id: PC is not a leading games format

John Carmack, the boss of acclaimed developer id and the leading force behind recent release Rage, has spoken frankly about the commercial viability of the modern PC games market.

And while his comments will undoubtedly anger the passionate supporters of the PC games community, Carmack is no fool. The money is on consoles. He’s a businessman. The public has made the decision for him.

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack blankly said to Kotaku."That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version.

A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it.

Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."

"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements. We chose the latter."