GamersCrib
06-01-2008, 11:05 PM
IGN (http://www.ign.com/) has posted up a new article earllier today that has Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/) taking a much closer look at the current state of PC gaming. Here is some of the story!
Says tradition is blinding consumers and parts of the media to the reality of the platform.
PC gaming is changing. Digitally distributed game sales are picking up, more Western games are implementing microtransaction models popular in Asian territories, and massively multiplayer online games are gaining more and more popularity. Yet there's still no reliable method of tracking all this. Traditionally we've trusted numbers from market research firms such as NPD to give us a reliable picture of platform sales, but with fewer and fewer consumers buying physical product at stores, those numbers simply don't tell the whole story. Just ask Blizzard, which is making somewhere in the vicinity of $120 million dollars every month with its immensely successful MMORPG World of Warcraft.
Statistics Valve pulled from the Gartner Group said over 255 million new PCs were purchased in 2007 and that more than 260 million worldwide use their PCs to play games, indicating there is a huge untapped potential with the PC platform. "In a single year the PC has much, much larger volumes of scale than the largest console ever did over its entire lifetime," Newell said. Of course not all the PCs purchased would be able to run many of the high-end games such as Crysis on high settings, but that's not what PC gaming is about anymore, according to Valve. It's moving away from graphical power and moving more toward accessibility, ease of use, and connectivity. "You're missing opportunities if you define yourself as a wrapper around a set of graphics hardware, which sometimes it seems like some of the console guys do," Newell said. "Graphics are certainly good, but if you're not trying to figure out how to connect your customers together and generate a community and social aspect... it's something I've talked to Will Wright about a lot and I think he's doing a great job in showing how much value there can be in connecting those customers together."
Valve maintains the PC platform is the breeding ground for technological innovation as competing hardware manufacturers continuously drive change. "If Intel stumbles for a while AMD steps in and solves their problems. If Nvidia slows down in terms of pushing graphics technology ATI is sitting right there to take as much of their business away from them as they can. We see that more and more it's the open PC platform that's driving the basic media standards, data standards, connection standards, graphics standards, compute standards that are being incorporated into consoles," Newell said. "Consoles are really just becoming step-children of the capital investments that are being made."
In addition to driving technology change, Valve pointed to the PC platform as pushing forward content distribution methods. It should be no surprise that Valve referred to its own service, Steam, as an exemplar of PC gaming's strengths. It allows for patches to roll out more continuously when compared to the thorny certification process required by Microsoft on its Xbox 360 console, and Valve does this completely free of charge. This kind of freedom and opportunity for autonomy for small developers and large publishers makes it an ideal portal for game releases, says Valve.
To check out the rest of this new article, visit here (http://pc.ign.com/articles/878/878144p1.html).
Says tradition is blinding consumers and parts of the media to the reality of the platform.
PC gaming is changing. Digitally distributed game sales are picking up, more Western games are implementing microtransaction models popular in Asian territories, and massively multiplayer online games are gaining more and more popularity. Yet there's still no reliable method of tracking all this. Traditionally we've trusted numbers from market research firms such as NPD to give us a reliable picture of platform sales, but with fewer and fewer consumers buying physical product at stores, those numbers simply don't tell the whole story. Just ask Blizzard, which is making somewhere in the vicinity of $120 million dollars every month with its immensely successful MMORPG World of Warcraft.
Statistics Valve pulled from the Gartner Group said over 255 million new PCs were purchased in 2007 and that more than 260 million worldwide use their PCs to play games, indicating there is a huge untapped potential with the PC platform. "In a single year the PC has much, much larger volumes of scale than the largest console ever did over its entire lifetime," Newell said. Of course not all the PCs purchased would be able to run many of the high-end games such as Crysis on high settings, but that's not what PC gaming is about anymore, according to Valve. It's moving away from graphical power and moving more toward accessibility, ease of use, and connectivity. "You're missing opportunities if you define yourself as a wrapper around a set of graphics hardware, which sometimes it seems like some of the console guys do," Newell said. "Graphics are certainly good, but if you're not trying to figure out how to connect your customers together and generate a community and social aspect... it's something I've talked to Will Wright about a lot and I think he's doing a great job in showing how much value there can be in connecting those customers together."
Valve maintains the PC platform is the breeding ground for technological innovation as competing hardware manufacturers continuously drive change. "If Intel stumbles for a while AMD steps in and solves their problems. If Nvidia slows down in terms of pushing graphics technology ATI is sitting right there to take as much of their business away from them as they can. We see that more and more it's the open PC platform that's driving the basic media standards, data standards, connection standards, graphics standards, compute standards that are being incorporated into consoles," Newell said. "Consoles are really just becoming step-children of the capital investments that are being made."
In addition to driving technology change, Valve pointed to the PC platform as pushing forward content distribution methods. It should be no surprise that Valve referred to its own service, Steam, as an exemplar of PC gaming's strengths. It allows for patches to roll out more continuously when compared to the thorny certification process required by Microsoft on its Xbox 360 console, and Valve does this completely free of charge. This kind of freedom and opportunity for autonomy for small developers and large publishers makes it an ideal portal for game releases, says Valve.
To check out the rest of this new article, visit here (http://pc.ign.com/articles/878/878144p1.html).