Comments on: PCGA President Randy Stude Talks Methodology

By: RichP

RichP — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:06:09 +0000

That’s the thing killing PC gaming

Incorrect. That’s what’s killing off the stupid bunch. As you said yourself, the studios who make scalable games are doing great. TF2 played fantastic on my old Radeon 9800 Pro and plays fantastic on my beefy 8800 GTS.

By: Pundabaya

Pundabaya — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:13:32 +0000

That’s the thing killing PC gaming. Forced obsolescence. People become jaded when they simply cannot play games on their machine anymore, and have to upgrade for the umpteenth time.

Valve learned. You can play Half-Life 2 on DX 7 machines. They helpfully had a widget that would tell you whether it would run on your machine. The game sold bucketloads.

Look at MMORPGs. They have to make the game scaleable, because they make all their money after the game is sold. If the game says ‘Ha, get a new computer N00b’ then the company has just lost far more money than they get from the retail sale.

Why can’t devs get a game to work on a five year old computer, then add in the whizzy stuff? It seems like a much sounder financial plan than ‘Screw those twats who supported our other games,they don’t have a brand new computer’.

Sure, on minimum specs, it won’t look as good. But if it plays as good, people are more likely to upgrade their graphics card/whole computer to see what they are missing.

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:16:54 +0000

@ Jon R

I thought the answer was pretty clear: it’s a body that has the commercial interests of its members in mind. They’re in this to make money – Stude says so in the interview. There’s nothing coincidental about the research only being available to their members.

So, if it is ultimately a “glorified marketing effort” (or actually a kind of fact-finding and regulating exercise, as it seems to be) and consequently they get some things sorted for both consumers and their members while they’re conducting it, then fine.

If it is a glorified marketing effort that ultimately achieves nothing of practical value, or even works against consumer interests, then I’ll be happy to start asking those tougher questions. At the moment PCGA haven’t done much worth commenting on either way: it has provided reports that are available only to its paying members, as is the prerogative of an industry consortium. So this interview is little more than finding out what they intend to do, and how they intend to do it.

Once the PCGA starts doing things that actually have some ramification for the consumer at large, then I’ll be happy to start making judgments. The min spec thing will be the first test of that: if it’s a sensible recommendation, then great. If it’s not – if, for example, it unhelpfully lends credibility to crappy integrated graphics – then we’ll aim to say so.

By: Jon R.

Jon R. — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:04:10 +0000

Oh good. I thought you were going to do something weird, like ask if there was any possible conflict of interest between having a stated charter of being a platform for the well-being of the industry and supporting it with their own “research”, which is coincidentally only available to member companies who’ve paid between $15,000 and $50,000.

Or how his completely made up position as Intel’s “gaming director” and foresight into those lovely integrated video chipsets lends credible insight to the needs and directions of the gaming industry.

Or how the PCGA’s Chairman of Data Research is also a a chair on their marketing subcommittee; Roy Taylor, who also happens to hold nVidia’s prestigious position of VP of “content relations”.

Taylor on piracy:
“Or, we just accept that it is what it is and it’s here to say and will never change. Going down that route means we’ve got to think about other ways to increase revenue and sales on the PC. Maybe we don’t need to sell games any more – look at Asia, the biggest PC gaming market in the world. They don’t sell games in Asia and revenue is instead driven by microtransactions, subscriptions and advertising. Most people think about advertising as in-game billboards, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s also product placement, portals, webpages and endorsements.”

YES! When i think about what could possibly make the Western industry better, it’s about how to mimic the makeshift industry that came about purely because no one else fucking thought to serve them properly! WINNER!

Fuck’s sake, Rossignol. This isn’t good enough. You’re either putting the screws to them hardcore until you get an answer or an admission to the lack thereof, or you’re willingly engaging in the PR program of what is ultimately a glorified marketing effort.

By: Crispy

Crispy — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:52:42 +0000

Oh and to hypothesise further on the ratings, looking at my L4D box I can see 5 categories that could be given a PGCA ‘specs rating’. You could do this on the year the hardware was (widely?) available on the market. So, for example, a 128MB graphics card might get a (takes a stab in the dark) PGCA 2002 rating in the Graphics category.

However, this could be misleading for some people who may think a 2002-bought PC should have the necessary graphics card. Perhaps if the PGCA began collective hardware data from its well-placed companies, you would be able to see when the majority of users were equipped with any given hardware, and use this for the PGCA specs rating.

I do think splitting it up by category is the only proper way to do it, though.

By: Crispy

Crispy — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:17:25 +0000

@cliffski
There is no such thing as ‘gaming ready’. laptops that will play bejewelled and Diner Dash and Habbo Hotel might not play Crysis. A laptop that won’t run bioshock can still play almost all indie and casual games.
I dread the idea of a triple-A retail focused group of devs declaring what spec is needed for ‘gaming’.

Actually, I think it’s more likely that they’re going to try to simplify the specs requirements so a complete initiate can tell whether their PC can run a game by comparing the game’s rating with their PC’s rating. Someone hypothesised a “PGCA yyyy” rating. So for Bejewelled you might be able to go to the PGCA website, input your system specs and it could give you a rough estimate of a PGCA specs rating, which you could try to match to Bejeweled’s own PGCA specs rating.

I don’t see that being a terrible system to work with. You could check your PC’s specs (or even take your Quick Reference card shipped with the PCGA-compliant PC) so that when you go to the shops, or buy online, you have a quick, easy point of reference.

If Publishers were encouraged to submit PCGA min specs ratings to the PCGA, at least this might encourage the PC to exploit the millions of PC users at the msot casual end of the scale, and perhaps this may see the PC being deservedly seen in a more high-profile light by the masses (and therefore the Publishers) as a platform on a level footing with the console market.

At first I was very skeptical about the PCGA, but this interview gives me a lot of hope for the future. People might complain that they’re not doing anythign, but I think by giving hard facts on sales figures, piracy figures, and so on, they are going in the right direction.

By: suibhne

suibhne — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:58:44 +0000

Yes, Stude sounded a bit subtly snarky (at least potentially) wrt Epic Games…but don’t miss that Epic has also lost no opportunity to be snarky about Intel, blaming Intel Integrated Graphics for everything from UT3′s dismal failure to the total apocalypse of PC gaming. Still, I’m a lot more interested in hearing positive noises from folks like Stude than more backwash from Epic, now that they’ve repeatedly and very publicly pooh-poohed the PC platform and have no (announced) PC games in the pipe. (They are, at least, still planning to support UT3 with an expansion pack…for all of the 250 people worldwide who actually play that game.)

By: Vriebert

Vriebert — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:46:00 +0000

You can’t really reducing it to a rating, it’s not a one-dimensional thing – some games need shader performance, others need texturing power, etc. In the most extreme case there could be games that require advanced features but very little processing power – if Bejewelled was DirectX 10 it’d work on a useless-at-3D Intel X4500 but not on a Geforce 7950 that can run Crysis pretty well. So what number do you give it?
The only option is to make the benchmark aware of what specific games need to run and have it tell you if you can/can’t handle it.

By: Quercus

Quercus — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:23:52 +0000

I like the idea of the rating – but you would just have to tone down the numbers.
Basically each system (or component) would be rated similar to the 3D benchmark, to give an overall score, then you could just divide by 100 to give a three-digit score.
Likewise games would be tested to see what they demand with most settings on high to run smoothly and would also be given a score. Then you just look at the numbers on the game and compare to your system.
Older systems could simply download some software to run a few tests and find out what their system is rated as.

By: ilurker

ilurker — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:40:11 +0000

You could probably get away with using a synthetic benchmarker along the likes of 3DMark06 to give you a score. It won’t be 100% accurate, but saying “You must have a 1500 PCGA Rating or higher to run this game” would clear it up for the average consumer enough to sacrifice the wiggle-room on how that translates to actual performance.

By: Duoae

Duoae — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:25:27 +0000

The DirectX updates are far more aggressive than anything you see on the consoles. They’re static for five or six years at a time, and we’re getting DirectX 11 just a couple of years after DirectX 10. That’s important because the platform I enjoy the best has the potential – via Moore’s Law – of doubling its performance every few years.

And yet while i love the PC as my primary gaming platform this is one of the weaknesses. I think DirectX 9 (a,b and c) was the most successful version of the code base because it was stuck in that version for a long time…. moving forward quickly is just as harmful as being stuck in one place for too long (see Left 4 Dead as a gaming example of this ;) .

Seriously though, the hardware doesn’t even fully support dx 10.1 (and doesn’t even run dx10 smoothly for the most part) and games don’t support dx10 apart from a handful of titles. I think that they move forward without regard for the stability of the business/development side of things… so next year (or 2010) developers are going to be developing across three versions of dx (9,10 and 11) since the majority of ‘gamers’ out there only have cards that are capable of running dx9 smoothly (i’m talking older and low-mid range current cards) and the minority are running the latest and greatest nvidia and ati dx10 and 10.1 cards(respectively) – just look at the steam hardware survey. IMO this needs addressing and quickly considering developers seem to admit (ask David Braben) that they can’t help but want to put the latest and greatest into their game – even if financially it’s not the best decision.

By: Vriebert

Vriebert — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:20:20 +0000

“If people bought games purely for the latest graphics then I honestly don’t see how “backdating” would affect that anyway when in comparison to saying that a new game only needs a 64 MB graphics card.”

I’m not saying everyone, just a significant percentage of people that publishers would like to sell to. And the difference is that everyone understands “lol, 3 year old grafix” whereas most people don’t know that 64 MB of graphics ram isn’t that much these days.
And, to the broader point, I can just as easily reverse your argument and point out that if graphics weren’t important then the PS3 and 360 would be utterly dead in the water, since their primary attributes besides higher resolution are, respectively, being really expensive and breaking all the time.