Fresh from the release of Supreme Commander, Gas Powered Games founder and developer Chris Taylor delivered his thoughts on the PC and new line of consoles in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz.
He seemed bittersweet about the initial launch of his most recent game:
Those little things… You lose a little more sleep than you’d think because you want things to be perfect, you want everyone to be having a really great time, and when you’re putting out updates and patches it’s disappointing.
But at the same time we know it’s very temporary and no sooner do we fix that, there’s something new that comes up in the PC space. The PC is such a complicated platform.
Supreme Commander players with anything but the highest-end systems at first found themselves mired in performance issues before the release of a patch. The patch was broken on many computers, prompting a stream of posts to the publisher’s support forums. The game often failed to run until the patch itself was patched.
Taylor also offered an unexpected analogy of the Nintendo Wii and its competition:
The rest of the industry, business and making money is a much bigger part of what it’s all about. You don’t get that sense with Nintendo – obviously money’s important, but it’s like games come first. You just can’t get around that, how it translates to the end customer; they can feel it.
Like, if you buy a Ford, you’re buying transportation. If you buy a BMW, you’re buying a car that’s for a driver, it’s to be driven fast, you’re buying a car for people that care about cars.
The well-known developer also criticized the Sony PlayStation 3’s price point as too high, citing its inclusion of BluRay technology as a barrier to mass adoption.
Gas Powered Games is developing five games for different platforms, but no titles are as yet planned for the PlayStation 3, which Taylor said, citing other developers, is ” an order of magnitude more complex to work on.”
