You're comparing the motive for the need to balance the budget. The analogy is with the need for balancing the budget affecting the actions of the work. In this sense, the comparison with a business is fair.

The budget decisions should lead to questions such as 'what is the most effective police work we can do within our available budget?', where as in some cases it seems to be just 'what is the most effective way to balance our budget?'.

In that case, the police work is no longer a primary consideration and the tail is wagging the dog. They may as well stop doing police work altogether and start opening hardware stores, or lemonade stands to pay their salaries and maintain their buildings.

To paraphrase Charles Goodhart: once a measurement becomes a goal, it stops being a measurement.

To be fair, @TheFreak's argument is not completely invalid.

The question is, are PC's better, I think you and I would agree that yes they are. TheFreak's argument did nothing to disprove that, he merely argued that RL gets in the way as you just demonstrated.

Well no shit. I have a huge backlog of games thanks to steam sales and I'm seriously trying to figure out how to give more money to Star Citizen without breaking the bank. And yes, I have a life outside of gaming and a job that demands a lot of my time.

Still doesn't mean PC games aren't better. In the console world, I have to save every flipping console ever made and hope that they never break down. Oh yeah, and I have to re-buy games I've bought before when they re-release them on the new platform. (you've seen AVGN's basement right? ManCave aspect aside, that place is completely unrealistic to everyone else

PC's not so much, as long as the software exists and I have storage, I can play it. I'm not locked into hardware or some online service. I'm not at someone's mercy if the corporation shuts things down.

no shit they require a modest bit more effort and money. again, that doesn't disprove that PCs are better. Many things that are better require a bit more effort.

Let's see, I can sit alone in front of my computer and play a PC game, assuming I've upgraded my system recently enough...ooooor...I can sit in my living room with a 50" display and enjoy a game with my entire family.

PC is great if you're young and have no responsibilities. Wait till you have a family and priorities that preempt spending a ton of money on PC hardware. Consoles will make a lot more sense to you then.

So wait. They make the game on PC, squeeze it on console hardware...and then don't announce a PC release? I thought the idea of developing just for consoles meant you could fine tune the engine for specific hardware, but you say that they make a PC "version" and then scale it backwards. Sounds nutty.

I'd wager a lot of this stuff IS running on the ingame engine, in real time, but that its heavily scripted with very little actually interactivity.

Anyway. The heist focus sounds cool. Also, for me GTA is a driving game at heart. I used to do laps of Vice City in the Sabre Turbo trying to beat my best time. Shooting at people was a minigame inbetween driving. If they can flesh out the minigame thats cool, just not at the expense of driving.

Well, at the time they were the only console doing online well. They also had superior hardware and a far superior development environment (which was already familiar to PC devs) which led to a lot of high quality games in a short amount of time.

I assume you'll be buying a Wii U?

I'm not sure what Microsoft has going for it at this point. The hardware is so similar between this and the PS4 that making an exclusive publishing deal seems like throwing away money opportunities for a publisher. Its not like how it was with the PS3 and 360 where the PS3 decided to take a radically different approach hardware wise. Microsoft is betting on all the other features stacked into it. They've been trying for over a decade to make a "unified household media center" and this might be their next attempt.

@VoodooV

I'm getting the impression people are getting a little overly bent out of shape about the Xbox One's convergence features.

Spec-wise it's all but identical to the PS4 so no apparent compromise has been made on performance. Hardware similarity will also all but guarantee easy ports. If anything I reckon this gen will be the closest we get to platform neutrality because of this.

For all its focus on non-game features MS must know that games sell consoles. They would be foolish in divesting away from first party titles or exclusives. If they get more purchases via spruiking their TV integration that will put them in a better position to pay for these.

Force bundling Kinect will surely inflate the price but it remains to be seen by how much. If they price themselves outside the PS4's range and people feel like it's an unnecessary accessory they won't use then it will hurt them obviously. Having said that, it's functionality actually looks genuinely interesting (and powerful) unlike their first Kinect beta test.

At least for me what's always turned me off Xbox and eventually convinced me to get a PS3 is the paid multiplayer. Coming from a PC I reckon it's flat out outrageous to charge people for what is effectively P2P quality multiplayer, let alone to them smother the hub with advertising. This will obviously not change for the One so I have no intention of giving them my money.

If Tesla could see them now he may wonder aloud as to why mankind hasn't "switched" the hardware for the transmission of electricity....We'd have to explain to Nicola that unfortunately for mankind, the same cunts drunk on power and control are still alive and kicking.

The A10 is just such an awesome piece of hardware.

And tell me if you were from any time before the 1900s and saw that thing you would not think it was a bloody dragon from myth (a giant flying beast that spits fire from its "mouth" and can totally destroy anything on land).

Perhaps some dude in the past saw a "vision" of it and that's how the dragon myth started? If you believe in that kind of thing

By in large, Japan was. It was the aggressor, but not exactly without justifiable self defense as a cause.

The American military build up was absolutely intended to at the very least be prepared to attack Japan. The hardware destroyed in Pearl Harbor was very likely to be used against Japan.

Now, the Japanese policy of conquest throughout Asia and it's genocidal treatment of those areas it conquered is another matter. It is those horrific acts which, to me, shift Japan from aggressor to 'bad guy' if we must use such cheap descriptions.

..indispensable, with hardware and software for all.

Nah, the Doom 3 palette was pitch black interspersed with the glowing eyes of demons, whose closets you have just foolishly stumbled over.
That demo (if you could really call it that) was very purdy but several things occurred to me while I was watching it. When our futuristic ninja gets busted I couldn't help but think, "Yep, I hate it when that happens" there's always one nosy douchebag who has to ruin an otherwise perfectly good infiltration.
In the future, shutting down an assembly line won't just stop the line but also blow up at least half of it, if only Henry Ford had thought of this, who knows where we would be today.
As good as this looks by the time a significant portion of the population has the hardware necessary to run this in real time we will all have moved on to Unreal Engine version 6. So none of this is especially practical for gaming purposes, it makes me wonder if they aren't trying to market this to film makers as well.

This.. is not a tech demo, this is just some eye candy. Tech demo's actually center on and demonstrate individual effects, this does none of that and is probably not even realtime on any current hardware.

I don't think this is "home made". In the video they said all that hardware is from 1979..so it sounds like they just restored some ancient Russian ultralight copter..

Are any of you into high quality audio? If so research if there is an ATMOS theater near you because this movie is being created with ATMOS in mind. I am going to see it just for that fact, regardless of the plot or subject.

The first generation ATMOS hardware in theaters has 128 discrete audio tracks and up to 64 separate speaker feeds.
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/technology/cinema/dolby-atmos.html#Video

"The system does not store your typical “channel” information. In the base system for panning, there is no dedicated “Left,” “Right,” “Center,” etc. Rather than store channel information, the system emulates something that has been used in game audio for years, spatialization within a 3D model. The reason for this, is that the system is scalable up to 128 channels. Yes, you read that right…128. The decoder has to be programmed for the playback environment it is installed in. Once it has that information, it creates the playback channel information in real-time during the film. In this manner, a film can be mixed in one room with a given set of playback channels, and be distributed to any number of theaters in any number of configurations"

"This unit will allow the room’s response to be measured, and a unique EQ profile can be established for each individual channel in the system. This processor will also be somewhat “self-aware” in that it can identify and report whenever there is a failure in the playback system" http://designingsound.org/2012/11/my-impressions-of-dolby-atmos/