My my, what do we have here. Rahul Sood, founder of Voodoo PC and now CTO of Hewlett Packard’s gaming business, has wrote some rather revealing and interesting things on his blog. According to the exec, Microsoft killed a secret project which would’ve allowed console and PC players “to interact and battle over a connected environment”.
The reason being testing showed PC players “destroy” the console player “every time”.
Lord have mercy.
“This project was designed to allow console gamers and PC gamers to interact and battle over a connected environment,” Sood wrote. “I’ve heard from reliable sources that during the development they brought together the best console gamers to play mediocre PC gamers at the same game… and guess what happened? They pitted console gamers with their “console” controller, against PC gamers with their keyboard and mouse.”
He continued: “The console players got destroyed every time. So much so that it would be embarrassing to the Xbox team in general had Microsoft launched this initiative. Is this why the project was killed – who knows, but I’d love to hear from anyone involved — what happened?
Those of us who have been in the gaming business for over a decade know the real deal. You simply don’t get the same level of detail or control as you do with a PC over a console.”
Sood contends that the whole idea was to “bridge Xbox gamers with PC Gamers so they could play against one another in games like Unreal, or Gears of War”.
“This was all part of their Live strategy, and had Microsoft just stuck to their guns and made it work, PC Gaming might be in a much better position than it is today,” he reckoned.
“It’s a real shame that Microsoft killed this — because had they kept it alive it might have actually increased the desire of game developers and gamers alike to continue developing and playing rich experiences on the PC which would trickle down to the console as it has in the past.
Instead they wanted to keep an old business model alive, and as a result they are (all) getting attacked by the most unlikely competitor.. Apple. Had they allowed something like this to take place then perhaps the desire to have the best platform would still be there.”
Sood added: “Perhaps the scale of the PC would have allowed Microsoft to get away from the hardware business and focus on their core, software. Perhaps we could have finally integrated the Xbox into the PC.
Game developers follow the money. This isn’t a labor of love.”
Wow.
Via Crunch Gear.
does not surprise me, only M$ could treat their own creation like this!
look at games for windows live, how long did that last!?
talk about the bastard child!
its true though, PC games would trounce console gamers because a mouse is so so sooooooo much more accurate and much faster than 2 analogue sticks!
i dont play many PC games because well theres not many decent PC games, but im much better with a keyboard and mouse than i am with a controller.
thats why i wish sony and M$ would let us use keyboards and mice for out games.
give me a keyboard and mouse and ill kick the crap out of anyone, even the developers!
controller, not so much.
though i did kill seb from GG 6 times in one match!
i was so proud of myself, a few months ago sony had a online tournament for 2 nights for 3 hours each.
out of several hundred players i came 5th, and out of the several hundred i got the most developer kills!
Uh, give me a dual shock everyday, thank you : )
nah, once you get use to a keyboard and mice you will be kicking even developers ass!
its allot easier to aim with a mouse than with the sticks, especially since a mouse is no where near as twitchy.
with analouge sticks you go and move it just a smige and you end up moving it too much, you spend so long just a little to the left, o no too much now a little to the right.
by the time you correct it ive already sniped your head off because with a mouse theres no oops too much its always dead perfect!
Well nick if you want to use a keyboard and mouse you can actually do that for ps3 or xbox 360. There’s an adapter for that. It allows you to play the games with keyboard and mouse. It’s called XFPS and it’s made by a company called XCM. google it sometime if your interested.
There.