6 ms·

> I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel c

> I always thought that checking the hardware requirements for any kind of PC gaming is something that's obvious to everyone. Especially considering the Intel chips not being able to run most of the modern things. Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years. When I worked at retail, IT support and at Apple Care almost every single PC game issue a customer brought to me was for, you guessed it, them buying it without looking at the requirements and their PC not meeting the requirements. Look at it from someone without a technical background (the majority of PC owners): they don't know what their system has, they don't know what many of the terms mean or what's better than another and they don't understand drivers. At all. The PC games that required the least amount of support? They were the runs that could run on practically anything and, granted, running on something sub-optimal is going to not be as awesome but hey at least it runs. There are many game frameworks that support this type of graceful degradation. I would like to see more companies adopt this attitude so anyone can buy any PC game and expect it to at least run.

izacus 10y ago
> Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years. Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"? What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs and requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"? This is confusing to the majority of consumers. I did support for ~3 ish years across multiple jobs for people who needed computer help. I can count the amount of people I talked to who understand what you just typed up on two hands over those years. It's simply not consumer friendly. Us folks who browse HN? Yeah, we obviously understand. But the majority of folks actually buying the games? Nope. > What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs I'm not sure I follow. I went to school for game dev and, granted, I chose a different path but I know many game developers and they have multiple paths to degrading the experience onto some pretty terrible chipsets. Many dev studios do this while still pushing the limits on higher end machines. I always thought FarCry was great at this, I never had an issue running it on crappy Intel GPUs but it looked like crap at the same time. > requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong It's simply not intuitive. Yes if you own a PC and buy something for it you should know about it. But when you work in support for any amount of time you realize this is far, far from reality. You're not going to be able to educate everyone and surely, into today's world of download from an app store and tap, it's only going to be more common to expect everything to "just work". I would argue that consumes shouldn't need to care about their specs if you want to provide any type of decent user experience. Tablets and modern hardware is actually getting pretty close to making this a reality. There are honestly not a lot of games out there that can't run on the terrible Intel GPUs.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    Bear in mind that you had an enormous sampling bias: almost all the people you saw were the people who couldn't understand minimum requirements. You didn't see the people who could understand minimum requirements, so you don't know what proportion the first set is of the entire population. (I don't disagree with your larger point that Steam should take a lot more responsibility to put up roadblocks to purchasing games that won't run on the system the Steam client is running on.)

izacus 10y ago

> Reality check: a small, small minority of customers check PC game requirements before purchase. Considering Intel is the primary GPU of Apple's most popular computers I find it insane that one can claim Mac support but not support the majority of configurations in the past several years. Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"? What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs and requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> Huh? The Intel chips just aren't powerful enough to run modern 3D games. The discrete GPUs in iMacs and MBPs are. Why the heck is it insane to write "Works on macOS if you have a gaming GPU" or by extension, insane to write "Works on Windows if you have a gaming GPU"? This is confusing to the majority of consumers. I did support for ~3 ish years across multiple jobs for people who needed computer help. I can count the amount of people I talked to who understand what you just typed up on two hands over those years. It's simply not consumer friendly. Us folks who browse HN? Yeah, we obviously understand. But the majority of folks actually buying the games? Nope. > What you want from companies is to stop making great 3D games to cater to the lowest common denominator of a crappy Intel GPU which Apple refuses to care about or upgrade. Rendering the world of Witcher 3 just isn't possible on an Intel HD5000 on older Macs I'm not sure I follow. I went to school for game dev and, granted, I chose a different path but I know many game developers and they have multiple paths to degrading the experience onto some pretty terrible chipsets. Many dev studios do this while still pushing the limits on higher end machines. I always thought FarCry was great at this, I never had an issue running it on crappy Intel GPUs but it looked like crap at the same time. > requesting that games like this aren't made at all so people can stay ignorant is wrong It's simply not intuitive. Yes if you own a PC and buy something for it you should know about it. But when you work in support for any amount of time you realize this is far, far from reality. You're not going to be able to educate everyone and surely, into today's world of download from an app store and tap, it's only going to be more common to expect everything to "just work". I would argue that consumes shouldn't need to care about their specs if you want to provide any type of decent user experience. Tablets and modern hardware is actually getting pretty close to making this a reality. There are honestly not a lot of games out there that can't run on the terrible Intel GPUs.
- barrkel 10y ago
  Bear in mind that you had an enormous sampling bias: almost all the people you saw were the people who couldn't understand minimum requirements. You didn't see the people who could understand minimum requirements, so you don't know what proportion the first set is of the entire population. (I don't disagree with your larger point that Steam should take a lot more responsibility to put up roadblocks to purchasing games that won't run on the system the Steam client is running on.)