Rage: two-thirds sales to be on console

Legendary first-person shooter developer id Software predicts two-thirds of the sales of upcoming game Rage will be for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

That leaves around a third of sales for the PC.

"Roughly," Todd Hollenshead, co-owner and CEO of id Software, told Eurogamer.

"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.

"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."

Rage, an open world, post-apocalyptic shooter from the team behind Doom and Quake, launches this October.

The developer made its name on the PC, but times have changed, and so has id.

Now, games are made with the consoles front of mind to ensure those versions are up to speed.

"In game development, you have to tailor your gameplay to where you expect people to play it on," Hollenshead revealed.

"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 to console from PC is old-world thinking, according to id.

"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."

Tom went hands-on for Eurogamer's Rage preview.