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Developers On 3dfx Buyout

by Maarten Goldstein, Dec 16, 2000 10:03am PST
Related Topics – 3dfx, Buyout

Of course, with the whole 3dfx buyout story, developers have their own opinion about it too. Voodoo Extreme got in contact with The Carmack, who had this to say

.. It was painful to watch 3dfx slip from the archetypical kick-ass technology start up to where they wound up.
I think I would have been happiest to have the PC market divided up between three strong players that all had their act together, but at this point, I'm not too unhappy with the market simplification resulting from 3dfx exiting.
Evil Avatar has posted the thoughts of Epic programmer Tim Sweeney
... 2. This shows the huge importance of keeping up with competition, in terms of cost, features, and product schedule. From a gamer's perspective, the Voodoo's are approximately as good as the GeForce's on average. The GeForce had T&L but few games took advantage of it; the Voodoo had a fill rate advantage. But this was NOT enough. NVidia's cards outsold 3dfx's by a huge margin (especially to OEMs) because of cost advantages, feature advantages (even though no games took advantage of those features at the time), and predictable product schedules. 3. This shows that a company can't "market" its way around core deficiencies -- at least, not for long. The 3dfx guys did an admirable job of hyping up the T-Buffer and FSAA, and if you read the typical magazine reviews, you might have concluded that 3dfx was on par with NVidia's products. But marketing isn't reality -- they were getting their butt kicked by T&L and 32-bit color ...


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Comments

38 Threads* | 73 Comments
  • #61
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    By: Silent Sorrow x
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    I don't think Nvidia's prices are necessarily going to skyrocket. The reason is that they're in a niche market that is in a synergistic relationship with the PC gaming market. When a publisher decides to publish a developer's game, they first consider all sorts of market conditions so they can be sure the game will be profitable.

    If one of those conditions is that making the latest and greatest games will require an "$800 card" they'll recognize that the game won't sell because no one will want to pay that much to play the game. Then the publisher will decide against funding the game and it won't get made. This will cosistently drive developers back to making games that use tech the mass market (incl. the gamer niche) is willing to spend on to in turn enable their ability to play the game. Nvidia won't have any incentive to make and price cards at $800 or whatever--the margin is high but they'll sell virtually zero cards of what is a luxury item people can easily do without.

    This should force Nvidia to keep cool. What they can do however is lengthen the product cycles--because of the lack of competition--and keep the $300 card at the $300 price point for much longer than they could previously. That's where they're going to make their increased profits. So it's likely we'll all be saying goodbye to the "new card every six months" dealie (unless ATI really steps up and forces the issue, of course).
    Dec 16, 2000 5:01pm PST