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Unreal Creator Tim Sweeney, "LOL PC Gaming"
KrunkMcGrunk
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There has to be something in the water at Epic. Seriously. What the fuck? Does it seem like they are just whining and crying from UT3 not doing well, or is it just me?
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36390/118/1/0/
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36390/118/1/0/
Interview - We got a chance to sit down with one of the sparkling celebrities of the IT industry during the the Game Developers Conference 2008: Tim Sweeney is founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the famous Unreal game engines.
TG Daily editor Theo Valich spoke with Sweeney about the future of the PC as a game platform, the role of the next-generation of game consoles, the next Unreal engine as well as the future of Epic.
We have known Sweeney for several years and are always looking forward to his view on the state of the gaming industry, which he is not afraid to discuss openly. In this first part of our three-part interview, Sweeney takes on the PC, which he believes is in trouble and can’t keep up with game consoles, mistakes in Windows Vista and the integrated graphics dilemma.
TG Daily: Tim, Unreal has grown into a big success much because of the PC as a great gaming platform. We have heard about a new gaming PC alliance that wants to promote gaming on the PC versus gaming on the console. What is your view on that, especially on those stunningly expensive gaming rigs?
Sweeney: There are many overpriced computers out there. It's like sports cars. They are everywhere, everybody writes about them, but there are only a few who can afford them. There isn't a great amount of people that will spend large amounts of money on that. In the case of PCs, they mostly don't deliver that amount of performance that you would expect to justify that cost. You pay twice as much money for 30% more performance... That is just not right.
TG Daily: What about those high-end features? Do you think that industry is actually sending the wrong message when it comes to gaming? Do you feel that the hardware industry went with wrong message when it started to talk about 3-Way SLI and other high-end things, while they did not work on expanding the PC gaming message to masses?
Sweeney: Absolutely. That was a terrible mistake. Marketing people believe that there is a small number of people who are gamers and who can afford spending good amount of money on buying high end hardware.
TG Daily: You have to admit, the margin is obviously there.
Sweeney: Agreed. But it is very important not to leave the masses behind. This is unfortunate, because PCs are more popular than ever. Everyone has a PC. Even those who did not have a PC in the past are now able to afford one and they use it for Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever. Yesterday’s PCs were for people that were working and later playing games. Even if those games were lower-end ones, there will always be a market for casual games and online games like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has DirectX 7-class graphics and can run on any computer. But at the end of the day, consoles have definitely left PC games behind.
TG Daily: But we mostly talk about conventional retail sales. Do you see an increasing divide between the Pc and consoles?
Sweeney: Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference [to more capable gaming PCs]. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that. Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x.
TG Daily: In other words: Too big?
Sweeney: Yes, that is huge difference. If we go back 10 years ago, the difference between the high end and the lowest end may have been a factor of 10. We could have scaled games between those two. For example, with the first version of Unreal, a resolution of 320x200 was good for software rendering and we were able to scale that up to 1024x768, if you had the GPU power. There is no way we can scale down a game down by a factor of 100, we would just have to design two completely different games. One for low-end and one for high-end.
That is actually happening on PCs: You have really low-end games with little hardware requirements, like Maple Story. That is a $100 million-a-year business. Kids are addicted to those games, they pay real money to buy [virtual] items within the game and the game.
TG Daily: Broken down, that means today’s mainstream PCs aren’t suitable for gaming?
Sweeney: Exactly. PCs are good for anything, just not games.
TG Daily: Well, we do have a fancy new operating system on the PC, which is actually heavily promoted as a gaming platform. What are your thoughts about Windows Vista?
Sweeney: I really don't know why they kept the 32-bit version of Vista. I was surprised when they decided to keep the 32-bit version, I expected that they would push the 64-bit version exclusively. It would have been the perfect time for that.
TG Daily: Considering that almost all the computers that can run Vista in fact support the x86-64extensions, that choice belongs to The Twilight Zone of the IT industry.
Sweeney: Let's be clear with it. The switch to exclusively 64-bit would clean up all the legacy viruses and spyware programs that have been plaguing us for years. The requirement for much more system memory cannot be an excuse, because most owners of 64-bit processors have at least 1 GB of system memory installed.
TG Daily: It would have been a soft switch when we compare it to the Mac, right? Almost all of our 32-bit software for Windows would continue to perform as it used to?
Sweeney: Yes, we would have liked something like that to happen. In terms of Apple, there’s a new PC in your future. In the case of Vista that would have gone 64-bit only, you would have ended up with five year old computers that still would have been able to run the 64-bit operating system.
TG Daily: Let’s go back to the gaming PC. What would you think if everyone would pursue a sort of an ease-of-use approach? For instance, in last two years, there were efforts to bring external graphics to life. It was supposed to be a compact box that would have a powerful discrete card inside. But in the end, it turned out that Vista's driver mode (LDDM) was incompatible with that.
Sweeney: External graphics?
TG Daily: A year ago, the PCI-SIG certified the PCI External standard, which enabled the conventional PCI slot to extend through several different cables. There were several Taiwanese companies such as Asus and MSI that demonstrated products based on different cards. In the end, you simply needed to plug the external box into a notebook or a desktop. Prototypes were using the ExpressCard interface.
Sweeney: Oh... that's cool. Actually, this would be a really good idea. We always joked that there will come a day when you won't be plugging a graphics card into a computer, but you would connect the computer into an Nvidia box, because they were quite loud and using a lot of power. But this idea would be really good. I didn't know there was actually a development in that area. Sadly, this would not solve a problem that we have today, and that is the fact that every PC should have a decent graphics card. A PC should be an out-of-the-box workable gaming platform.
TG Daily: What about notebooks?
Sweeney: For notebooks this could be a really good solution. There is no room to put a fast GPU into that compact form.
TG Daily: With that much background and knowledge about what PCs make sense and which do not, I’d be interested to learn what PC you are using.
Sweeney: My work computers are Dell workstations. Currently, I have a dual-CPU setup, dual-quad cores for a total of eight cores, and 16 GB of memory. We at Epic tend to go to the high-end of things. Until recently, we used to buy high-end consumer PCs, simply because they tend to deliver the best performance. However, as time goes by, we constantly run into stability problems with CPUs and graphics, so we decided to switch to workstations. We just need very, very stable computers and they perform very well.
TG Daily: So, you aren’t really after the highest benchmark numbers obviously.
Sweeney: Part of the problem we see with these systems is that that they are ultra-fast, but often we see our PCs running under full load for 16 hours a day on various projects. We are constantly loading the systems, for instance using Radiosity. These computing tasks are extremely hardware extensive. Most of the high-end systems we worked on are just not engineered to support that.
TG Daily: What are your thoughts on the future of the PC as a gaming platform? Is scalability the future – we hear AMD talking about Spider and Nvidia is selling Triple SLI that will keep us upgrading over the next several years. Or did the industry lose its focus?
Sweeney: PC gaming is in a weird position right now. Now, 60% of PCs on the market don't have a workable graphics processor at all. All the Intel integrated graphics are still incapable of running any modern games. So you really have to buy a PC knowing that you're going to play games in order to avoid being stuck with integrated graphics. This is unfortunate, and this is one of main reasons behind the decline of the PC as a gaming platform. That really has endangered high-end PC game sales. In the past, if you bought a game, it would at least work. It might not have been a great experience, but it would always work.
TG Daily: Can that scenario change?
Sweeney: Yes, actually it might. If you look into the past, CPU makers are learning more and more how to take advantage of GPU-like architectures. Internally, they accept larger data and they have wider vector units: CPUs went from a single-threaded product to multiple cores. And who knows, we might find the way to get the software rendering back into fashion.
Then, every PC, even the lowest performing ones will have excellent CPUs. If we could get software rendering going again, that might be just the solution we all need. Intel’s integrated graphics just don't work. I don't think they will ever work.
TG Daily: These are harsh words. It looks like Intel has a lot of things coming down the pipe.
Sweeney: They always say ‘Oh, we know it has never worked before, but the next generation ...” It has always been the next generation. They go from one generation to the next one and to the next one. They're not faster now than they have been at any time in the past.
KrunkMcGrunk on
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a) UT3 was released at a really bad fucking time
b) UT3 was not hyped/marketed nearly enough and completely flew under the radar of most gamers
c) UT3 was only "pretty good" when compared to all of the other games released in Q4 2007, including other multiplayer-focused PC shooters like CoD4 and TF2
In other words it's their own damn fault and the fault of their publisher that UT3 did poorly on the PC. PC gaming is not dying. It's just got a few bruises from poor treatment by assholes like these guys, and pirates (see Iron Lore closing down thread).
Advertising or lack therof was a big problem. But personally I think the main problem with UT3 was that the game felt like it was a relic from a long passed age. Playing the game it quickly became clear that the rest of the industry has moved on and made forward strides in gameplay and design whilst Epic has been frozen in time.
They were just dragging the same old shit out, giving it a new coat of paint and poking it's rotting corpse a bit to simulate life. The problem wasn't the platform or the fact they forgot to advertise the damn thing, the fundamental problem is that the rest of the world has moved on and epic apparently hasn't.
Yes, as Epic has demonstrated with their little tantrums over the past couple of months, they have trouble moving on.
A) Drum up some more support and positive PR with tournaments, mod contests, and general advertisements that'll bring up the word of mouth on a game that survives solely because of the community that plays it.
or
Somehow, someone at Epic thought B was a good choice. Sure it offers up an excuse for their flop, but it doesn't garner them any sales. The PR guy over there should really be telling all the loudmouths spouting about the PC platform to shut the hell up and let him do the PR work.
I mean, I, personally, had planned on buying UT3 at some point (not sure about PC or PS3), but after all this whining from them, I doubt the community in the game will survive at all. The game is hinged on having a large community, and if they're just pushing it away, then why do I want to put down my money on it? If the creators themselves have no faith, why should I?
Well, see, personally, I don't like this whole "industry has moved on", "forward strides in gameplay" thing. People are always talking about how gameplay gets "old", but for me, like any other form of art, great gameplay is great forever. The problem is that our medium is so technology-based that people tend to think in terms of "this is obsolete, this is not". But I don't really buy that.
So for me, UT's style of gameplay is good forever and will never be dead. It'll come back later if not now.
It is true, though, that the game lacks innovation within its style; it's essentially a rehash of UT99 with a few new elements mixed in. But hell, a really solid rehash of the best multiplayer shooter ever is still pretty good, and I had a lot of fun playing it.
I did. It's mostly Sweeney bitching about the hardware industry.
Honestly, think his feelings are related to UT3 bombing.
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
See, what the really talks about, and what the question/answer you highlighted is regarding, is the fact that most PCs that you purchase from a retail store simply can not play modern games. Someone goes in and buys a computer off the shelf and it really just can't do it. That's why the question is asking about "mainstream PCs", in other words computers that the average person would see in a store display and buy.
that certainly explains why pokémon continues to sell so well
No shit
UT3 isn't mentioned once. Not once. No Epic title is, they are talking about hardware and the industry.
I think everything he said is correct. Sweeny is placing some of the blame of the delcine of PC sales in general on the vast majority of PC's not being able to play anthing beyond Bejweled out of the box. Most store bought PC's need at the very least a graphics card and power supply upgrade before they can play anything modern. This is not a big issue for anyone know anything about the inside of a machine, but the average idiot buying an e-machine who wants to CoD4 isn't going to undertand that.
As a platform PC gaming is a joke to the every day user. Imagine if Microsoft sent you an XB360 in pieces and you had to build it yourself. With no instructions.
Different demographics. A lot of the people playing pokemon now didn't necessarily play red/blue.
What's with this 1997 rhetoric?
In terms of availability, yeah. I can see his gripes. But OEMs are want that bottom end, retailers want cheap product, and even if you get a decent PC off the shelf it still won't have enough RAM in it and come bogged down with OEM approved SpyWare.
No, good sir.
I choose to live in a dream world where I can bash anything anyone in the entire industry ever says from the safety and comfort of my desk chair. Never will I have to make such decision and say such things because I know that if I were in the industry every single decision and every single word uttered would be the pure truth and the absolute greatest fresh new idea ever thought up.
that is all.
Checking the min specs for UT3, it will run on my 4 year-old computer.
The point of this article is that the places that sell PC games are not selling computers capable of running said games and that it is impossible to lower the specs of games to run on the integrated graphics that those computers are coming with.
It all boils down to ease of use, and personally, I believe consoles have that game wraped up. They are essentally plug and play. Not to mention I can play on my couch with a big ass TV and 5.1 surround.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump on him.
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I'm not picking on you, but I see people using the "ease of use" argument quite a lot. I honestly have not had problems getting PC games to work (with exception given to Vampire). Aside from Vampire, I cannot think of any game in recent memory that didn't require me to do anything more than just install it.
On the reverse, I had a brand new Xbox 360 give me the beloved RRoD the day after I bought it last fall.
Anyhow, yes, Sweeney's complaints are more with the industry. I just found it odd that Epic has had such a negative media blitz as of late.
That's pretty fair. I haven't had a lot of problems myself (even when I had to install new hardware) but I also think its fair to say that some folks are functionally retarted when it comes to upgrades.
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The only really interesting bit is how much longer will desktops still be a viable route for PCs?
I know plenty of people that bought a "great PC" at Best Buy and then were surprised when it couldn't play Portal. All he is really saying here is that integrated graphics cards suck.
I always thought it was the PS2 that fucked up Dreamcast. Everyone was waiting to buy one of those and didn't give ol' DC the chance it deserved.
You see the "ease of use" argument a lot because it is a fairly common problem for less experienced or knowledgeable PC users. For an example, people who bought ATI AGP video cards are being constantly fucked by games that simply don't support them, because ATI doesn't even support their AGP cards in the drivers anymore. I spent probably 5+ hours trying to get STALKER to work, dealing with crashes, corrupted saves, and mod issues. Was it worth it? Hell yes. But I had to do a shitload of work for it. If it was a console game, it would have been as simple as putting the disc in. I consider that a fairly large difference in terms of "ease of use." It certainly isn't true for all PC games (<3 Valve and Blizzard), but there is definitely more work involved in getting a PC game to work on average compared to a console game.
Well, it all depends on personal experience, I find. Personally, I haven't really had any trouble getting any of the games I've ever played working. With 99% of PC games, it really is as easy as installing and then just playing. Exceptionally buggy games like Stalker are of course the exception to this rule.
I knew a lot of people that had 'lol every DC game evah' burnt to CDR so maybe my world view is skewed.
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but the people playing UT3 necessarily played the other UTs?
i'm not sure i follow
It really REALLY irks me.
Considering I've never had a PC turn into an expensive brick for me overnight, I have to disagree with the argument that console gaming is somehow free of the sort of problems that PC gaming has.
STALKER is an exception, I'll give you that. My situation is also somewhat of an exception too (with the ATI card support), although it's not like there was any additional research I could have done that would have told me that ATI would be a bunch of pricks about their older cards. Nvidia still supports their AGP cards, don't they?
Anyway, a lot of it is my level of expertise with PCs in general. My PC is a clogged, dust-covered, mess of a machine that is full of parts that were obsolete before I bought them. I'm sure if I was more into it, and was motivated to fix and optimize it a bit, I'd be back to problem-free gaming. But for me, just tossing a disc into my console is infinitely easier.
Edit: Krunk - I said on average. The 360 isn't exactly indicative of the console market as a whole. PC parts are also subject to hardware failures (not at the same rate as the 360, but similar to the rate that most consoles have), but they also have compatability, OS, and driver issues on top of that. So on average, PC gaming will take more effort than console gaming.
But yeah, just because your expirience with PC games is favorable, that doers not mean its a universal thing.
And, of course, just because your experience with PC games is unfavorable, that does not mean it's a universal thing, either.
No shit. And as such, annecdotal evidence should not be taken into consideration.
I agree with your point, but not with your first sentence. I've had HD's fail many times and MB's and other components fail from time to time. Neither route is clear of hardware failures, it's just that the 360 has an unusually high rate.