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Gaming consoles are holding back the gaming industry and console exclusives should be banned (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world
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The fact that developers have to cater to multiple platforms that have hardware limitations and different operating systems has led to worse quality of games of time. Console exclusives are anti-competitive, monopolistic, and they lead to a terrible consumer experience.

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[–] 32 points 2 years ago (3 children)

This notion that hardware limits hold games back is nonsense and could only come from someone with no development experience. Hardware benchmarks have only benefited the ecosystem of games. Without those benchmarks and the gradual standardization of architecture that the last two gens of consoles have provided the indie market would not be flourishing the way it is. Not to mention it forces AAA titles to actually optimize their shit. Imagine a world where developers had no incentive to care about performance? "tough shit buy a new GPU." A true gamers paradise.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think that's necessarily true. Water will reach its own level so to speak, if a developer releases a game that is far too much for a majority of gamers to run, those gamers won't buy the game and it won't sell. Obviously that also isn't always necessarily true, but enough terribly optimized games have released recently to be met with 40% rating on Steam that I'd like to think this is the case. Are some developers going to do it anyway? Absolutely, but that's true regardless. I think that no matter what, indie developers will always tend to keep their games lightweight either by principle or by design necessity, and bigger game studios would also sorta get the message and keep their games reasonable. With obvious exceptions... goddamn 400 GB games these days.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Yeah you're definitely right that there is still incentive to make games performant and accessible, AND that performance still often gets overlooked at launch and patched up post release (capcom and ubisoft you lil bitches), but I think the hard line of a necessary benchmark for consoles forces optimization to be worked on throughout development and helps indie devs manage their scope from the start as well as level the playing field a bit.

    But all of this kind of misses the forest for the trees in that no game is going to be made more fun by loosening hardware restrictions.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The hardware is only a part of it. A keyboard and mouse provide infinite controller configurations. How anyone can play a shooter without them has always puzzled me.

    You do realize controller options exist right? (On PCs)

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