What's wrong with the industry? It's evolving, both from a technological standpoint and from an idealistic point of view. Cellphones used to just call people, now everyone's got a cellphone that will make them pancakes and scratch their testicles for them and some of these phones have the nerve to have it's worst feature be to actually call and/or talk to someone, and I'm not even going to get into some of the contracts and plans for these phones, it's absolutely appalling to me to see just how much people are shelling out for some of these things. I feel like the gaming industry has gone in the same direction(generally speaking). Gaming used to be just about games, now it's about graphics, cinematics, the big budget nonsense, stories that can be told in a thick book, constant advertising being shoved down our throats, consoles that are able to do more than what an average person is able to accomplish on their PCs at home, and sadly for a lot of these games, the gameplay has taken the backseat. And people who like and buy into all that fluff are to blame for the rising cost of just about everything. I saw an Xbox 360 controller on sale awhile ago for $70. Are you fricking kidding me? And next to that was a $50~ish dollar controller(still ridiculous in my opinion) with what I assume is absolutely everything identical to the controller next to it but the faceplate on it was the standard white one.
That's just it, there -is no- protecting your work from piracy. Even World of Warcraft suffers from piracy. World of Warcraft has private servers that you don't have to pay a dime for. Developers need to realize that to minimize piracy on their software, you've got to make it as appealing as possible to the online gamer, and -that's- where you nab them. Activation of your product sure, that's fine, and there's nothing wrong with CD keys. This is where Steam is paving the way for piracy protection. Have software(only if you're on some distribution network like Steam) or the game itself if you're independent connect to an authentication server for an online experience and do your piracy checks there. Don't put that BS on my computer, compromise the security of my system, slow down the performance of my system, and have the audacity to leave traces of the software or leave the software in it's entirety on my system when I call for an uninstall. That's -viral- behavior.
I'm a game programmer and even I will say that if the DRM trends of 2007 and 2008 continue then I will be buying games legitimately and letting them sit in their box while I get a pirated copy downloaded and installed. I respect the industry's need for money and sales figures as much as the next guy, but I refuse to keep a checklist of what games have how many tokens available, what games need to be de-activated if I decide to format a drive or reinstall an OS, and I have absolutely no desire to have anything running on my PC that compromises it's security or it's speed(without reason) in relation to general OS performance as well as game performance. It's a sad day in gaming when I distrust a game disc as much as I would distrust opening spam e-mails with Internet Explorer or distrust a small executable file without running a virus check on it.
Quite simply it's because the revenue isn't there and in most cases it isn't worth the extra development time to make the PS3 version take advantage of all of it's features(or claimed features, whatever the case may be). Just think for a moment, you're paying your workers however long extra it takes to make a superior looking PS3 game in comparison to it's 360/PC counterparts. The PS3 quite frankly is in less homes than the 360 is in North America, and the fact that it's on other systems means that homes that have both a 360 and a PS3 will likely have the person buying the 360 version because it came out first and they really wanted to play the game as opposed to the delayed PS3 version. Business wise it will -never- be profitable to do that.
To be fair, it's not fair competition. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 are running static hardware and static resolutions, and you cannot modify anything under the hood. The PC has part selections as of right now(and there have been substantial enhancements to graphics cards and CPUs since 2006). Furthermore, you can tweak things under the hood, both at the graphics card level and the game itself on a PC. Some games let you completely overhaul things if you really wanted to like someone mentioned with Oblivion. Even if you had a PC running on parts made in 2006 or earlier and you ran games at the same resolution as a 360 or a PS3 you'd probably find that the PC still looks better, though not by much. Still it would be a fairer comparison to make.
The PC and the 360 run under pretty much the same framework(DirectX). It just bothers me that everything is generally darker on a 360 than on a PC. PS3 either runs OpenGL or something entirely different, so of course the difference between the PC/360 and the PS3 is going to be more noticeable, it's a completely different graphics framework.
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