Alan Wake 2's PC requirements may leave AMD RX 5000-series and Nvidia GTX 10-series users high and dry
Alan Wake 2's PC requirements may leave AMD RX 5000-series and Nvidia GTX 10-series users high and dry
A potential lack of mesh shader support may leave older generation cards out in the cold.
I don't mind them raising minimum requirements if they actually use features of newer hardware (cough unlike Windows 11 cough), but requiring upscaling is never a good sign. It's just a cost-cutting strategy that allows them to spend even less money on optimization work while reallocating that money to marketing budget or exec bonuses or whatever, at the cost of visual fidelity. It doesn't benefit customers in any way, quite the opposite.
One of the good things about this being an epic exclusive is that I won't get it for many years, so all these current hardware talks probably won't matter if I ever get my hands on it years later through an epic giveaway.
Epic exclusive
cool I can tune this game out and come back to it later after the apology letters and patches
What apology letter?
I don't understand the recent trend of making cards like 2060 sounds like the lowest you can go for "recommended", and any developer puts even 3070 as recommended suddenly become lazy. No, it is because everyone is starting to move on to PS5/Series X as the "baseline" spec as they are almost 3 years old now and pretty much become the "majority" of the gaming market.(note, PC takes really small amount of the gaming population even when you don't count mobile gaming.)
So if you go check what is consider PS5/Series X equivalent PC parts, it's the 3070/6700XT. People with lower spec machines should be glad that developer even want to put more efforts to accommodate your needs and release a game that supports your hardware in the hope to get some extra bucks if you feel happy about the result.(honestly it really is a pita for dev team ) It is perfectly reasonable to release a product that just can't run on older hardware, the developer is constantly making that decision during and even after game released with patches to address newer hardware being released. (this part I mean newer hardware but at lower performing tier, ie. the [x]060s)
Older gamer has experience the era where games just can't run on CPU anymore and you have to buy extra GPU and extra audio cards to get all the features delivered. It was acceptable then why not claiming developers are lazy because the game can't run on my Pentium 4 with Riva TNT2(I had 256MB ram and the last aureal 3d audio card).
There are other developer making games that also targets older hardware, play those and vote with your wallet. Or, use your 4080 GPU budget to buy PS5/Series X AND whatever latest switch and you can play like 99% of games released and not missing any exclusives. (Yes, you can buy all 3 consoles with the price of 1 super inflated GPU card. )
note, PC takes really small amount of the gaming population even when you don’t count mobile gaming.
googles
That doesn't appear to be the case. Looking at this article, in 2022, 43.8% of video game revenue was from PCs, and 56.2% from consoles. There's more revenue from consoles, but it's not a terribly-drastic difference.
The difference(if the article is trust worthy, see last paragraph) is made up by what some live service games on PC are pretty big money maker.(Valve's games, LoL, and some live service are really PC focus or PC only.) Fortnite is cross platform and here is a comparison from it's revenue source, and live service game are aiming more competitive not graphically more advanced. If you compare games like say Assassin's Creed or Jedi Survivor or say MWIII by pre-orders console vs PC, there will be a big difference. There is a reason why developer are focusing on console quality/performance first, because if you do cross platform, that's where you make most of your money from. But if you are doing a competitive FPS, then developer will focus on PC build cause that's where most competitive players are.
Look at best of steam for 2022, notice the lack of big selling console titles? That's why. Probably not valid source now, but before Psyonix bought by Epic, they released their Rocket League player by platforms, PC takes about 21% on 3rd year(2018) after switch version is released. First, second, third, they don't release new numbers after year 4. And you can run RL on potato laptops before their mandatory DX11 update. Most cross platform games will bias toward Playstation since Series X/S aren't as dominant this gen. but usually it falls around 70~75% on consoles and 25%~30% on PC.(if game also release on switch, PC shrinks further.)
Lastly, the article you linked if you read the info or sourcing carefully, they are some sort of report/forecast survey data selling company. They don't really actually have the numbers in terms of global revenue. Yes, public company have financial reports, but Valve is not public company which will distort the result quite a bit, and use survey means if your sample pool is bad, your extrapolation will also be bad. One of the graphic shows their sample amount. (with about 42k samples, with no mention where or how they get those number)
edit: minor edits for better reading
extra big edit: I went and look for playstation game division revenue for 2022 and found this article with links to actual financial report, 24.4 billions. Where the best I can find for steam(which dominates about 90% pc sales market share) is about 8~9 billions in gross revenue(including game sales/mtx/etc). I don't feel confident linking the articles as I don't think they are really reliable, but multiple of those "survey company" probably estimate it from source like steam spy or steam db data. So playstation along make 3x more revenue than steam. Like yeah, I know it also includes PS5/accessory sales etc, but we all know that console are selling almost at cost or slightly below to drive game sales. Sony sold "19.1 million PS5 during fiscal 2022" doing some paper calculation it's around 9.5b if all consoles sold are at 500USD. Actual number would be much lower as Sony don't get those sale money directly compare to PSN, they get it after the vendor/shipping split. And I don't know how much they get from console sales but look at the chart I linked it's way below 1/3rd. So even with worst case calculation Playstation still make 2x more in terms of software sales.
The phenomenon of hardware falling out of requirements due to lack of support for newer features instead of due to insufficient compute power is nothing new. We have seen it before with stuff like that awkward shader model change in early ps360 era or more recently with CPU instructions.
I understand it stings because I had it happen to me too in the past, but that's why it is important to have realistic expectations about hardware longevity when deciding a purchase, especially in the uncertain times of the late years of a generation, when you don't know where things might go in the next one.
Shout out to Hardware TnL 2.0 feature rendering older cards like the Nvidia Riva TNT2 useless for most games it would have otherwise run fine, like KOTOR. Extra shout out to Max Payne 2 for supporting software TnL at a time when most games did not, preserving the longevity of that card.
Oh damn, thankfully that was before my time lol.
That goes to show, that the last ~decade from 2011/12 to 2021/22 has been an outlier in that regard. It used to be that every 4/5 years there was a paradigm change that left any non-recent hardware completely behind, but in 2022 you had people running Elden Ring in almost 8 year old 970s. So I can't help but find this recent development in requirements acceptable... It has been due for quite a bit of time.
I'm all for realistic graphics, but a good story and fun gameplay can be had without them. It will definitely leave them out of some markets.
And here is me with GTX 750Ti 😂