feel ROUGHLY
the same on all three platforms. To customize the game for one platform would
be at the expense of the other two (from a development, production, and QA
perspective) and it often doesn't make sense to those paying the bills.

Sometimes the PC gets a dedicated port (such as Mass Effect for the PC), and
those things that make PC gamers smile get added. However, this port is
essentially a new project (SKU in retail games parlance) that is greenlit only
if the console versions of the game have sold well enough to warrant it, and
is typically done by a third party under extreme time pressure.

All these factors contribute to less polish, which everyone involved is keenly
aware of. Hopefully I've illustrated that this is a complex problem that can
hardly be addressed by a "it doesn't take that much more effort to do a good
job" platitude.

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onli
I think you somewhat missed the point. Sure it is complex to support all gpus.
But that's not the point of the article. The article is about small things
like being able to customize the controls and not having to login in an
useless service. Those are thing possible without much effort.

If you dou a port and miss to modify the basics, you ruin your port, your
reputation, and thus lose money. There is no point in doing the awful part of
the port, like gpu-support, but miss the easy but necessary steps.

~~~
Symbol
And I'm trying to say that, in most cases, these things appear to be
superficially easy but are more complex than you give it credit for. In almost
all cases, the sad fact is that a playable version on the PC will generate
sales. Any deeper level of polish is only diminishing returns. It may sound
like I'm hating on PC gaming but I'm not. I only am giving my perspective from
inside the sausage factory.

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drdaeman
If the port's unplayable - why care about it at all? Treat it as if it had
never existed.

