With the arrival of Mantle and the more recent announcement of DirectX 12, PC gaming has been pushed back into the limelight. Timely then, was the PAX East panel “The Incredible Future of PC Gaming”, which saw Star Citizen head man Chris Roberts, along with representatives from NVIDIA and Oculus VR, give their perspectives on where the platform is heading.
Roberts provides some of the more insightful dialogue, particularly regarding recent developments in graphics APIs that despite incremental attention have, for the most part, stagnated:
I think there’s a fair amount of improvements that are moving in that direction, I’m pretty happy with that. It’s one of the reasons I’ve backed Mantle and I’m quite happy to see finally the DirectX 12 announcement… we’ll see [with] Microsoft saying ‘Oh yeah, we care about PC gaming again’ — they say that and then they don’t pay attention to it and then they get back on it.
He goes on to say that PC gaming has always been big — it just hasn’t taken “the same headlines” as consoles:
World of Warcraft has probably made more money than any other game, period, in the history of the game business including any of the big console franchises like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. So I think the platform is a huge platform. The problem is it’s just kind of fragmented because of lots of different machines — do you have a high-end machine, do you have a low-end machine — but it’s a great platform.
While I don’t have any grave concerns about where PC gaming is heading, as a developer myself, I’m always happy to hear positive talk from some of the bigger names and companies in the business.
PC gaming: Not just still alive, but still dominant, says PAX East panel [ArsTechnica]
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