PC Gaming Alliance Formed [Feb 20, 2008, 10:29 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Top technology companies form gaming alliance (thanks Mike Martinez) officially
announces the formation of the gaming alliance first revealed last week
(story) to help promote/revive the PC gaming scene. Here's word:
Some of the top technology companies, including Intel, Microsoft, Dell, and Advanced Micro Devices joined forces Tuesday to form the PC Gaming Alliance, which will try to promote the PC as a gaming platform.
The alliance will bring hardware makers, software companies, and game publishers under one roof to "accelerate innovation, improve the gaming experience for consumers and serve as a collective source of market information and expertise on PC gaming," the alliance said in a statement.
The companies will work together on challenges facing the PC gaming industry, including piracy and the establishment of hardware requirements for PC games, the alliance said. PCGA also hopes to accelerate growth of the PC gaming industry and standardize the development of gaming PCs and software by developing and promoting guidelines.
The alliance comes at a time when PC video game sales are falling. PC games sales in the U.S. were $910.7 million in 2007, down from $970 million in 2006, according to research from NPD Techworld. PC game sales in 2007 dwarfed in comparison to the sale of software for video game consoles like Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Wii, which were $6.6 billion.
Unit shipments of PC game software totaled 36.4 million in 2007, compared to video game software unit shipments of 153.9 million, according to NPD.
The U.S. gaming industry already has the Entertainment Software Association, which represents vendors that publish games for both computers and consoles. About 90 percent of the $7.4 billion revenue of PC and console gaming software in 2006 belonged to ESA members, giving the association a dominant presence.
Other PCGA members include Acer, Epic, Nvidia and Razer USA.
The announcement comes during the Game Developers Conference, which is being held in San Francisco. During the show PCGA member Intel launched a new gaming platform formerly code-named "Skulltrail." The Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform includes two quad-core microprocessors, totaling eight-processing engines, and supports graphics cards from ATI or Nvidia.
PC gaming needs to use the hardware that consumers have rather than designing for what they want them to buy.Amen, but...
The best thing the gaming alliance can do for PC gaming is encourage developers to stick with a common denominator that will work for the most possible users.
that's not going to happen because the whole purpose of this "alliance" is to sell new hardware. Games are what has driven the PC industry to this point. The overwhelming majority of PC users wouldn't need a Geforce 8800 and four cores if it weren't for games like Crysis forcing users to buy them. The executives at all of these hardware companies finally got their bean counters to run the numbers and realized that without PC games, there's nothing to push consumers to buy the latest one-hundred pipeline video cards and twelve core processors. Video game consoles don't get updated but every four or five years, so they can't makeup that revenue with console sales especially when the costs of the components decrease with each passing month. These hardware companies can only demand premium prices for their latest and greatest offerings if consumers are willing to buy them. And, without PC games requiring them, the overwhelming majority of consumers won't waste their money on those high-end components.
This comment was edited on Feb 20, 20:57.
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