Geth has it right. The vast majority of comments that include PC means Planetary Conquest.

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To the OP. I don't think you know how a business works. CCP wants to make money, therefore releasing Dust to the widest possible audience is desirable. PC users are a members of this wider audience, therefore it makes sense to release to the PC as soon as they are out of their Sony exclusive.

Businesses aren't built on "matters of principle" they're built on profits.

CCP wants to make money, therefore releasing Dust to the widest possible audience is desirable. .

False. Actually, one of the leading principles of running a business/marketing campaign is "don't try to cater to everyone", or avoid the "jack of all trades, master of none" mentality. Focusing on the PS3 was a very sound marketing decision.

While this is a correct principle, you've interpreted it incorrectly. This idea means don't try to make a product that appeals to all possibilities. In dust land this would mean adding in a bunch of unrelated play styles like an art studio or cooking as examples. Releasing your focused fps to the widest possible audience is exactly the right move, and this includes pc players. Xbox players too for that matter.

The idea that somehow CCP ought to be "loyal" to the PS3,or to Sony beyond any contract agreement is foolish and childish.

Dust will stay a console exclusive just as long as the money holds out, or until the contracts expire. Whichever lasts longer. So, if you want Dust to stay PS3 only, you better get to buying aurum.

The wider the audience, the more platforms you push the game onto, the less focused and more fragmented the experience becomes. Dust 514 seems to be designed with that in mind. Instead of fragmenting and diluting the EVE experience it channels it (or reveals it) along a specific and limited vector (or from a new and distinct vantage point) hopefully adding more people to the fold in the really elegant and contained manor (or, as CCP put it, revealing another facet of the Universe) without disturbing or obscuring what is already there.

I had been thinking about writing up some of the best counter arguments to my manifesto that I can think of, since they haven't yet appeared in this thread and are worth considering.

Ultimately I think you missed the whole thrust of what I was trying to say. The only entity CCP should be "loyal" to is CCP.

However, back to the whole business thing: reaching a wider audience might allow you to make more money, selling to more customers. It doesn't necessarily mean that you can continue to offer the best possible product. It does not mean that you can sustain your expansion. More and bigger is not always better. Sometimes small is beautiful. People will sometimes resent "sell outs" and Dust has seen an undo amount of criticism because of that. What I object to are those that do not seem to care if Dust 514 is "good" or "bad" in its own right, but only deem it bad because they can' have it, or are unwilling to take any steps to obtain it. And therefor seem to be saying that it is only going to be a good thing if it belongs to them.

Geth has it right. The vast majority of comments that include PC means Planetary Conquest.

On the possibility of a Personal Computer version get your head out of the sand. DUST runs on UnReal 3.something. It was cheap solution and gave the new developers in Shanghai a way to learn how to do FPS on consoles. It works okay at 720p. There are some limitations because it is an older UnReal engine. However, it was a very good business decision by CCP.

Now, recall that Sony announced the PS4. Simply put it is an underpowered PC. It will have some advantages in that it is not running the Blue Screen of Death OS and the RAM is all higher speed graphics memory. Both good things. But it is running a slow speed, low wattage portable APU (AMD Application Processor 1.6GHz combining CPU/GPU) so the power of a PC is not ever going to be available as it will not be upgradeable. All of that is good news for a console.
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It may look like that on paper, but things aren-¦t that straight and easy. The memory has a very high bandwidth, but also a high latency. The bandwidth is appreciated by the graphics processor, and doesn-¦t care much about the latency, that-¦s why GDDRx is used for graphics. But a regular CPU is sensitive to latency, so this may slow things down.
To circumvent this, programmers may have to learn to never let the code halt the data requests from the memory, to let it come in a constant stream. This could be a little tricky.

This, however, is probably the most cost and heat effective solution the could do. Stepping up to a Steamroller instead of a Jaguar would cost way more in terms of die size and heat dissipation for a uncertain performance increase. The instructions per clock is higher up to 4 threads, above that it is not.

Using DirectX on a PC steals about 90% of the performance http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/2
Using custom APIs that work more direct to the hardware and sometimes programing directly to the metal makes the consoles very strong against PCs, and differs in the way games are made.

This all together makes the PS4 still being far from a PC, despite using PC components.


A video game console have historically used custom components because floating point operations have been crucial. Ordinary CPU have not been good at this, and it is not until recently that standard CPUs have catched up on this point, making custom CPUs not worth it.

When the PS2 was released the Emotion engine had 10 times more FLOPS performance as the best Intel processor.



This is all a long story made (very) short.

And consider that your (and my) computers cost many times more than the PS4 will do.

ps4 underpowered pc

I was under the impression that Dust 514 was not getting ported to the PS4 or rather streaming through Giaki [whatever its called] was the only option mentioned for PS4 play.

If this is still true. I hold out hope that a PC version is in the future. The PS3 is at the end of its life cycle it has a few years left for sure, but I want Dust 514 to be a 10+ years game like EVE. Keeping it locked on the PS3 platform will not achieve this.

Truthfully, releasing the game to the PC would be the worst situation possible.

You open the floodgates to all kinds of kinds of easy hacking, and as Eve players know, in New Eden the higher powers rarely stick to honor.

As long as the game takes advantage of the PS4 and keeps supporting KB/M, it should please most audiences.

Well, I agree with your nuances. Dust, currently, is an Unreal engine game that supports kbm. Personally, I think portability is part of the current design principle. I'll leave it at that.

I agree that DUST is probably coded in a way that porting would be trivial. I still don't believe that is the intention of CCP in the near term. It's not just about the widest audience, but that is a good argument. The pilots in EVE are already captive. Those guys would have paid for a new expansion anyway, and will for the next one. Personally, I hated EVE when I tried it and had no intention of going back. By pushing into a completely new audience, CCP has managed to grab my attention and several Merc Packs from the deal. That's new buy in to them, rather than continued buy in.

But beyond all that is something more profound than market strategy. CCP is tying two disparate games (a shooter and a resource manager) together in the same digital space. And not only that, they are doing it across two platforms. It truely is an experiment in comparing Apples to Oranges by making them equals. When this experiment succeeds, game design will have fundamentally changed and CCP will have been the first to do it.