Star Citizen can't be run on current-gen consoles, says developer

Star Citizen, the upcoming space-based MMO being developed by Roberts Space Industries, will only be releasing for the PC. This might seem like a suicide move since console game sales have always been dominating the market over PC game sales, but the lead developer and designer Chris Roberts says there's a reason that they're releasing the game on only the PC platform.

Essentially, Roberts says that the hardware requirements for Star Citizen exceeds that of current-generation consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. He also claims that high-end PCs today are "already more powerful than what a next-generation console is going to be." Roberts is aiming high with the hardware requirements for Star Citizen, but he expects them to be standard for a PC when the game releases in two years or so.

While Roberts doesn't disclose what the hardware requirements might be for Star Citizen, he mentions that if he's developing a PC game, users are going to need at least 4GB of RAM in their machines, and while his games wouldn't use up all 4GB (because Windows needs some allocated for itself), he says that they'll require a lot more than the 512MB of RAM that most current-gen consoles run on.

Roberts also slightly disses other game developers who port their console games to PC. He says that "if someone is making a game for a console first, and it's being ported to the PC, [he's] always buying it for the console." However, he goes on by saying, "I don't want a buggy port of a console game on my PC that doesn't really show my PC off."

[via Ars Technica]