As was heavily rumored last week, a group of industry giants came together last night to announce the PCGA, or PC Gaming Alliance. This group will bring together competing game developers and publishers, hardware manufacturers, and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) firms to help solve the problems faced by the PC gaming industry.
Companies featured as founding members of the group include: Activision, Microsoft, Epic, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Dell, Acer, Alienware, and Gateway.
Randy Stude of Intel serves as the PCGA's current president and unveiled the company at the event. Also present were representatives from each of the founding companies, including Games for Windows Global Director Kevin Unangst and Epic Vice President Mark Rein.
According to Stude's presentation, the PCGA has numerous goals, chief among them being the education of consumers and gamers about PC games. Stude said he wants to fight the misconception that PC gaming is dying when, in fact, some studies point to "massive growth" in this sector of the gaming industry. Specifically, Stude cited a report by DFC Intelligence stating that PC gaming grew 12 percent in profit last year with an estimated forecast of 14 percent growth in 2008. Stude said 263 million gamers currently play titles online with their PCs.
The problems for PC gaming, then, come from other directions, one of which is system requirements with no industry-wide accepted standard. Stude brought up a scatter chart based on a recent issue of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. The chart plotted out where 30 different games featured in the magazine fell in terms of system requirements. It came as no surprise that they were all over the place. The PCGA's plan is not to put a cap on maximum requirements but to introduce a bottom-end minimum requirement for PCGA members and developers in general to work toward.
To illustrate the relevance of this problem, Stude pointed toward Assassin's Creed, whose extremely high PC requirements shocked gamers. With the caveat that he loves Ubisoft, Stude admitted, "I don't know what Ubisoft was thinking when they set the Assassin's Creed requirements so high."
Another problem brought up during the presentation was piracy, although Stude was quick to say that "maybe piracy isn't the problem. Maybe the business models for providing PC games are." His general point seemed to be that there likely isn't some simple catchall solution to stopping PC games piracy, so developers may have to start looking toward alternate forms of distributing and creating games. EA's recently announced Battlefield Heroes was discussed as an example of a publisher finding new ways of developing PC titles.
One thing Stude stressed is that making it harder to pirate games on PCs via a closed system is not the solution. "If we close our platform, we're a console," he said, followed by a joking, "We are not the RIAA."
Despite setting Battlefield Heroes up as an example, the PCGA members were quick to point out that they are not looking to get rid of retailers. They also are not trying to steal gamers from consoles so much as to make it so that virtually every computer in America can play most games at any time. For example, they said that they would never think of forcing a developer to make a game PC exclusive. Obviously with an ever more console-centric dev like Epic as part of their group, that was sort of a given.
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Companies featured as founding members of the group include: Activision, Microsoft, Epic, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Dell, Acer, Alienware, and Gateway.
Randy Stude of Intel serves as the PCGA's current president and unveiled the company at the event. Also present were representatives from each of the founding companies, including Games for Windows Global Director Kevin Unangst and Epic Vice President Mark Rein.
According to Stude's presentation, the PCGA has numerous goals, chief among them being the education of consumers and gamers about PC games. Stude said he wants to fight the misconception that PC gaming is dying when, in fact, some studies point to "massive growth" in this sector of the gaming industry. Specifically, Stude cited a report by DFC Intelligence stating that PC gaming grew 12 percent in profit last year with an estimated forecast of 14 percent growth in 2008. Stude said 263 million gamers currently play titles online with their PCs.
The problems for PC gaming, then, come from other directions, one of which is system requirements with no industry-wide accepted standard. Stude brought up a scatter chart based on a recent issue of Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. The chart plotted out where 30 different games featured in the magazine fell in terms of system requirements. It came as no surprise that they were all over the place. The PCGA's plan is not to put a cap on maximum requirements but to introduce a bottom-end minimum requirement for PCGA members and developers in general to work toward.
To illustrate the relevance of this problem, Stude pointed toward Assassin's Creed, whose extremely high PC requirements shocked gamers. With the caveat that he loves Ubisoft, Stude admitted, "I don't know what Ubisoft was thinking when they set the Assassin's Creed requirements so high."
Another problem brought up during the presentation was piracy, although Stude was quick to say that "maybe piracy isn't the problem. Maybe the business models for providing PC games are." His general point seemed to be that there likely isn't some simple catchall solution to stopping PC games piracy, so developers may have to start looking toward alternate forms of distributing and creating games. EA's recently announced Battlefield Heroes was discussed as an example of a publisher finding new ways of developing PC titles.
One thing Stude stressed is that making it harder to pirate games on PCs via a closed system is not the solution. "If we close our platform, we're a console," he said, followed by a joking, "We are not the RIAA."
Despite setting Battlefield Heroes up as an example, the PCGA members were quick to point out that they are not looking to get rid of retailers. They also are not trying to steal gamers from consoles so much as to make it so that virtually every computer in America can play most games at any time. For example, they said that they would never think of forcing a developer to make a game PC exclusive. Obviously with an ever more console-centric dev like Epic as part of their group, that was sort of a given.
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