CEO Todd Hollenshead feels ”two-thirds plus” will be the likely split between console and PC. The studio ”forbid anybody” using keyboard and mouse first.
”I’m not in the sales forecast business, and I don’t want to be making projections for the company on the basis of that. But if we’re just going to do napkin math, that’s as good as any,” said id Software co-owner and CEO Todd Hollenshead.
Rage is leading on the consoles as id follow the math. ”Maybe it’s 70 per cent among the consoles and 30 on the PC, or maybe 75, 25. But we’re still talking two-thirds plus of the sales being on PS3 or Xbox 360,” he continued.
”In game development, you have to tailor your gameplay to where you expect people to play it on,” he said. ”So, while we’re developing Rage on the PC, we forbid anybody from playing it on a keyboard and mouse until we’ve played it first on a console controller.”
”We pull the keyboard and mouse out and put in a USB 360 controller, even on the development staff. That’s not just the testers.” Porting from the PC version to console is the old way of thinking and it gets you into trouble he observes: ”That was the way we did it in the past. Ultimately, we learnt that’s not the way you should do it.”
”We had the discussions early on with Rage about what platforms we were going to go on. If we’re going to expect one third, one third and one third of sales to be across those three platforms, so that means two-thirds of our sales are going to be on console, we’re going to make sure we have that gameplay feel tight first.”
Rage releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC October 7th.
