News EA Sports Ignite engine won't work on current PCs

Yawn. EA are trying to maximise profits from minimal input, who'd have thunk it.

Mo business less game. That's the industry right now though. Tired cash ins and samey looking fpss.

 

Agreed. Don't play any recent EA games, and I could care less about their future releases too.

Lol, good riddance if they do.

EDIT - thats prolly a bit harsh but meh!

 

I reckon everyone should self publish through Steam on PC, then deal with the devil (publishers) for getting on consoles. Ideal world ...

 

This really wees me off. Firstly because I'm everyday surrounded who slate me for having a PC because they've only tried to game heavily on an old laptop or 250 quid Ebay machine. And secondly because, well, what wold it matter anyway? The games would only be sh**** console ports like always.

 

Problem is that it's generally not a good idea to allow one company the monopoly on game distribution/activation etc, with no competition they can do what they want with pricing and how you play the games with DRM, no more cheap steam game offers because they control the game market and meh, we don't need to sell cheap games

 

The debate of whether Steam/Valve should have a monopoly is for another thread. Bring your view of evil corporate monopolies to this debate about EA's Ignite engine. It's not just one game that won't be appearing on PC according to this story, it's any game using the Ignite engine. Thus creating console exclusives ....

 

I can't see fault in EA for this decision, don't know the numbers but their sports titles must be massively skewed to consoles. Seems to make sense to me and I can't think of any of my PC Gamer friends who it would impact.

 

Just gonna add that FIFA 14 is on Origin for Preorder for PC, so you may want to change the caption for the picture. And if they re did FIFA 14 to not use the ignite engine, what is it that Ignite is supposed to bring? All I've seen mentioned is that it adds better spectators...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_%28game_engine%29

 

For once I actually see where EA are coming from. It's not exactly a secret that sports games bring in a decent amount of fans who are less than PC-savvy. The negative PR and bad experiences they get from these fans not understanding system requirements is not good for EA, or for the consumer.

It's a trade off. In order to keep these fans from getting upset the minority who are also PC enthusiasts, or at least understand and meet the requirements, are denied the game on PC. There's no forseeable win/win situation so they went with the least damaging option.

If you're one of those minorities, tough titties. As Bindi says, educate. This isn't a problem which is unique to EA, PC gaming as a whole has to accomodate for or at least be aware of the lowest common denominator of system specs. We all beneft when "PC gamer" and "PC enthusiast" come together.

 

Do you guys think the SteamBox will help EA change their minds?

 

Depends largely on the hardware specs. The whole problem EA's having is that many users have underpowered PCs. A quick look at the latest Steam Survey makes this fairly apparent, as it gets more and more common the number of integrated or low end graphics systems gets higher and higher. If the SteamBox is successful its level of hardware will become a new baseline for developers to consider, if EA (or any other developer) can make their game run on that hardware then they can feel fairly confident that their PC release will be able to run on a large number of systems.

 

I think it's a lot of this too. FIFA, Madden, NHL etc are mass market games. Mass market PCs can barely run Word. Mass market consumers expect a mass market game to look amazing. Stupid Mass.

 

Honestly, I don't think Steambox will hit mass (sorry, going off on mass again) to sway any big developer to build specifically for the Steam box. It'll maybe add a few % on to the addressable PC market, but that's just addressable, not necessarily 'in the market for sports games'. For which they'd probably get a console anyway.

 

Do you think 'educating' people is going to make a difference? The mass market of PC will always lag behind the latest and upcoming graphical engines. Does that mean we we may as well just give up on the PC market cos our games won't be supported? That's a completely nonsensical argument. The simple matter of the issue is that EA is unable to optimise its games properly, nor does it wish to spend the extra time and money. Simple. PC Gamer and PC Enthusiast will never come together. This has never been an issue before when publishers are releasing next gen games, so why now? The answer is obvious. I will refer you back to crysis again. How many games could run crysis when it came out at max? Compare that to how many now? The difference isn't that much.

EA is not the only publisher who has this 'issue'. I don't see other developers saying they are going to stop developing games for the PC because not enough have the hardware. EA knows the people who run sports games will likely have less powerful PCs. That means more work required to optimise the game to run it well, whereas people who want to play BF4 will have spent a bit more thought or money into their PC so more will be able to easily run it. EA just doesn't want to optimise the game, despite numerous other publishers continuing to churn out great PC games. The answer is in the money, not in the lame excuse that the target market isn't there, they're just being too lazy.

 

SirFur you appear to have argued in favour of EA's decision, and then concluded against it. They are completely different groups of people playing sports games and playing pc fps games. It seems people who buy battlefield or crysis or whatever on the pc are better educated about system specs and game settings, and have more realistic expectations about performance. Intuitively I think you would expect this to be the case.

Releasing a demanding sports game for the pc would probably be a PR nightmare. So they'd be taking a massive hit to their reputation (such as it is) and dealing with all the suport nightmare and for what? So the one or two interested people with proper mid-high end graphics cards could play their game.

It seems to me like this decision is probably practically forced, at least if they want to make a cutting edge game (at least graphically and technologically, since I find it hard to imagine any sports game being truly cutting edge since you're pretty much tied down to the rules of the game!) for the majority of their players which are playing on consoles. Players who have been tied down to ancient hardware until now. Clearly they're going to want to show these players who are mindlessly throwing their cash at EA every year that they can do more than just update squad lists.

 

I do think educating people will make a difference. Educate people that mass market PCs will not cut it for graphically intense modern games, that you can't just pop in the disc and have it run fine if you don't have the hardware for it.

Crysis was published by EA. It was a PC only release designed to push its graphics as far as possible, the target audience is a crowd more likely to understand system requirements and make sure they were met before purchasing. Indeed, the game became quite popular among PC enthusiasts, this very forum is an example of that.

You'll note that I specifically say this problem isn't unique to EA.

Optimization is not the be all and end all of the gaming world. There are limits to how much time and money a developer can throw at a game, and to how much money a game can afford to require before becoming unprofitable. We do not have access to the data EA has regarding PC specs for sports title players and do not know exactly how dire of system specs they're looking at, it's entirely reasonable that the costs required to make the engine work on lower spec PCs are higher than the income they can expect from increasing the number of consumers able to run the game.

It's even stated in the article:

Whenever it's financially viable to do so. Looking at Crysis again, it saw a port to consoles after its release, once the heavy optimization required to make it playable on lower spec consoles was less than the income they expected from the new market.

 

Well at least now they won't ever be able to complain about poor PC sales.

I will say the rise of APUs is starting to buck that trend but many people still try to install blatantly GPU intensive games on their aging laptops or old C2D Intel Integrated Graphics computers.

Worse still are those who are convinced a PCI graphics card could help their dying machine. Educating people would actually be rather nice as everyone wins (Pc manufacturers and PC game developers) but that's nota realistic option.

It doesn't help that the PC market is still an incredibly confusing one (ask Nvidia or AMD to make a clear naming scheme..) and most mass market PCs take advantage of this to sell people the cheapest equipment at the highest prices. So gaming on the PC? Possible, but it isn't something that happens often or something that is mass market viable because of these costs.

And for those who pine for optimization. There's only a certain amount you can do before it's not financially sound (well it never is for EA.. ) to spend more money to allow a certain percentage of people to play on a platform that isn't very popular for the previously stated reason.

In other words; we really screwed the pooch to ourselves by being elitists and the manufactureres really muddied the waters by making products confusing (to the layman!) and making the barrier to entry more effort filled than buying in a simple console.

I know it's not like that as much anymore, but seeing as the recent XPS series (which is a joke now) comes with an Ivybridge processor and a bottom rung GPU for $900 USD. It's safe to say that mass market off the shelf PCs are still deliberately misleading.

 

I wouldn't say deliberately misleading after all they are giving the customer what they asks for, and that is cheap PC's. It's kinda the same thing you see in the world of cars, yes there are people driving around in expensive fast cars but the vast majority of people have your run of the mill it get's me from A to B car.

 

I challenge thee to what used to be the GT555m.

In all seriousness people are still convinced more GB's of VRAM = more performance.