The primary factor in min spec PC requirements is whether we’re planning to release the game in Asia. This is because there’s an absolutely enormous number of PC cafes all over Asia, but the vast majority of them are really old low spec machines. Many of them are still running Windows XP and have less than 4 gigabytes of RAM. If a game can run reasonably well on those old machines and is localized for the region, there are a lot of potential sales there.
Beyond that, min spec is usually determined by the amount of development time and effort we can budget into reducing asset quality and all the engineering optimization time we can give it. Our engineers and artists could be doing other things with those dev resources like creating new assets, building new systems, or fixing bugs. The brass ring really is running well on a Windows XP potato. If our leadership thinks we can feasibly hit that goal within our dev budget, we’re going to try for it because the number of additional sales we can make is substantial. If we can’t do that within our budget, it will likely be determined by our core technology and the leadership’s decision as to what they think is the minimum hardware to achieve the experience they want players to have.
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