The Current State of PC "Ports"

There seems to be a disturbing trend with PC ports. Over the past few years we've been treated to mostly decent ports of the majority of games coming out on the current generation of consoles, but that's starting to digress back into the way things were before.

I recently purchased Street Fighter V on Steam and ended up returning it within 48 hours after not being able to solve a crash bug. I'm sure Capcom will fix this bug in the near future, so I'm planning on purchasing the game again when Juri is released and I can get the game at a discounted price. I did attempt to purchase it at release, but was disappointed that I can't run one of my favorite franchises at it's pinnacle visual peak.

I never had any issues with Arkham Knight, but it was notoriously pulled from the Steam store and no-questions-asked refunds were offered even after it returned to the store nearly 6 months after release.

But by far, the worst example in this article is Mortal Kombat X! After putting out a decent PC port of a decent fighter they made the choice to stop supporting the PC version with new content. Most of the work is already done. There is a PC port and the content is already being added to that current port. Games are developed and tested on PC long before they are ever loaded on dev kits for console testing!

So the big question why aren't we getting good PC ports?

I'm sure every one of these games and the numerous other examples I could have used have their own stories. Here are a few things I have seen that may be contributing factors:

• Studios often buy large supplies of hardware at the same time. Unless an effort is made to diversify hardware, testing is done on less than a half dozen hardware configurations.
• Testing for so many possibilities is hardware and software is time consuming! Often problems are impossible to reproduce without exactly duplicating the source of the problem. This is especially true of in-house or heavily modified game engines.
• This is my observation and probably NetherRealm's reasoning: PC players don't seem to buy as much DLC as console players. People I talk to, myself included, wait for a "complete edition" to be released instead of being nickle and dimed by incremental DLC.
• Possibly little money is spent on a PC port because the studio is afraid there will be too much piracy? (Though strides in DRM have made recent games uncrackable.)

I'm not sure exactly why we are seeing a steep decline in quality, but we are in danger of taking a huge step backwards. Please buy your PC games, let the publishers and developers of any games you want to see on PC know you want their games, and respectfully be specific about port quality and features you appreciate in your games.