On a personal note, the PC Gaming Alliance is one of the more exciting things I have done in my working life. Having the opportunity to work with the biggest and best companies in the PC Gaming Industry is a real treat. Since announcing our little consortium, we have been hard at work to make progress on a number of fronts. The head of each of these efforts has been asked to comment on status of these efforts in their own Blog entries to follow. However, I will briefly update you now on where the PCGA is today and where we will be going over the next several months.
- Our Charter is to provide an industry voice to PC Gaming. The members of the PC Gaming Alliance are undertaking an effort to tell gamers (and the World) how big PC Gaming is. We expect to have the first of this data available in the 3rd Quarter of this year (sometime in August or September). This data will show that PC Gaming is by far the largest of any gaming platform in the world. By largest I am referring to both revenues and total number of gamers.
- A second key effort is to provide a set of minimum systems requirements, or stable starting point, for game developers and system builders. After 2 months of organizing, we are starting to move into SMU Guildhall lab (thanks Guildhall for all of your support). The testing will begin soon to find out how to get a list of popular PC games running @ an acceptable frame rate and @ an acceptable quality level. Members of the PC Gaming Alliance are donating equipment and manpower to help facilitate the testing efforts of this lab. When this effort concludes we should be able to announce a starting point and an adjacent marketing program to promote this starting point. The PC Gaming Alliance is looking forward to clearing up minimum systems requirements for gamers. We know that this issue has created problems for the PC Gaming Industry in the past and hope that our efforts, as an industry consortium, will resolve this.
- Piracy… If you pirate games you need to know that you are stealing. The PC Gaming Alliance believes that gamers should be able to enjoy gaming on the PC without annoying DRM solutions from multiple different vendors getting mixed with different hardware and operating systems to create a confusing and untested environment. If you open a PC Game that you have purchased and don’t want to have to worry about the DRM solution invading your privacy while still protecting the intellectual property of the game developers and publishers then we are going to wind up on the same page. If you believe in stealing games then we want you to know that the PC as a gaming platform is going to suffer as a result. If game developers cannot make money on the PC because of piracy they won’t make PC Games. This year we will attempt to quantify how big PC Game Piracy is. We intend to provide industry recommendations based on the results of this research.
Please provide your feedback. We really enjoy getting suggestions from the community at-large and want to hear from you. Do you believe we are doing enough for the PC Gaming Industry? Is there something you think the PC Gaming Alliance should be doing that it is not?
Regards,
Randy Stude
President, PC Gaming Alliance
