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It seems everyone hates exclusivity, unless they're the ones to benefit from it. PC gamers like it when there aren't console ports of their games and it seems console gamers are just the same, as a number of Xbox One players have lashed out at Xbox head Phil Spencer after it was announced that third-person shooter, Quantum Break, was also going to be released on PC.
The big annoyance for Xbox fans is apparently that there isn't much point in buying an Xbox One if the games they thought would be exclusive are also on PC. Indeed that's been a solid message this generation, as cross-platform releases have been rather common, but Spencer's response has been that Microsoft isn't looking to build walls, just great games.
Others were annoyed that the announcement of another version of Quantum Break was coming so late in the day. Why wait until just a month before release to announce a PC version too?
@PNF4LYFE We've been evolving our strategy over 2 years. We try to share as early as we can, GDC, Gamescom. I'll take the feedback on timing
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) February 11, 2016
When asked what was the point of owning an Xbox One when so many games were also going to PC, Spencer countered that the Xbox One was a lot cheaper than a fully-fledged gaming PC and that some people liked the different experiences. He also suggested that there was no downside to games being available on more platforms, as it meant more people could play them.
@PNF4LYFE We've been evolving our strategy over 2 years. We try to share as early as we can, GDC, Gamescom. I'll take the feedback on timing
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) February 11, 2016
He went on to say that Microsoft was looking to make cross-buy games far more common and would start with Quantum Break. If you buy a copy on either PC or Xbox One, you can play it on the other (thanks Eurogamer).
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KitGuru Says: I really like the idea of Cross-Platform buys. I can understand the Xbox One fans' annoyance here though. If a PC exclusive suddenly announced a console port right before launch, fans would be up in arms over how it would have a restricted frame rate or visuals.
oohh.. salty
I think fans would only be up in arms if the PC version definitely did have restricted frame rate and visuals, not just because a game was also going to release on console.
Think Microsoft needs to order a lot of salt for this one.
True, PC people don’t mind if the game is on ‘x’ different platforms. We would just like the basics (uncapped framerate and a good array of visual settings).
I own an xbox and im not upset. Then again i aint poor and also have a gaming PC. I’d of course rather play this game on my PC. I use the xbox as a media hub more than anything, unless i have guests over then i play some multiplayer games like just dance….too bad Halo 5 wasn’t split screen, i would of bought that……
With multi-platform games, it depends a lot on how the game was developed, for example:
1. Game written exclusively for console hardware, then messily ported to PC afterwards.
2. Game written for high-end PCs, then scaled down if necessary to work on the consoles.
Both are multi-platform, yet option #2 is far better as it’ll give good performance scaling on different PCs and still work well on the consoles.
It’s less of an issue now with the very PC-like hardware in the current gen consoles, but with the previous gen gamers frequently got option #1, often with fan patches required to bring things up to scratch on the PC (especially with tiny texture sizes due to the extremely limited console RAM at the time). This is where a lot of the ill-will stems from on the PC side of multi-platform games in my opinion.
At the moment, things seem quite good, i just hope the industry resists the urge to slide to option #1 in future years as the current gen console hardware ages…
I can’t remember where I read it, it was months ago, but I read an article where they interviewed a game developer at one of the big studios, and asked him about console games ported to PC and vice-versa. The gist of his response was that, it’s a hell of a lot easier (and results in much better quality on both platforms) to build a game for high-end PC and then “dumb it down” to play on consoles than it is to build a game that runs great on consoles, and then “tune it up” to take advantage of the nearly-infinite variations of PC hardware configurations.
Xbox fanboy says: “Phil my issue with this is the nature of how this was announced. Why now? Why so late? It’s hard to defend to be honest”
What’s to defend? They decided they could build the eff out of it for PC and make a bunch more money. Why do you care unless you just want to be able to say, “Haha look PC fanboys, you don’t get this game!”
Loser.
Integral Kinect!
I can understand the anger if one bought a Xbone just because they were looking forward to this game, because thats 400$ (or whatever an Xbone costs these days, i’m too lazy to google it right now) wasted if they already own a decent PC. But then again, why would somebody shell out 400$ just because they want to play 1 game? You buy an Xbone if you want to play lots of games on it. To anyone who already owns an Xbone, this news doesn’t change a thing, unless they also own a powerfull PC, i which case they just cancel the preorder on the Xbone version and buy the PC version instead (slightly cheaper, slightly better graphics, and hopefully not horribly ported to PC)
PC Gamers were fine with Crysis being ported to Xbox360. The core game was great.
PC Gamers were not fine with Crysis 2 on Xbox360 because the core game was restricted to make porting it less work (Small maps, oversimplified controls and terrible AI).