The console games, as they come out with this new generation, will have a temporary advantage in price performance, but there are still many things you can do on a PC, more conveniently than you can do on a console machine.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Everybody's saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now.
When you look at this and where it's all going, the hardware business requires a lot of investment. It's very hard, it's very expensive, and ramping up hard on any given platform, whether it's a console or any kind of PC or mobile device, going into the hardware business requires a lot of investment.
Developing games for the PC and consoles is all about everything and the kitchen sink. In many ways, you don't have design decisions to make. You do it all. So I enjoy going back to making decisions about what's important as I'm working on a game.
I think that that multiplatform development is what's on the mind of most high-end PC developers now... this is really the first time in the industry's history that we've had console machines that can handle all that PC developers can deliver.
The Xbox 360 is the best game console ever designed. It's fast and powerful - games look as good on the 360 as on high-end PCs that cost six times as much. It's easy to navigate and has lots of useful secondary features - the ability to play digital video, stream MP3s, and so on.
If I buy a game on Steam and I'm running it on Windows, I can go to one of the Steam machines and already have the game. So you benefit as a developer; you benefit as a consumer in having the PC experience extended in the living room.
The PC is successful because we're all benefiting from the competition with each other. If Twitter comes along, our games benefit. If Nvidia makes better graphics technology, all the games are going to shine. If we come out with a better game, people are going to buy more PCs.
Online console gaming will continue to grow at a healthy pace.
The Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've had on PC.
The new generation of consoles has as much power to do the kind of games that we do as the PC does.