First,
@lilhasselhoffer, I must preface up front that I always love your posts, reading them voraciously and digesting them, because they are most times not only well-thought out, but hit the mark, so don't take my remark negatively.
You talk about an impetus to drive the game creators to change, and also mention Skyrim. Interesting example for my point, and germane to the lead post of this discussion, and in particular, Bethesda as mentioned in post #3, since it was not only created by Bethesda, but published by Bethesda as well. If I am not mistaken, Skyrim PC sales at this point are nearly equal to or greater than console sales of Skyrim. And, because of mods, I'm guessing it will be played by many, many people for years to come on PC, much as Oblivion was. Now, my point is, Bethesda knows what we in the PC community do to their games, and they encourage it. They are also aware of how many people bought the PC version. That alone should have told them that if you offer something good to the PC crowd, they will come. You can still make your money as a company without having to shortchange the PC gamers. I'd be willing to guess that the large majority of console users haven't played since the first playthrough. So technically, Skyrim should have proved to Bethesda at least that you don't have to cater to the consoles.
Looking at this from a slightly different perspective, Skyrim is a unique example. There were two things I considered when bringing it up, but apparently I don't do a great job framing what was in my mind.
First, mods and friendliness to computer users is a huge hang-over from the days of Fallout 3. Gamebryo is and always has been a broken POS, which required outside patching to get it running. Anyone who played Fallout 3 before any of the patches should be well aware of that turd in the punch bowl. Random CTDs were more common of the PC than anything else in the wasteland. Bethesda eventually pushed out updates, but the community largely made the game playable prior to Bethesda releasing their patches. This sets the bar pretty low on PC support for Bethesda, and honestly their QA hasn't gotten better. Skyrim showed the same failures all over again, which took a good several months to patch out. When a developer basically can't be bothered to make sure a PC game is stable they've shown where their priorities lie.
Point two, the Legendary Edition of Skyrim is a unique oddity. Other developers push out DLC on the stores like it was candy. 99 cents for a new costume, $10 for a new area. That's what Bethesda did, but once their big three DLC packs came out they released the Legendary Edition. Counter to what most developers do, they continued to support their game, and actually brought it to people's attention again after release date. I'm hard pressed to see the same dedication to the consoles anywhere else. PC gamers got the Legendary Edition, but since Steam was required to play the game there was absolutely no reason that the Legendary Edition had to exist (GOTY edition have been released for some games, but they generally existed for games without Steam support due to terrible store fronts and no DLC distributors).
What I'd hazard to say is that Bethesda only supports mods because their patchwork engine requires them. If they ejected Gamebryo/Creation, I'd bet the modding community would also be ejected. Because Skyrim could run "well enough," Creation got to stick around. I'm sure an executive at Zenimax tasked with creating a new engine would start with the following criteria, as would most gaming executives:
1) Come in under budget, with an engine that will be modifiable and useable for at least a decade.
2) No support for computer modifications, so we can control DLC content.
3) Use at least one piece of code that offers a unique benefit to sell the new engine. Read: Mantle, Physx, and their ilk.
If you don't believe me here look at Unreal Tournament. 2k4 offered insane mods that made the game a hit for over a decade. Unreal Tournament 3 lost modding and died a quick death. I'd be hard pressed to find a server still running that game with a decent player base.
I'm too jaded to think anything else here. EA has set the tone in the games industry for the last decade. The cadence they established was constant iterations, a middle finger to the PC, and reusing the same tired engines until they physically could not support a playable experience. EA got a substantial amount of money, so they both bought up developers and became an industry standard. That kind of blind greed has led us into a near collapse of the console industry, which we've yet to truly recover from. The indie revolution is doing a decent job revitalizing things, but a billion 8-bit and 16 bit retro titles don't feed the masses.
Whenever I stop seeing an annual release of Football, US Football, and modern military shooters I'll concede that gaming has recovered. Right now, the cash cows of the industry are consoles. No executive has the balls to spend money developing a new engine, while the industry is on shaky grounds. They're willing to spend 1/3 the cost of a new engine on getting the old ones to work, and are willing to cut expectations because the optimizations are patching a broken leg.
In short, I completely disagree with the OP's thread title. Ubisoft has a shrewd person at the top, who is entirely in touch with reality. The difference is that, as with most executives, the video game industry is no longer about the games. They've justified killing expenses today to make a quick dollar, and have gone so far as to assume their customers are idiots. They invent bespoke resolution and frame rates to fit what decade old tech is capable of, and use the profits they generate to fund expansion. For lack of a better phrasing, developers are cells and publishers are viruses. Viruses expand, take over cells, reproduce, then burst the cells to form more of their own kind. My hope is that publishers realize this, but I don't see it happening. Eventually the crap decisions publishers make will push them to a state of poor profits, and without expansion viruses die. That death will hurt the video games industry, but maybe a little pain now will force a re-evaluation of priorities.
There's no reason that the xbox 360 could run 720p, and a decade later the xbox one and PS4 shouldn't be able to do 1080p. That'd be like saying that a Radeon HD 3650 and a Radeon R260 has no functional difference in power. We know that isn't true, so either the newer hardware is crap, or the software is crap. While the Jaguar isn't impressive, it has demonstrated far better performance than this.
