John Carmack, who we can easily call the father of FPS games, had two tough statements.

Carmack, who went from id Software to work as the chief technical officer at Oculus, had a speech at Oculus Connect, and he simply said that the developers just don’t develop games well for virtual reality devices. The industry is lazy, and it is waiting for new hardware. „I would rather have magic software over magic hardware,” he said, referring to developers always waiting for the new generation of AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Instead, he believes they should focus on optimizing their games/software for low-level hardware.

When it comes to optimization, Carmack needs no self-confidence: he said that he does it better than GPU driver teams. „Let me do the specific low-level things, I know what I’m doing, I’ll take care of it, you’re going to make decisions that are not going to be optimal for me in various ways,” he said. He didn’t take potshots at AMD and Nvidia with the comment. He was talking about the Oculus Go and other VR technologies.

Carmack believes that VR can only become mainstream if the industry develops for mainstream devices, such as mobiles, as it would allow the industry to move forward due to a large part of the industry focusing on this platform. He added that the mobiles would never have the raw power of a PC, but it makes developers strive to improve, and if they can’t do it, they have to go out and find the skills that Carmack has.

Carmack knows what he is talking about: in the mid-90s, he had a game called Doom, which made the (at the time) weak PCs put up a fight against consoles with a pseudo-3D game (which then got ported to consoles in multiple ways in sometimes utterly awful quality…).

Source: PC Gamer, PC Gamer