On Cross-Platform Play (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, April 07, 2014, 12:38 (3889 days ago) @ uberfoop
edited by Cody Miller, Monday, April 07, 2014, 12:45

This makes the incorrect assumption that everyone who wants to play Destiny can afford a $400-$500 next-gen system

Maybe not quite. The assumption Cody seems to be making is that the presumably drop in overall player base would be worth the increased cohesion (for people who have multiple consoles, there'd be fewer variables in deciding amongst friends which version(s) to get, and it's probably true that Destiny would push a few PS4/XB1 if it wasn't coming out on the seventh-gen consoles).

Yeah. I mean, PC MMOs have had this issue pretty much solved, since:

1. Everybody has a computer
2. You can adjust settings so as to run on a wide variety of hardware
3. You can't really pirate MMOs
4. PCs are easily hooked to TVs and can operate with gamepads, replicating that console experience

Basically, everybody could play. Everything Bungie seems set out to do here seems like the perfect fit for a PC only release. The game is already going to run on hardware 9 years old, so a PC release should be able to play on tons of systems.

Bungie is presumably doing consoles for a reason, so there must be some explanation as to why Mac + PC + Steambox is not their preferred release, beyond the history of being a console FPS developer for 10 years.

I'm not going to scream "PC Master Race" since I do see advantages to consoles, but not in a shared world genre like this unless it's platform exclusive.