Where is all of Gates' money going? That's a tremendous amount of cash (and therefore power).

So they plan on hiring a man who failed to bring his auto company to the top of the pack, and they expect him to bring MS back into good repute, much less economic dominance? Pull the other one, guvna. Once again, MS decides to shoot itself in the head. Maybe the whole Steam console thingy will make MS back up and think twice.

Realistically, MS should be working on Visual DirectX and the 3D cyberspace OS envisioned by WIlliam Gibson. Too bad they have no vision short of short-term monetary gain. *does Vir Cotto wave*

@Vaishakhk @VarietyMage The point the person was making was that the technology advances every year such that there will be "convergence" of technology, meaning less problems with porting games from console to PC as the technology gets better. While I believe that will happen decades from now, it certainly didn't help GTA 5 to come to PCs (which it isn't going to do any time soon). And there's still the issue of totally new console designs - remember the bitching when the PS3 introduced the Cell processor, and everyone had to learn new ways of programming? That will continue to happen, especially when the technology gets better, and as such, there will be companies that are unwilling to port to PC.

You'd think that since the XBox systems run off of a slightly modified version of DirectX, that porting to PC would be a breeze...but it's the collage of hardware that causes the problems (idiopathic bugs depending on what combination of hardware is in the PC). And a fix has to be written for every one of those bugs...it's time-consuming (and thus costly).

The ultimate point of the speaker is that eventually computing will be so powerful that there won't need to be different architectures between platforms. I agree with this, but the quantum computing necessary for this is decades away, and even then, there will still be chess programs that will suck up all the available cycles. :)

Now people know what I feel like any time I play an MMO, or cloud game like Diablo 3. The Internet is *not* reliable (and wasn't designed to be). Single-player offline for me, please, and local non-Internet servers for the E-gamers, please.

"If there were technological reasons that games weren't ported to the PC in the past, there are a lot less of those reasons come next-gen."

Tell that to GTA 5...I hear the petition to bring it to PC has more than 500,000 signatures...

What a waste of money.

@Azghouls @VarietyMage It's too bad it was before most kid's time. I run it through my C64 emulator, because that's the version I bought decades ago. I still maintain that M.U.L.E. could get a re-write for today's technology and make a smashing success again.

@BrainFart01 @VarietyMage Anyone who's bored enough to randomly hack a phone, or the government. Or Microsoft employees on break looking for their own version of Voyeur Roulette.

@thetoaster99 What laptop? What phone? I don't need a laptop, and I can't afford Verizon's prices (they are the only service I get out in the sticks).

Still got the integrated camera? No money for you. #ducttapetheeye