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Despite many developers moving away from the PC platform in the past few years due to claims of high piracy rates cutting into profits, some believe it's the only place for their games. Star Citizen developer Chris Roberts, has said that his game will be a PC exclusive, because contemporary machines are already more powerful than what the next-generation consoles will be capable of.
“What I was showing [in the teaser video] you can’t do on a current generation console,” Roberts said while speaking with ArsTechnica. “You can do most of it on a next generation console, but I can promise you a top-end PC now is already more powerful than what a next generation console is going to be.”
He explained it in simple hardware availability terms – memory capacity being one of the biggest problems. If you're looking at a current gen machine, there's only around 512MB to work with. PCs he said, you know you can set a minimum requirement at 4GB and not worry about people not having enough. While next-gen machines will likely bump things up to at least a couple of gigabytes, the price of memory now means that it will only be a couple of years before everyone is sporting 20+ GBs.
“I’m looking at the high-end [hardware] today being the ‘Normal Gamer' level in two years time,” he said. “It'll be kind of like Wing Commander used to be. If you had the extra memory, if you had the 386, it was a better experience, but you could still play it on a 286.”
Ultimately, Roberts said that he hoped Star Citizen would help show people it was still worth it to have a high end machine. While console ports were fine, they aren't what the PC is designed for.
Along with its Kickstarter campaign – that has 14 days left – so far Robert's company has managed to generate over $2.7 million in funds on the official site. Star Citizen is set for release sometime in late 2014.
KitGuru Says: Nowadays CryEngine games are commonly used as benchmarks for what a high end system can do – though they're certainly more understanding of contemporary hardware than the first Crysis was. Do you think we'll be using Star Citizen for the same, in a couple of years time?
