The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[Zgroktar]

Matt Skynner, the company's Corporate Vice President and General Manager of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, reassured PC gamers in an interview with Forbes that the days of neglect are likely over. The PC gaming segment is alive, it's doing well, and growing. With the new generation, the architectures are similar, therefore development costs are reduced, and much easier to create multi-platform games than before.

(Talking about PS4.)

That's largely irrelevant when it comes to people's fears about SOMA being a PS4 exclusive.

The biggest factor in platform exclusives is money, not the ease with which games can be ported. There's no hardware limitations stopping the Halo games, Gears of War games, Uncharted, etc, from coming to PC, hell, the first 2 series I mentioned did eventually have their first instalments brought over to PC, so it was obviously do-able, yet, that didn't happen after later in those series. Why? Money. Microsoft and Sony want to do everything they can to get you to buy their systems and then continue buying games on those systems so they make money. How do they accomplish this, they pay for exclusives, and this is what people are worried about, not the ease of porting a game over to another system.

If you don't agree, explain why Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a game from a developer that has made all their previous games on PC, is now an exclusive on the PS4, the system with which it is now apparently extremely easy to port to PC from. Money.

Piracy is also a concern to developers. While it happens on consoles too, it is a little more prevalent and publicised on PC, so some devs will either straight up avoid PC, or have timed console exclusivity in order to make most of their money there first, and then release on PC when it's less likely people will want to pirate it.

And last but not least, it's worth noting that the person speculating that the days of PC neglect are over, works for AMD, a company that makes most of it's money from selling PC components. Of course they want to tell you everything is going to get better, so you'll go out an buy more of their hardware! While I do believe that it will be easier to port games to the PC this generation, and that we could see an increase in ports because of that, I very much doubt it will be as big a change as they make out, as money is still the deciding factor, and Microsoft and Sony will be going all out in the next couple of years to try and get as many exclusives as possible.

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture was barely being developed all this time, that is what makes it a special case, not a symptom of something common happening these days, while SOMA is nearing it's completion, it would be completed even without the deal with Sony.
While The Chinese Room considered Kickstarter to fund their new game, they are obviously the more desperate of the two.