Why are there no games on the PC on the same level of Sony exclusives?

Hello, how are you?

Following the e3 presentations, I am left wondering this.

The Last of us 2 showed an impressive demo at e3 with visuals and animation that where out of this world.

If a pc can have monstrous processors with 8 cores or 5ghz of speed and gpus that can go to more than 8tflops of processing power, why aren't there games on the PC that show the same quality and visuals as the Sony games?

For example rise of tomb Raider, running at ultra settings for me can't match uncharted 4 in visuals, animation, attention to detail and overall polish.

And the game is from a big AAA developer supported by a big publisher.

Can't be lack of budget or resources...

Same goes for ubisoft. They are a giant in the industry, but still can't put out an open world game that on the pc is better than horizon zero dawn.

I don't understand if they are big studios, have resources and the pc has the hardware, why aren't we pc gamers getting those experiences?

Then at e3 we see metro exodus, dying light 2 and I loved the previous games of these franchises on the pc and I am sure these sequels will look great but then comes The Last of Us 2 and it's on a whole other level...

I must say that I as a gamer that is more casual and enjoy single player games am a bit jeleous of Sony exclusive games.

Care to share your thoughts?

Regards

Well, everything you said is subjective so it is hard to argue against.

Also, your definition of "quality" and "visuals" are also subjective

There are many that agree with you that PS4 has some amazing looking titles created by great devs.

But to argue that PC doesnt produce games with higher graphical fidelity is objectively false.

There is objectively more "detail" in The Division's open world than in Horizon, but does it "look" better? That part is subjective.

Thats why these arguments of "graphics king" or "PS4 is better than PC" are crazy.

PS4 devs work magic within the confines and limitations of the console.

But to say no game on PC looks better.............well that is subjective overall.

I happen to think that there are tons of games on PC that are far ahead of anything on PS4.............as it should since its much, much more powerful

Good question, PC seems to be thriving on mid tier-, lower budget and indie games but the bigger budget games are out.

Some third party AAA publishers still invest in PC games like Ubisoft with Anno 1800.

And than there is Microsoft with Age of Empires 4

But EA for example could've shown a Command And Conquer game for PC exclusively, yet they opted for some garbage mobile game instead.

In short I think the days of AAA-budget PC exclusives are definitely over, but we'll still get some here and there.

So you're a casual gamer who likes single player games & has a PC and are jealous of Sony's games, and you expect us to believe that lol.

Smells like another cow alt.

@i_p_daily: feel free to check my steam profile.

It is the same name as my name here: gdourado07.

And in reply to the previous, yes, I agree there are some great looking pc games and I enjoyed the division as well as almost all other ubisoft games.

I am a big assassin's creed and far cry fan and I also enjoyed wildlands a bunch.

But horizon, for me at least as a cohesion and overall attention to detail as a product that I fail to find on a pc game.

But of course it is subjective to my taste.

Cheers

The games that been shown from Sony studios are scary. With a cheap ass hardware like PS4s they making some of the most impressive graphical games of the generation, PC included. Might lacking sometimes frames or whatever but damn .... We talking about a cheap CPU with cheap ass old GPU and 8GB of RAM that is not all dedicated to graphics and we playing games like Uncharted, Horizon , God of war and soon Spiderman and The Last of Us 2 that look insane...

Where is the new Farcry or Crysis for PC that will be the graphical benchmark for years to come ? So much power for 4K ? 4K might be impressive but is not in game graphical improvement on technical level. Is 4K the reason we havent seen yet the new Farcry or Crysis ? I dont know but if all Sony studios can manage to provide such in game graphics with so low tech i wonder how much of our PCs power going to waste and if those studios could make a game for PC only ... what would it look like ....

I agree.

But what I don't understand is why.

A Ps4 is a x86 architecture machine with an amd gpu.

Why can't devs harness the power of the pc the same way?

Can't be budget or studio resources because some giant AAA studios are in the pc space.

Can't be user base... Ps4 sold 70 or 80 million consoles. But how many steam users are there?

I just don't understand the lack of innovation on the visuals and overall presentation on the pc front.

Even Detroit looks impressive running on a base ps4 at native 1080p.

And choice driven games on pc? Just the same telltale games? While some are good and I enjoyed the first walking dead and the wolf among us, they all run on the same crappy graphics engine...

Well, your comparison is Open platform vs Console.

PC developers dont know what hardware a customer might have, so they have to develop for a wide range of possible configurations.

A PS4 exclusive has fixed hardware and first party devs have been working with since the console's inception. They can tailor the engine to one fixed set of strengths and minimize or mitigate the weaknesses.

This is why it often takes more powerful hardware to emulate games.

There are very few PC exclusive developers.

Developers tend to get the most out of PC when they develop for PC "first".

Witcher 3 looks objectively better in every way that Horizon on PC.

From texture detail, buildings you can enter, draw distance, weather, animations, etc.

It is scaled down for consoles, of course, but you get my point.

That said, if you are going to compare PS4 exclusives to PC, you have to be fair and objective.

I love Uncharted 4 and Horizon but coming from PC, you can see the sacrifices and cutbacks made for console.

Doesnt make them a bad game, in fact they are better games overall than many games this generation.

But you have to be honest, watch the tons of Digital Foundry PC vs PS4 game comparisons.

PCs simply do more graphically, its just that exlusives have 1 platform to cater to, PC has hundreds of thousands

Another one of these threads.

at the end of the day PCs are not sony hardware. those are not just any jaguar cores or GDDR5 memory or radeon graphics. this is hardware blessed by sony and that makes it much more powerful than anything else on the market. :P.

seriously though its money. it all comes down to money. sony put a lot of money into making exclusive games and custom tech built for the sole reason of getting the most out of a specific set of hardware. i mean the few titles exclusive to the X1 are also very impressive given the hardware they are running on. forza looks brilliant even on a base xbox 1 for example.

the PC doesnt have an excluisve first party backed by a massive corporation ploughing 40-50 million per title into just getting the best out of PC hardware. dont get me wrong: the PC has some very impressive titles like the total war series and the multiplats still look better on the PC of course. but this is more by sheer brute force rather than devs being very clever in getting every last drop of performance out of PC hardware.

the PC still has technically better looking titles though (higher resolution rendering, more detailed assets, higher framerate and so on)

Money and patience.

Sony is willing to pump tons of money into getting the best devs in the industry to develop games for a specific set of fixed hardware. They also have the patience to allow these developers to be creative to do their best work. The fact Sony also gives their devs a certain amount of freedom that other AAA publishers don't allow also helps a lot too. Any artist will tell you that their best work is done when they are free to make the kind of art that they want to make not when they are making art that's controlled heavily by their patron.

Unfortunately PC gaming doesn't have big company like Sony behind it willing to fund these type of games due to it being an open platform. Also, due to it being an open platform with different PC configurations, devs have to code for a wide variety of hardware which eliminates the advantage of being able to code for specific hardware.

Because making games is very expensive and risky so they can't just focus on PC as they'll struggle to get their developments costs back + profit.

That's why most games are 3rd party as there's potential for more sales and thus more return on the investment.

Sony is in the position where they have money to pump in to these studio's and they're backed up with good sales so they always recoup developments costs back to then pump in to another studio/game.

@navyguy21: so the pc openness and its many possibilities are also it's weakness?

Like a 1080ti is a beast, but only a few percent of the pc gaming market has 1080ti gpus on their machines.

So a dev can't optimize a game to take the full advantage of a 1080ti because then it wouldn't run on a 1060, 1070 or 1050 and that is the vast majority of their target market.

That kind of sucks for people you spend hundreds of dollars for a 1080ti.

And I also agree with the brute force of pc development.

Devs can think that the user has the choice to throw more hardware at the game.

And the way I see it, it is hurting pc gaming and it is hurting tech development.

I remember back in the day a new pc would be obsolete in a year tops and the advances where fast.

That need to constant upgrade sucked, but at the same time we got games like half life 2, the first far cry, crysis, fear..

Today you can pc game on a Sandy bridge cpu and a 7970 gpu at 1080p with high or even some ultra settings, but the advancements?

For example on the pc I played assassin's creed black flag, rogue, unity, syndicate... They were games I liked, but the visuals and presentation where practically the same between them. No evolution, no amazement...that's what I find lacking on pc gaming.

PC exclusives tend to be aimed at the PC gaming audience. For example: Id take a game like CIV VI over TLOU any day, just like a PS4 gamer would prefer TLOU over CIV VI. Having said that there are genres that are enjoyed by gamers across all platforms too like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, Doom, The Witcher, Battlefield, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto to name a few. All those franchises share two things in common - they all came from PC and they are all better on PC. PC gamers get the absolute best of both worlds with very few exceptions; multi platform games tend to be the best games and are almost always better on PC. They look better, they perform better and they often have more features, while the most popular PC exclusives offer a diverse gameplay experience from one and other as apposed to following a popular platform trend like 3rd person movie games do on PS4.

Its funny seeing a post made by a console gamer saying there is nothing on PC that interests them, yet most of what they are playing now was popularized by or derived from PC and are still better played on PC.

I also see pc gaming being to much into competitive games like fortnite and pubg.

And looking at the steam top sales, competitive games are strong on pc.

I personally, like I said, don't enjoy such games because I am not a big competitive person and tend to enjoy story driven games the most.

But if devs get seduced by the big money making possibilities of such games, that might be bad for the gamers like myself.

Not what Im saying so I'll clarify.

The 2 biggest factors in game development (as far as graphical fidelity goes) is Time and Money.

It takes time and money to created those high resolution assets, intricate designs, animations, etc

It takes CPU and GPU power to run those.

If we take the standard 25m development cost as a standard, we can begin to break down why consoles, in general, push boundaries more than PC (subjectively)

If i have 25m dollars and 3 years with 1 set of hardware, i spend less time writing code, less time testing that code, NO time creating multiple versions of the same assets and textures. I can spend time creating 1 set of a textures as detailed as i want that will run on that system.

PC has to create 3-5 versions of the same texture, of the same asset, of the same tree.

So, its not that weaker GPU/CPUs are holding back gaming, its that you have to configure assets that are tweakable in the graphics settings so that the end user can tailor their experience to their hardware.

That takes time, time that could be spent doing other things if PCs all had the same hardware.

Even considering that, PCs STILL manage to look better than ANY console game on a technical level.

As I said earlier, games developed on PC FIRST far outpace any PS4 or Xbox game.

Cyberpunk 2077 will probably be the next game that proves this since its led on PC.

Its hard to compare exclusive games on PS4 to PC because there is nothing to compare it to since it is exclusive.

The mistake people make is assuming that PS4 is as powerful as a PC simply because they dont see a game that looks better on PC.

If that exclusive was on PC, it would be miles better in terms of graphical fidelity.

It's better hardware vs optimization. It's a balancing act. That's why you see games at the end of a generation doing amazing things on old hardware. That's the benefit on working with older hardware. But when the new gen begins, the cycle starts again.

Examples please?

You either like PC or you don't everything you said was all about eye candy. "TLOU2 looks better DERP" yeah but you don't mention the fact the game runs at 30fps. I tired Quake champions last night 144Hz better than any eye candy at 30fps for sure. These type of games aren't on console, Gears Tactics a RTS not coming to xbox because it doesn't suit a controller. PC has these advantages over consoles.

Ill say it PC is losing to consoles graphically, and can't compete visually with console hardware upgrading more frequently. PC doesn't get the huge budget exclusives, its down to the multiplatform games to push the hardware.

Id also like to say i bought Rayman off Uplay Its on sale (people) and in the pixelated options you can't select a 60fps option. A game from 1999 runs better than TLOU2 in 2019.

Then buy a PS4 pro and stop complaining. I play multiplat games on PC cause of the 60fps advantage. I am soooo over graphics.

So the problem is then game engines?

A ubisoft Dunia engine is developed to run both on consoles and pc with various hardware levels.

The engine can be loaded with better assets on high end pcs and better post processing effects, but the engine itself never takes advantage of the better pc hardware.

While an engine like the Decima is built only for the ps4, so it uses every performance the hardware has.

@PCgameruk said:

You either like PC or you don't everything you said was all about eye candy. "TLOU2 looks better DERP" yeah but you don't mention the fact the game runs at 30fps. I tired Quake champions last night 144Hz better than any eye candy at 30fps for sure. These type of games aren't on console, Gears Tactics a RTS not coming to xbox because it doesn't suit a controller. PC has these advantages over consoles.

Ill say it PC is losing to consoles graphically, and can't compete visually with console hardware upgrading more frequently. PC doesn't get the huge budget exclusives, its down to the multiplatform games to push the hardware.

Id also like to say i bought Rayman off Uplay Its on sale (people) and in the pixelated options you can't select a 60fps option. A game from 1999 runs better than TLOU2 in 2019.

I don't think I've seen such desperation......... Sony's 1st party games have people shook to the core!

The same reason there is not a game on the level of League of Legends or World of Warcraft ever start on Ps4 (some make it way down the life but PC is the preferred platform for many games). Different games work better for different platforms. PC is great for RTS, MMO, and Moba space, and top tier for indies as it is a open development platform. I have over 300 games on steam, that is something that will never even get close to happening for me on all of my Sony systems combined. PC is a godsend.

I think Sony's 1st party is showing a great attention to detail and focussing on art style. Plus by knowing the limitations of the hardware they can more effectively achieve results. Also I'm pretty confident developers within Sony are under less pressure to get the game out, so rarely anything feels rushed.

That is not to say that their games, regardless of how good they look, don't show the hardware limitations. They do. Clearly.

And while HZD looks impressive I'll continue to say that Origins, specially on PC, is clearly above it.

Is it so hard to figure out?

"Sony"-quality games are exactly that, financed by Sony. To reach such levels require A LOT of money, something Sony is quite willing to spend on.

PC is obviously different than Sony, Nintendo and Msoft, it has no one financing or backing its triple A projects, most times its just the studio or publisher financing its own. Your post already answered it, PC has unrivalled content in mid tier, budget or indie. In multiplat it is absolutely king.

If PC ever have a dedicated backing of a mega corporation in its gaming projects, nothing can ever come close. But thats is a ridiculous notion because PC is what it is exactly because of its independence and free form open nature of its development.

How many games like TLOU are there on PC? How many story-drive games with tight space, tons of scripted sequence and overall small scale? Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. What else? Otherwise AC: Unity, AC: Origins, AC: Odyssey, The Witcher 3, Battlefield 1, Battlefront 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider look every bit as good as PS4 exclusives if not better.

Edit: Ryse and Quantum Break are other examples and they look better on PC than Uncharted 4 to me.

It's been said several times that pc is king of multiplats mostly because of framerate and I agree.

The ps4 is severely limited by it's cpu.

But if next gen consoles can run games at 60fps with checkerboard 4k and good visuals, what will be pc next gen advantage beside some brute force effects like hair works or some better post processing effects?

@mojito1988 I too have plenty of pc games. Thanks to sales, I have more than 1100 games on steam excluding uplay and origin.

But I think 95% of the games I own really lack quality compared to Sony titles. Even running on a beastly pc with ultra settings all the way

They can already run at 60fps. The N64 could run games at 60fps. The dev will choose 30fps as a target to realize their ambition and since PC's will have faster CPU's, they'll be able to run said games at 60fps+. It's been like that for decades.

@phbz: yes, hzd has it's limitations of course.

For example almost all quests are given outdoors. There are almost no buildings you can enter at settlements and so on.

But the game as a whole is just very interesting. The quests and errands are well designed and the world has meaning and things don't feel like chores.

I finish black flag, rogue, unity and syndicate on the pc. But finished the main stories mostly as the rest of the activities felt like random markers placed on the maps as fill content. Overwhelming fill content with no actual meaning...

If you mean cinematic, story-driven games, there aren't many big budget ones for PC because it doesn't own a studio. PC is just a semi-open platform, there's no master behind the curtain making sure certain types of content are getting made for it. There's nothing at all stopping a game like TLOU2 getting made for PC. Certainly not hardware, as you noted. It just needs a developer and a publisher to decide it's worth their money. Why haven't they? I couldn't say.

If you mean quality in the general sense, then you're just being ignorant. Because I'm a huge TLOU fan, but PC is overflowing with high quality games that aren't made in the TLOU formula

Well you got your answer. You can't talk about attention to detail and ignore Horizon: Zero Dawn's very obvious shortcomings. There are virtually no dynamic foliage outside of the ones used to hide in(and it all looks the exact same), interior areas are practically non-existent, you can find poor quality textures and low-resolution shadows almost everywhere and the facial animation for tertiary and even secondary NPC's is some of the ugliest I've seen in a AAA game. While on the surface Horizon looks very polished(beautiful art direction, color palettes, weather effects and damn those skies) it comes up short in a lot of areas and is completely outclassed by many multiplats on PC.

@Juub1990:

I played the 2013 tomb Raider for over 25 hours of single player. Loved the game on pc.

But I must say while the game looks good, the way Lara moves in the environment and handles weapons is not on the same league of uncharted or the last of us 2.

Also finished ryse on the pc. Great looking game. But I finished it in 5 hours and the characters and story where really lacking.

Also, quantum break. Beat it to.

Great story, but the game was such a mess that at the time, not even my 980ti could properly run it...

It's not always the visuals which make pc games impressive. There's exclusives such as the Total War or Civilisation series, which are far beyond anything consoles could handle due to weaker cpus.

Just now wondering were you? It's obvious, PC is open architecture, anyone can build a PC so it doesn't require software to sell specifically to get the system afloat. A console is proprietary and completely rely's on it's games alone to get people to want the weak hardware. But there are a few such as Star Citizen but it's obviously in a limbo release time frame for release.

He wants to know why there is no equivalent to Last of Us 2, Uncharted 4 and God of War, etc. In other words, games that have very high production values and budgets.

That's the life of the PC beggar race, a bunch of graphic whores that only get 2D indie exclusives and are jealous of AAA playstation exclusives;

@pimphand_gamer:

Yes, that is exactly what I want to know.

Because I like that type of games and I don't understand why they aren't on pc.

PC has the bigger user base by far and has the best hardware by far...

Yet, ps4 has the best games...

@gdourado07: Best games is also subjective.

Yes it is. That's why I said for me.

I am a father with a house and family to take care of and as such don't have much time to play games.

I have no interest in competitive games and never play multi-player games.

I like stories and games that take me on a journey.

I like memorable characters, characters that develop in the course of a game and that are relatable.

I like games that provide a meaningful experience.

I like games that are immersive with its visuals, animation and world building.

So, like I said, for me personally, the pc is currently really lacking in good quality content.

And I don't really understand why since it has so much potential...

I open steam and on the 10 best selling games currently, only 2 interest me. One is witcher 3 that is far from being a new game.

The other is Nioh that happens to be a console port.

The rest are either competitive games or multi-player focused games. And although they have their merits, I have 0 interest in such games.

Sony investing its own money to make these games. There only third-party studios on PC making games for that platform. Microsoft does have xbox games on its Windows store.

Valve has no interest in making their own titles for steam.

Not many are willing to sacrifice everything of worth for a shallow attempt at vanity at up to 30fps

The gameplay of PC games also moved beyond 2006

They bought or made a gaming studio this year. They might come back to making games.

I play games for the gameplay, and have little interest in movie games. None of the games the OP mentioned really interest me.

Also, you guys may not be into them, but eSports games are HUGE on PC. Things like CSGO, PUBG, Fortnite, LoL, Overwatch. These games have a much larger audience than the single player cinematic games the OP mentioned.

I do enjoy single player story driven games from time to time. I just don't enjoy them the way Sony typically does them where there's little interactivity beyond quick time events and a few on rails gameplay segments. The best way to tell a story in a game in my opinion is through the gameplay like in Half-Life 1 and 2. If you are pulling me out of the gameplay to watch lengthy cutscenes, I'm probably going to lose interest.

@navyguy21: with that logic. Tic tac toe in 8k would be graphics kings. Pc doesnt have any better visually than even uncharted and thats a fact.

Pc wuudnt wanna limit uncharted to 60fps. Therefore it would only compatible with exspensive computers that would cost more than a PS4. Thats a fact. Any pc nerd can properly elaborate

Death of third party exclusive and microsoft donot spent on PC.

just wait once xbox brand dead. they will have no choice but to spent on PC.

most of PC exclusive now coming from small indie who have less budget. and exclusive are not the reason we play on PC. most games like FPS play better on PC. and every multiplat looks better on PC aswell.

Pc players won’t spend $60 on a one and done game, Sony exclusives are the types of games you wait to find in a Steam sale for $20 or $30.

I smell something fishy here, go post on your profile, because I'm having a hard time beleiving someone who is spewing the same subjective nonsense as the flood of alt account cows are saying, but in a "nicer" way, and finding a random steam account online with high *everything* and just matching the name on this forum to try and seem more credible.

I'l eat my crow willingly if wrong. But I find it incredbly hard to believe someone so HEAVILY invested into one platform, goes into this almost dead forum suddenly, makes an account and starts saying that rubbish.

Sony brings out 2 SP games a year if that.

If that is your profile, then you've clearly found pleanty of games to play.

But saying PS4 has the best games, because it has some outdated-gameplay pretty cutscene based games (except Bloodborne and GoW) just seems totally off.

I like SP games, I have all of Sony's "Greats" .. and they don't hold a candle to the many 3rd party SP experiences... they are just prettier... that is all this forum really cares about.

Meanwhile you have the standard Cow-Alts coming out calling hermits graphic whores.... yea no... hermits are playing EVERYTHING and all kinds of games.... not gushing over 6 graphic whoreing games over 5 years and 80 milion sales.

Yep. Even if these games came out on PC, PC gamers have much higher standards than console gamers. They aren't going to pay full price for short single player games with no replay value. But then again, they aren't a captive audience like PS4 owners. PC has a massive library of great games going back decades with no shortage of awesome stuff to play. PS4 has just started to get a decent library in the last couple of years.

@kali-b1rd:

No problem. Tell me what you would like me to post on my steam profile, within reason and I will do it no problem.

I am not a kid or some online troll but if you need proof of that, I don't mind indulging you.

You can post anything that would be obviously recognisable here.

Also why is your "most played" hidden? and the library, can suss most of it out from the cards (Into Hentai Cats eh?) but I want to know what that account ACTUALLY does, the sheer volume of cards suggests its a card farming account, so any true results may be skewed.

Looks to me the majority of the games on the account are cheaper ones or ones been included in bundles and just logged into to generate cards.