Is it easier to develope a PC game rather than a Console game? - Developers

Me and a friend are arguing this so I decided to consult good ol' Facepunch. I personally believe Console game are easier because you don't need to worry about thousands of different Drivers, Chips, GPUs, and Operating Systems. Let me know what you think.

Its probably easier to finish a product on console as there is just 1 piece of hardware to worry about, but its easier to get up and running on a PC

On the PC you are more free as a dev than you are on consoles. You just need a engine to run the game on and knowledge on coding and stuff or someone who does the coding while you do something else if you're working in a team. And then a place to release the game on which is currently either Steam or something else I currently can't remember. On consoled you pretty much can do the same but because of the current hardware limitation (which will hopefully change of the release of the PS4 and Xbox One) you are limited and should be careful to have a steady fps all the time. Also if it's a game that needs many keys it's better for the PC as it pretty much has so many you would always have enough keys no matter how complex the game may be. That's why PC masterrace, but even with keyboard and mouse it's sometimes more comfortable with a 360 controller. [editline]2nd September 2013[/editline] Everything above is obviously IMO.

In my opinion the only big difference is that if you want to you can go over your minimum requirements on a pc. Otherwise the problems of coding for a certain os, architecture etc are basically equivalent.

It's faster to go from idea to working prototype on PC. It's easier to develop a piece of software using console dev kits. It's way, WAY harder to actually publish a product to market on console. The console downsides seem to give PC the upper hand, at least for now. If Sony's really sucking indie dick like everyone says they are, who knows.

Yes.

[QUOTE=Richy19;42055869]Its probably easier to finish a product on console as there is just 1 piece of hardware to worry about, but its easier to get up and running on a PC[/QUOTE] But the consoles deprecates and you need more power Valve explain it when they did orange box for console in his powerpoint of crossplatforming [url]http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_CrossPlatformDevelopment.pdf[/url] Really nice

[QUOTE=lope;42055734]Me and a friend are arguing this so I decided to consult good ol' Facepunch. I personally believe Console game are easier because you don't need to worry about thousands of different Drivers, Chips, GPUs, and Operating Systems. Let me know what you think.[/QUOTE] You lose the stress of cross-platform and cross-hardware support and gain the stress of resource limitations which don't just cause performance degradation if you push their limits, but cause entire console subsystem halts.

More the API. I've seen devkits that were literally drag and drop to make a game and I've seen devkits that had you needing to map out memory for textures and engine components.

Console games are easier to optimize, since you only have to worry about the one piece of hardware, but are harder to develop for, because of inferior specs (memory management for example is/was very important, maybe the next gen will change that?), proprietary API and sometimes the strange architecture design choices of the console.

[QUOTE=lope;42055734]Me and a friend are arguing this so I decided to consult good ol' Facepunch. I personally believe Console game are easier because you don't need to worry about thousands of different Drivers, Chips, GPUs, and Operating Systems. Let me know what you think.[/QUOTE] PC. Consoles require a fuckton of SDK's and licenses. You're wrong, your friend is right.

If you an indie/amateur developer, PC is easier to get into and develop, but in a professional level, console is easier. Consoles may have some drawbacks but the fact you only have to deal with one system means a lot since you can save a lot of time and money in QA (not to mention, after gaining some experience you can really push the system, much more than in PCs). On the other hand, indies don't have to worry about AAA standards on PC, so it's easier for them.

I believe it is easier to work for consoles. console dev probably don't have to deal with all the different hardware on PC etc. But every console has their Limitations. I guess it's more about the type of game being developed. Pc devs need to deal with a lot of different variable and hardware to make their game compatible with most people as possible. but console are just the same exact copy with all the same hardware etc. As said, I didn't count license or Specific Development kit required.

[QUOTE=pac0master;42076271]I believe it is easier to work for consoles. console dev probably don't have to deal with all the different hardware on PC etc. But every console has their Limitations. I guess it's more about the type of game being developed. Pc devs need to deal with a lot of different variable and hardware to make their game compatible with most people as possible. but console are just the same exact copy with all the same hardware etc. As said, I didn't count license or Specific Development kit required.[/QUOTE] Oh god he's back.

[QUOTE=NightmareX91;42076643]Oh god he's back.[/QUOTE] I love you too.

A lot of console games are developed and tested on PCs and then released to console. It's very easy to abstract away from the console's hardware - especially now that a lot of them use COTS hardware inside. Even still, either emulating the console's instruction set or building a compiler is quite an easy thing to do. When using APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL, you are abstracting away from the GPU technology. Of course, different GPUs have different processing capabilities and that's where the complications come in. It's quite easy to deal with these constraints by ensuring you're optimising your usage of the GPU pipeline, back culling and combing textures/sprites into single sprite maps. Although, these only have static performance increase so if it works for a good pc, there's no guarantee it will improve the situation on a smaller PC. A lot of constraints on hardware can be adaptive or time constrained. For example, if your FPS is low, then you could possibly limit the buffer depth until FPS is more acceptable. Ray tracing is an iterative improvement algorithm that can be constrained by time - you can ray trace as deep as possible per frame. Reducing number of particle effects, using smaller or lower quality environment maps on smaller systems etc can also make improvements. Its definitely possible to build rendering environments that are adaptive to system spec and load. But, testing your code on a number of system types will be hard. I think writing for the PC is most fun and most portable - you just need to get the code right to start with. So in answer to "Is it easier to develop a PC game rather than a Console game?" The answer is probably that they're both the same. You have to optimise your code one build spec for consoles, which you would do using some of the techniques I mentioned above. You would just have different configurations for a PC and only one for a Console.