Marketeers often use convincing soundbites to cover reality. If the consuming public doesn’t always believe them when they say “something can’t be done” then I’m not going to point the finger at the consumer for being unable to pick up on what is truth and what is falsehood. Better to rage away hoping that it’s false. For all the consumer entitlement issues, it is somewhat a problem our corporate overlords have created themselves. They made their bed.

Maybe we should have a console-type certification process for console ports… but we’d probably not get anything then.

Oh my God. I seemed to have turned into a ranting cynic. Your podcast has rubbed off on me, BC =)

I love this:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-31-bethesda-struggling-with-dawnguard-on-ps3-this-is-not-a-problem-were-positive-we-can-solve

As indicates a ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ if you look at the comments thread. Bethesda have said they can’t do it as it wouldn’t be good content and they are getting lynched anyway.

@BeamSplashX– I know, it’s just that… I hate to feel that PC players are made to beg for the attention and then it’s all big smiles for the most broken of ports.

They’re not idiots over there. My gut feel is that they made a business decision to just get the thing out the door without too much re-architecting as they probably weren’t sure if it would sell well. They limited the project budget to something they felt was acceptable. I don’t see malice or agenda here, just a lack of conviction that the port would make money.

Saying that, my concern is that such self-inflicted failures are picked up across the industry as anecdotes to cite about the difficulty of the PC platform. Ubisoft weigh in with the worst DRM known to man which alienated a lot of customers – and then complain low sales => piracy is incredibly high to justify a decision to go free to play. I’d much rather corner the game companies into understanding the PC is not “dead” and neither is it the pit of piracy (both views seem contradictory to say the least).

Console ports are political and bad ports have repercussions.

To be fair From Software have never made a PC game, they are a Japanese company that have focused entirely on console games. I don’t think they have an agenda against piracy or the like, I think they simply don’t have any experience with making a PC game.

I think it’s still possible to totally break a game during the PC port process. And worrying because that’s how companies line up and say “well, you see, it didn’t sell anything on that platform” to justify lack of PC investment. After rampant piracy, of course.