PC is not Leading Platform for Games Says John Carmack

In a new interview with Kotaku, John Carmack was outspoken, and expressed his anger about the launch issues Rage is currently facing on the PC. The game, which has a significant number of problems with AMD/ATI graphics cards, with many players reporting a constant crashes, texture errors, and other forms of graphical instability.

*Editor’s Note: I can’t run Rage on my high-end PC and have since received a refund from Steam.

“The driver issues have been a real clusterfuck,” according to Carmack, talked about how the developer had worked closely with both nVidia and ATI prior to the games release, and how the game had run without a hitch on their own test systems.

When asked why the studio opted to design the game for consoles rather than the PC, Carmack provided with a response he knows will make PC gamers unhappy.

“We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games,” said John Carmack, as he explained the company’s reasons for focusing Rage’s development on consoles.

"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."