Big Players To Form PC Gaming Alliance?
According to the San Jose Mercury News, heavyweights Intel, Microsoft, AMD and NVIDIA will join forces to help fight the decline in PC game sales.
The alliance will be officially announced at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Being a hardcore PC gamer, I'm pleased to hear about this. However, the team will need more than just hardware vendors if it wants to stand a chance. After all, it's the publishers that decide what goes on which platforms these days, and with the popularity of the Xbox 360, Wii and Playstation 3, combined with the large outlay for a decent gaming PC (some video cards cost more than an entire console!), the battle is going to be an uphill one. Sure, Microsoft has its fair share of releases, but a bit of support from EA or Activision Blizzard would go down a treat.
It will be interesting to hear the group's strategies to invigorate the platform.
Takahashi: Gaming Alliance stumps for PC [San Jose Mercury News, via Blue's News]
So they are forming a street gang to take on the consoles eh? Is this serious fight, or more a broadway musical gang fight with lots of combs and finger clicking?
Microsoft, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA all have interests in the console market. Microsoft own the Xbox brand, AMD (through ATI) are responsible for the Xbox 360's GPU and NVIDIA produce the PS3's GPU. Intel really are the only party involved who missed out on the current console market, but considering that they made the processor for the original Xbox this seems a temporary situation.
What does this mean? Well it means that each of these corporations had enough foresight to enter the console market early. The planned alliance may be a serious attempt to reinvigorate the PC market, but at the end of the day I doubt any of those involved are going to plan their business on the assumption that PC gaming will compete on equal grounds with console gaming.
Consoles are the (immediate) future of gaming. The game publishers know it, hardware vendors are planning for it and hardcore PC gamers *feel* it. I'm a hardcore PC gamer, forged by the titans of PC gaming, and I feel it. Memories of battling the Kilrathi in Wing Commander and fighting my way to Cydonia in X-COM now compete as equals with my victory over the Covenant in Halo and my brutal rise to power as Kratos in God of War.
Console gaming may want for the finesse of a mouse, or the versatility of a keyboard, but what it offers in exchange is immensely appealing.