Carmack: PC Not The Leading Platform For Games

id Software co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack has admitted that the company sees console gaming as a higher priority than PC gaming, since console versions "have larger audiences" than PC versions. As part of an interview with games blog Kotaku regarding the recent launch of first-person shooter Rage, the industry legend explained, "We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games." "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions [of Rage] will have larger audiences than the PC version." He continued, "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." He went on to note, "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements. We chose the latter." Carmack also commented on the graphical issues that some players have been experiencing with the PC version of Rage, explaining that the company "were not happy" with the problems some graphics cards were causing. "We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems," he noted. "When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work." "The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn't help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms."