Marketing confuses me
I started playing Bioshock yesterday. The computer I keep mostly for games meets only the minimum requirements. There aren’t half as many new games I want to play as there were six years ago, so upgrading isn’t as much a value proposition as it used to be for me.
I was surprised to find a prominent (above the title) “Only on XBox 360 and Windows” logo on the game box. I sympathize with the decision to limit the target platform—it’s strongly favored by the technical and economic realities of commercial software—but I don’t understand bragging about it. We’ve made the same decision where I work, and while I believe it’s a sound business decision, it’s certainly not a feature. In fact, every time I make an engineering decision that will force users of the software I write to fulfill a precondition, I feel vaguely embarrassed.
I hope they’re getting kickbacks or something from Microsoft for badging their packaging, because it’s otherwise a waste of ink. Even the least intelligent, most impulsive consumer I can imagine isn’t going to change his mind and buy a game because he finds out it won’t run on a computer he doesn’t own.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:33 am
I don’t believe that in the end, limiting development to a single platform really provides the best decision for the customer… The best games of history, certainly of the 80′s, were popular partially because they were developed for every system and computer they could. Bard’s Tale, Ultima, King’s Quest… All these series found their demise when they limited themselves to a single platform that didn’t have their audience’s following. Adventure games found a home on consoles long after the dos/windows gamers had moved on to FPS’s and other “Hard Core” games, and much of the Ultima series fans were on Mac or even Linux when Ultima 8 became the first non-cross-platform entry. It’s telling that the fans who weren’t on the platforms they followed have built engines to allow their favorite games to keep running where the original games hadn’t been created for (Exult, ScummVM.)
Many of the best games developed today are still created as cross-platform titles if they’re not started on that monopolist’s dream that is Direct X… I noted that many games today use OpenGL and SDL to build cross-platform goodness between Windows, Linux, and OSX, and some of those run better on the non-MS platforms than the popular platform.