PC isn't the leading games platform, says Carmack

Explains the decision to focus RAGE development on Xbox 360 and PS3.

Id Software co-founder and tech wizard John Carmack has backed his studio's decision to focus RAGE development on the home consoles, stating that the PC is not a "leading platform for games".

"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," Carmack told Kotaku. "We chose the latter."

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," he added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterise 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."

Carmack also spoke about the problematic launch of RAGE on PC, pointing to driver issues outside of his studio's control.

"The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$," he wrote (self censored by Carmack). "We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions."

"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. 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," he concluded.

A patch to address some of the PC issues is now available.

RAGE is out now for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.