Some quotes from a rather amazing article, which is rather ironically entitled, “PC games not dead yet”:
“These days it seems that millions of gamers have switched to playing games on their game consoles, but Roy Taylor, Nvidia’s Vice President of Content Relations, recently told us that PC games aren’t dead by a “longshot”.”
“Developers often want to make the best possible game, but business realities mean that games must often be scaled-down graphically to work on many machines. “I would like a version of the game that doesn’t pander to the businessmen. Something with the very very best in graphics,” Taylor said, adding that if it takes a $20,000 PC to run the game, “then so be it”.”
Oh.
If PC gaming isn’t dead yet, it certainly will be if this idiot has his way.
There seems to be a disconnect with reality here. Sane people might think that there might be a connection between PCers going to consoles and current PC gaming pricing.
The answer to “people are leaving us because our products cost too much” isn’t usually, “Let’s charge ten times more!” I mean, it’s not enough for this guy to want games that will only run well on a 2 or 3K PC. Nooooooo, we got to add a zero to that.
What do I know, but I’ve gotten lots of emails over time from people saying that they’re going to consoles because the extra cost of PC gaming isn’t worth it, but not one email complaining about the disgustingly low cost of PC hardware.
This fellow seems to aware of at least the words “economy of scale” when it comes to hardware, but he seems clueless that economies of scale apply even more to software.
Developing high-end games cost tens of millions of dollars these days, which means you have to sell a million or two copies just to get back your costs, and quite a few million to make good money from it.
This guy wants somebody else to spend tens of millions more for a luxury product that maybe a hundred thousand people could use. $10,000,000 extra cost divided by 100,000 buyers. You do the math.
Of course, not like this guy and his company would be sticking their necks out for this, it’s all gravy for them. They’ll make a lot more money selling God-knows-what video systems than any game developer will ever make.
This brings us to the scary part of all this: the cluelessness and economic illiteracy isn’t coming from some crazy blogger, but the vice-president in charge of content management at nVidia. This is an important player in the future direction of PC gaming.
Maybe an analogy is in order here. This is like U.S. Vice-President Cheney getting interviewed on TV one day and saying, “You know, those Europeans just aren’t spending enough on the war in Iraq. I think they ought to be spending even more than we do, and spend most of it buying weapons from us. And if they have to raise taxes 50% to do that, so be it.”
What sort of reception do you think he’d get?
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