PCGA Members at E3 2009: Alien Invasion

By John Blain from Dell/Alienware

Just as E3 began this year, agents dressed in black wearing mirrored sunglasses and earpieces began making appearances in hotel lobbies across downtown Los Angeles, all sporting locked silver briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. “Today at 1pm, at the convention center”, was the only information these mysterious messengers would import to curious bystanders. The display caused a stir on many occasions, and several times these agents were politely asked to leave by members of various hotels’ security.


At the prescribed time these agents filed into black Suburbans and took the act to the entrance of E3, successfully setting the tone for what was to follow. I was able to catch the display on camera with the help of a few friends http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbFMFH71lhU

With the ceremonies out of the way, E3 attendees were unleashed upon the brand new M17x laptops waiting inside the Alienware booth. The wait was finally over. The ‘World’s Most Powerful 17-inch laptop’ was finally here.

I spent most of the second day at E3 following these agents around as they escorted VIPs to the Alienware booth for press interviews. Their subdued secret-agent style was a stark contrast to the glitter and glam most exhibitors at the event chose to showcase, but was rewarded with the curiosity of the gawking crowd. “I wonder who they’re escorting,” I often heard as our lead agent cleared a safe path through the masses. Thanks to the M17x, I now have had a taste of what it might be like to be an important dignitary being escorted through public places by the secret service. It’s surely an experience I’ll never forget.

On the third day I finally got a chance to check out all the great games being previewed at the event. After the excitement from the previous days, I was almost too tired to enjoy them. ALMOST. You can read the rundown of the games that impressed me most here.

With over 41,000 attendees, this year’s E3 was bigger than ever, and was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

PCGA Inaugural Supper Club Successful!

The Monday night of the Game Developers Conference, the PCGA held an informal members dinner at the House of Prime Rib in San Francisco in the name of networking and socialization.

In attendance were several members of the board, a few of our promoter members and invited guests from Ubisoft, Stardock, Gas Powered Games, Gamepro and the AIAS. The atmosphere was laid back and jovial with some serious conversations on issues surrounding our business mixed in.

This was the first of what we hope will be a growing series of events over the coming quarters.

PCGA's New Website

We are delighted to announce the launch of their new website. We think the new look provides a premier showcase for the PCGA and 'speaks' more cleanly and clearly to PC gamers everywhere. We hope that visitors to our new website will see that the PCGA is the place that PC Gaming companies of all types can come together to collaborate to help solve problems and work to advance the cause of PC Gaming. We will endevor to continuosly improve our website with the goal that PCGA members and non-members alike will find it useful, relevant and important. Let us know what you think!

PCGA Validation Testing Lab Video Tour

See the lab where the PCGA's minimum specifications are tested and validated...
http://www.youtube.com/PCGamingAlliance

PCGA in the News - Gamasutra Piracy Special Report

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21133
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21329

Here is a snippet...

The PC Gaming Alliance is a group of industry leaders including reps from Microsoft, Dell, Activision, Capcom and many others, who meet to work on solutions for challenges facing the space and promote the health of the platform - and piracy is a particular problem for PC in particular. With that in mind, the PCGA has formed a new subcommittee to start examining ways to take the crucial first step of learning to quantify piracy and its material impact. Christian Svensson, senior director of strategic planning and research at Capcom, is a member of the PCGA, and tells Gamasutra that the new impact-oriented subcommittee is just now getting off the ground. There's a complicated road ahead with a good many factors still up in the air, but the subcommittee knows that quantifying that impact is a key first step. "We're just starting to lay out the groundwork," Svensson says,"I would hope within the next three months we have started to make some progress toward that."

If you are interested in anti-piracy, please consider joining the PCGA to help us craft our anti-piracy plans and deliverables. We have recently changed our membership plan to encourage every company in the PC Gaming industry to get involved. See http://pcgamingalliance.org/en/join/membership_benefits.asp for more information.

We are the Guardians of PC Gaming

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081110-pc-gaming-alliance-we-are-the-guardians-of-pc-gaming.html
The PCGA has a clear mandate. "We are the guardians of the PC as a platform for gaming. We need to make sure there is an environment where publishers are not afraid to invest tens of millions of dollars in developing great gaming experiences," Stude says, and while it doesn't seem like the average gamer will often know what goes into the work the PCGA does, many of the group's ideas are compelling. Giving PC gamers a voice and proving their value as a market, while trying to maintain a balance between publishers keeping their content safe and gamers being able to play the way they want to... these are the biggest challenges in PC gaming right now. We wish the PCGA luck in trying to fight the good fight.

The Urgent Imperative Of Piracy

PCGA President Randy Stude recently sat down with Gamasutra for a frank discussion regarding the industry, especially piracy. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20668

Here is a snippet:

Meanwhile, the PCGA hopes to attract game companies to its efforts -- and while potential committee members acknowledge the importance of platform stability, says Stude, "there's a far more urgent imperative they want to see discussion and debate going on around, which is piracy."

So the PCGA has formed an anti-piracy and DRM subcommittee which is just kicking off its efforts, starting with an endeavor to try and quantify the size of the piracy issue.

"At some point next year, we expect to be able to quantify the potential impact of piracy on the industry," says Stude.

So, now we turn to you readers. What type of change would be good for you? What are your feelings on DRM and other hot-button piracy issues? And even further, if you are a company in the PC gaming industry and you would like a voice in determining the direction of the industry, we invite you to join us!

Minimum Bar Team Makes Major Progress

As promised, PCGA will continue to post noteworthy updates on our progress. The minimum bar subcommittee is making significant strides in our efforts to establish a minimum bar “Gaming System” and set of hardware and software guidelines for the industry, all with the goal of improving the PC gaming experience and user satisfaction.

As reported previously, the subcommittee formed into 5 working groups, each with a distinct deliverable to the formation of the final guideline:

1. Minimum Hardware Bar Work Group: Mission is to define a minimum Gaming System “Bag of Parts”. The preliminary bag of parts was agreed to and 10 systems were built, comprised of various configurations of graphics cards, mother boards, CPU’s, OS and memory sizes. The systems were then shipped to our validation testing partner.

2. Performance Work Group: Mission is to define gaming performance and gaming experience benchmarks. This group has finalized our “gaming performance benchmark suite”, to be used to test our theories using the 10 hardware systems described above.

3. Validation Work Group: This group put together the lab that is hosting our 10 systems. The first round of testing is complete. The testing included running the prescribed benchmarks in the performance plan and a series of usability or experience tests to validate the measurements, correlating measured benchmark data against actual game play. We also tested below this minimum bar to make sure that we had headroom on the benchmark suite we will recommending. This proved that we had a suitable buffer from the benchmark which is important because it enables the benchmark to be scalable across more games within a genre. We now believe we have a solid minimum Gaming performance bar derived from a solid set of Gaming performance benchmarks. Our next step is to update the Gaming performance suite and quickly rerun the testing to further increase our confidence level.

4. Software Guideline Group: As you know, hardware is not the full story to creating a solid PC Gaming customer experience. It has to work hand and hand with the software (OS and Games). We have completed the software guideline which is comprised of two parts. The first part supports the minimum bar while the second consists of a set of ISV Best Practices designed to further enhance customer experience. We are currently incorporating this into our spec.

5. Utility Group: This work group is evaluating the need and the cost of implementing a utility tool which would determine if a set of hardware meets PCGA’s minimum bar. More work is being done in pursuit of this part of the min bar spec.

An offshoot of the work of the min bar team has been the formation of a Logo and Certification subcommittee. This team is hard at work building a proposal that will go to the PCGA Board for approval. The purpose a logo and certification program is to allow any customer to easily identify hardware systems and games that meet the PCGA minimum bar. Basically, a game that is tagged with the PCGA logo will work on a PC that is also tagged with the PCGA logo. Of course, lots of work and discussion needs to occur here before we launch this type of logo program.

As you can see, we have been quite busy, and we are closing in on our objectives. Things are really starting to come together and we have a lot of confidence that we will make a difference for PC gaming customers when we publish our guidelines. Please stay tuned and stay engage. Send me your ideas. We need your support!

Also, the PCGA needs the full support, through membership, of all companies in the PC Gaming industry including developers, publishers, IHVs and PC OEMs. PCGA members collaborate with the leaders in the PC gaming industry, participate in shaping the development and evolution of our work, and influence our strategy and direction. If you are interested in joining, please contact John Ehrig.

Regards,

Rick Carini
PCGA Chairman of the Board
PCGA Minimum Bar Subcommittee Chair

PCGA Marketing Subcommittee Update

Hi, as well as being Chairman of the Data Research subcommittee I am also Chair for the Marketing subcommittee which is responsible for communications, member recruiting and events.

To date we have been busy in a number of areas. We are excited that very shortly we will be able to unveil our new logo for the organization. This takes longer than might be supposed, the design has to work across a wide variety of formats and backgrounds, be acceptable to all, be registered, etc. We are pleased with it and look forward to sharing it with everyone soon.

In addition to the logo we have also been working on a schedule of events and the PCGA will be officially attending the Leipzig Games Convention http://www.gcdc.eu/ where our President, Randy Stude from Intel will be presenting an update on our activities and we will be holding an industry ‘meet-n-greet’ reception. The PCGA will also be at NVISION, http://www.nvision2008.com/ , details for that will follow and we are looking at other events for the fall.

Finally, we are working with TriplePoint PR to help us grow membership and better communicate to the industry, the press and the public about the work of the organization.

If you have ideas about how we can better communicate, or if you know of events you feel we should participate in then please do post below. We read your posts and discuss them so please voice your opinions.

Many thanks,

Roy Taylor
CTO, PC Gaming Alliance
Marketing Subcommittee Chair

Data Research Subcommittee Update

Hi, as Chairman of the Data Research Sub-Committee I’d like to give everyone an update on our activities to date.

The research team has two broad goals. First to identify the total value of the PC Gaming software business. This is quite a task, retail boxed sales numbers can be found from major research firms like NPD and Chart Track but other revenue streams are harder to ascertain. However by examining data from different research firms with partial data and collating them we are starting to identify a whole.

This research is unearthing some interesting data already, some of it controversial and we are busy hammering away at the numbers to gain consensus. We are also triangulating this data and will be publicly stating what we believe the sum to be in what we have codenamed the ‘Horizons’ report. This will be late summer at one of the larger events we plan to attend.

Secondly we are looking at establishing the total value and extent of the hardware business, worldwide. This will include everything from complete PC’s to component sales where the hardware is used for PC Gaming. This is obviously also a huge task.

To aid us with these projects the Sub-Committee is currently taking in RFP’s from a number of the worlds leading research firms and the successful bidders will be contracted to establish regular reports, funded and owned by the PCGA that will detail the results from this research.

We are excited about the data we are already unearthing. We realize that some of it will be open to question since the project is so ambitious but we hope to invigorate a debate about the extent and importance of the PC Gaming industry. More soon.

Roy Taylor
CTO, PC Gaming Alliance
Data Research Subcommittee Chair