Ubisoft CEO: ‘Industry needs new consoles’

Console gamers might not say they do, but in reality ... consoles have become more and more like PCs for the longest time. The only difference is that consoles have a TV-friendly UI while the PC has a monitor friendly UI.

What console gamers fail to realize is that aside the fact that you place consoles in living rooms and on a big screen TV, there's really nothing differentiating "PC gaming" and "console gaming" when you get down to it. If they didn't want "PC-like" gaming capabilities, they'd be much happier with the Wii which is what traditional console gaming is ... but tact on online gameplay and HD graphics ... they just really want a PC-like gaming experience on a $300 box with easy plug and play capabilities.

Plug and play can be easily achievable on the PC, but seems like no manufacturer likes the idea of doing that on the PC and the bulk of the PC gaming market doesn't care, so that function was never implemented but it's highly doable.

deltatux

 

Nope, wrong again!!!
If anything you could even find me getting called a 360 fanboy in the console section for my "constructive criticism" of the PS3, and im sure a few people would attest to that,i call it like it is, if people want to hand pick stuff, thats up to them, doesn't make it fact.

If anything MMO's are the disease of the gaming world, and help contribute to the rumour that all gamers are no life losers, with no real life friends, and i hate them just as much as i hate those crap dice rolling novels that were about when i was a kid, but you won't find me in MMO threads spreading negativity, as i respect others opinions whether i agree or not.

serp202, but thats not the best way forward, i(we) don't wan't PC's to be like consoles, i want them to be seperate, the minute you start dumbing it down, and making PC gaming easier to use, the minute it becomes restricted, and not why i got into it 20 years ago.

Consoles are for plug and play sociable gaming of reasonable quality, so aimed at young kids and older adults in the 20's and 30's with little free time, while PC's are for higher quality gaming, but at the expense of the sociable side of things and a little more hassle, but aimed more at older kids and guys in their early to mid 20's with a bit more free time to dedicate to the problem solving we all know is needed.

deltatux, plug and play is possible in theory, but it will never happen because there are too many variables, too many different software and hardware combinations, and because it would ruin PC gaming altogether.

Too many people are only in PC gaming for graphics alone, which is why i think the situation is a mess right now.
That and the fact most PC gamers spend more time fighting among each other about nonsense crap like Nvidia v AMD etc....just doesn't help any unity in the community at all.

 

I think one thing PC gamers fail to realize is that consoles are much more "sociable".

In college, my friend had an xbox 360. On a regular basis, a group of friends and myself would go over to his apartment, drink beer, and play NHL 10 online together.

Nothing like this has ever happened in any PC game I have played. When I was big into counter-strike years ago, I had a group of friends that all played on the same server, but it isn't the same as all being in the same living room, playing on the same TV, and making jokes (and drinking) together.

After college, that same group of friends I played xbox with in college all bought 360's, and we still play together. However, the moments where we have the most fun are still the moments when we are all physically sitting next to each other in the same living room.

The other nice thing about consoles is that you don't have to worry about the hardware. Face it, a large majority of people aren't tech savy. Most of my friends probably have no idea who Nvidia or AMD/ATI are. With a 360, they don't have to worry about whether or not their graphics card is powerful enough, or what settings they need to set the game on, etc. They just put the game disc in and play.

Any games that I know my old college buddies will not be interested in, or any games that I buy solely for the single-player (i.e. TES), I buy for the PC. I still love PC gaming and I am a huge tech geek, but I also have absolutely no problem with console gaming.

 

I agree Merton, when i was heavily into MP gaming, it was LAN parties etc....nowadays calling MP sociable is like saying you have lots of friends, but forgetting to mention they are Facebook friends.

 

Ya but these days, with Microsoft and Sony pushing "PC-like" gaming experiences instead, the days of local multiplayer is fading away. Even Microsoft no longer supports "system-link" anymore ... that means you can't connect XBOX consoles together no more.

Personally I think console manufacturers should concentrate on getting people to go to LAN parties other than constantly upping the graphics.

deltatux

 

uhhh this quickly escalated into a console-vs-pc thread. NOW BEHAVE PEOPLE.

 

That is how it started though.

 

This is simply how it is, and this was stated very early in the thread.

Consoles exist because not everyone's going to maintain and upgrade a PC. Spoiler: Consoles are cheap. Dirt ****ing cheap, and they do almost as much as our expensive PCs. I know when I bought it new, my PC could probably buy 5+ 360s and the 360s require no upgrades or modifications or setting changes to play whatever game is made for them.

There will ALWAYS be a console segment, and it will ALWAYS be huge, and the whiners among you are going to have to look through your "I hate Ubisoft" blinders to see that this guy is asking for a fix to many of your stupid, inane, and worthless complaints.

Every time I come on this forum I have to see "Consoles lol holding back PCs" and here comes someone who says the current generation of consoles is holding everything back, and the blind around here can only make useless statements about how consoles suck. One side of your mouth complains about how inferior consoles are to PCs, and how little they compare, and then the other side complains when someone says consoles need to be better.

Guess what geniuses, if new consoles comes out, all your games are gonna get a graphics boost.

 

In 2008 there were 1 billion computers worldwide. In 2009, there was just 22 million consoles in the US. By 2014 there will be 2 billion computers worldwide (by current growth models).

The premise that people want consoles because computers are too expensive is not true. Almost everyone in the modern world has at least 1 computer. Most computers now days are able to work on the HD TV and use "console controllers" and they are very cheap to retrofit to play games.

People aren't buying consoles because they think computers are too expensive, the only reason they buy them is marketing and ease of use. Should computers ever provide the same ease of use with marketing, consoles will effectively (as a stand alone product) be dead. Which is why next generation consoles (even more so than the ones today) will focus on being a media hub that works in concert with whatever PC a person has.

 

+1

New consoles are a good thing.

 

I remember when gaming consoles were worth buying. Those were the good days.

Console gaming died for me with the gamecube ( I owned all 3 consoles last gen though. I bought like 5 games for my PS2 and probably less for my xbox ).

I bought a wii this "gen" and it was the biggest waste of money of my life. I also bought a DSi even though I had a DS.....just like my DS I never played my DSi.

It's just the "I need to have the latest $#!+" syndrome.

For the few exclusives a year I miss out on, I'll gladly save the purchase price of the 3 consoles. That's my entire PC upgrade covered right there.

PC gaming is just as bad as console gaming these days though.

DLC, DRM, short campaigns, online only MP ( no bots, LAN, or split screen ). Dual and single core optimisation and DX9 only for PC exclusives ( Starcraft 2 and Stalker CoP ) we can't blame consoles for that. Stracraft 2 only works in offline mode for a week before you need to log back online to re-authenticate your game. That's just about as bad as DRM gets.

It all comes down to greed.

If consoles still have no DRM next gen, and PC has steam-integration galore in retail games ( See: Cancer ) and constant internet ubi B.S... then I would weigh up the value of console gaming.

That or piracy...

 

Yep, consoles are winning because they are what MOST people want. They don't want to have to learn the difference between video RAM, CPU RAM, and just plain old RAM. They don't want to worry about when they need to upgrade. They don't want to deal with installing new drivers. Most of all, they don't want to cough up a lot of money. They would like to see better graphics but only if they are very cheap.

Ubisoft wants to see a new round of consoles (as do I) but, from what I've seen on forums, there are a ton of people that really hate that idea. You can talk about better graphics and smarter games until you are blue in the face, they will only see one thing: another $300 gone.

And yes, these people ARE holding back the industry. But then, they are holding it up, too. Back in the 80's you could make a game with half a dozen people. Lord British wrote Ultima 2 almost by himself. Credits for modern games, though, take fifteen minutes to scroll through. You can't be making games like that for the PC-only crowd.

Just because we are being held back doesn't mean we're cemented to the floor, though. More games are coming out with nifty DX11 add-ons. Then there's the whole stereoscopic 3D thing. Consoles are already pushing their video to the limit, there's no way they can deliver 3D without pulling way back on other graphics features. PCs, though, have GPU to burn so calculating two cameras' screens is no problem. So we're getting held back when it comes to texture resolution, sure, but meanwhile we've added a whole new dimension to the image.

 

dchalf10 i mostly agree, but Ubisoft constant internet DRM is gone from the looks of things, and Stalker COP is DX11 capable, not DX9 only.
There are half a dozen recent PC exclusives that are either DX9 only, or were released as DX9 only, and they are still awaiting patches, so you could take your pick from them as an example.

I would resort to piracy, but i would give up my right to complain, and considering im paying 50-100% less for PC games compared to console ones, even a straight 1-1 port is damn good value.

 

Yeah I don't know why I wrote the DX9 part and then wrote stalker, I was originally going to write the optimisation thing and then write the DX9 thing but I consolidated my senteces without changing the wording :S

But yeah single core optimisation for PC exclusives and then the separate ( and sometimes additional 'issue' ) of having DX9 only PC exclusives.

So it all comes back to developers IMO.

I don't have a problem with DX9....just saying, it can't be put on consoles or console developers when PC devs are doing it too.

 

You're comparing a game genre to inferior hardware that holds back gaming due to their ludicrous restrictions. Yeah, real parallel there.

So far all you've done is repeatedly say "no" because you have no real argument, consoles are and have been severely holding back PC games for years now. They are trash output by greedy companies who like to horde sheep.

No one wants to learn anything about computers even though their daily lives revolve around them, no one wants to pay more than they absolutely have to and apparently 99% of them are legally blind because they all think console games look fantastic. God forbid should they ever have to install programs. Clicking the "install" button to copy parts of a disc to the console HDD is apparently frustrating enough for the masses as it is.

 

Depression? What depression?

 

Yes it is, consoles are used by the masses so developers will always use that no matter how inferior it is. It's an absolute joke that the hardware has lasted as long as it has, even if console games are super optimized now (about time) while PC games aren't.

Most people don't realize just how weak the hardware is that they're trying to stretch out for all these years...

The PS3:
CPU - Single core 3.2GHz Power PC (lol) processor with 6 usable vector units
GPU - Crippled 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3
RAM - 256MB XDR DRAM (Why?!)

The 360:
CPU - Triple core 3.2GHz Power PC processor with 2 threads per core
GPU - Proto 2900 XT 512MB GDDR3 + 10MB eDRAM (for AA, etc)
RAM - The RAM is shared, 512MB GDDR3 is all

I'm blown away that they've had the audacity to continue putting games on that hardware. I wouldn't care if it didn't horribly show every single time... 20-30 fps at best and aliased to hell and back. I especially hate that grid-line/scan-line (both horizontal and vertical) they use on low resolution textures to hide how ****ed up they are. That drives me nuts. Even exclusives like FF13 used that.

Computers are in everything now, everything. Being able to use one and install a program requires about as much brain power as it takes to breathe... so to get a speech for what I said doesn't seem quite right. As for appearance, I can't stand what my PS3 games look like and play like (20fps) which is why I haven't finished most of them. Too bad no PC versions exist.

 

Neo, lol, at calling the PS3 Single Core, makes it sound weak.. And Crippled 7800? It's a 7900, the Ram situation is terrible though. The PS3's processing ability is quite amazing, hell, even the Military buys them up to use in bulk.

When it was released, it was 10x stronger than any processor on the user market. Of course, times have changed, and it's rather average. The X360 has been outdated since release...at least Sony is innovating.

The PS3's power is far greater than the X360 in terms of visuals, yet few devs make use of it.

 

It's a 7900 before the 7900 existed, interesting theory there. I doubt the processing power matches and it has half the memory of a 7800 GTX so I'd say it's crippled.

The vector processors are only good for specific applications... such as vector processing, trollolol and pretty useless for everything else. When used by the military it would have 7 available, 1 is disabled/defective. In games only 6 are available at most since at least 1 is used by other processes.

It IS a single core CPU, saying otherwise would be like saying the FPU in a CPU is a separate core, no it's not, stop smoking crack, drugs are bad, mmmkay.

As for the PS3's potential, they've been saying for years it's maxed out with games like Uncharted and FF13 (which is why FF13 was blowing up PS3s left and right, heating up the CPU and GPU). FF13 looked like crap, the scan-lines, aliasing and 20-30fps play, ugh.

But yeah... the RAM is seriously limiting, those scan-lined textures I'm ranting about might not have happened if it had 512MB GDDR3, they could have used some reasonable sized textures instead of micro ones. Who am I kidding, they'd need at least 2GB for that. The fact that the 360 shares the RAM actually gives it the advantage there.