News PC Gaming Alliance formed at GDC

[Tim S]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/02...ormed_at_gdc/1

The PC Gaming Alliance has just been officially announced at GDC, so check inside for a full list of partners and find out what the aim of the group is.

[Zurechial]

Glorious!
Now, intelligent games please. Death to consolification.

[[USRF]Obiwan]

Like I said before in another newsitem. They have to (or must) get involved into gaming or else they wont sell any 'new' hardware in the future. The path I think to go is, to fund game development by hardware vendors like for example Nvidia. They have oozes of money to spend anyway. Its a win-win situation for tnvidia because; Developers make new exciting games with the latest graphics bells and whistles. And to play this, 'we' have to buy new hardware from Nvidia to play it. No new exciting games, is no new hardware needed.

[Mister_X]

I have all the major consoles and a few of the minor ones too, but i still consider myself a PC gamer. ood to see this sort of thing happening, though oddly worrying that they feel they need to...

[liratheal]

I'm surprised at Acers involvement..

I wonder what they're contributing to it..

[AlexB]

I'm not sure how it affects anything really?

[matee]

I wonder why 6 out of 9 members are pc hardware companies..
Maybe if it was not for games no one would bother to upgrade PCs?
Of course there are exceptions, but its the games, that drive PC hardware business.

[p3n]

Activision should be ejected for their crappy sequel money hoarding

[HyBry]

I think they should get Steam on the board and get all the major publishers to distribute through Steam (or similar).
Also what PC gaming needs to avoid at all costs is console segregation/exclusivity - you can play this game only if you have - this one specific hardware, etc.

[Angleus]

This is really good news, could save our gaming lives, hopefully they actaully do stuff rather than jsut make announcements

[Dreaming]

No EA?

[Tim S]

what upsets me is that Epic is on the list... With Mark Rein and CliffyB both saying that the PC is no longer their primary development platform, why is Epic involved? I'll assume it's because of the money.

[Lepermessiah]

Tim S, I agree, Epic are one of the worst spreader of anti-Pc Bs. i really have started to despise anything that epic says or does.Pc gaming is not dying, game companies are getting lazy and more greedy. Piracy is an issue, yes. PC gamers have themselves for that, stop pirating and then trying to justify it, come on. Hopefully, this alliance can start to add some unity and promotion to PC gaming, and hopefully some more exclusives. All of those companies directly benefit from PC gaming, so they can chuck a bit of cash at a few exclusives. What the PC market has been missing has been some form of standard and promotion.

Epic being there instead of a great company like Valve makes no sense to me. Hopefully this group accomplishes something, instead of lip service.

[Lepermessiah]

On another note, I agree with the other poster who said if these companies funded some development, Pc gaming would benefit greatly. Consoles do this, why not these big companies, they certainly can afford to, and benefit from the upgrades that drive hardware sales.

[Tim S]

Nvidia and Intel have had pretty large devrel budgets for a while now and that involves sending people to work on site with the game developers to make use of new techniques and such. That's part of the reason why DX10 games came to market much more quickly than DX9 games did (after hardware and API availability ramped up).

[Lepermessiah]

Originally Posted by Tim S

Nvidia and Intel have had pretty large devrel budgets for a while now and that involves sending people to work on site with the game developers to make use of new techniques and such. That's part of the reason why DX10 games came to market much more quickly than DX9 games did (after hardware and API availability ramped up).

Yeah, but unfortunately they are not funding Pc exclusives like console makers do.

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by Lepermessiah

Yeah, but unfortunately they are not funding Pc exclusives like console makers do.

That's at least the current evidence... although I'm not sure if they helped to fund Crysis, since that remained PC exclusive, what with the rumours that Nvidia spent $5m on Crysis. That said, I have no confirmation as to the legitimacy of the rumours but if true, it's an interesting one nevertheless.

Both Intel and Nvidia invested time (and therefore money) in helping to develop the game (helping with multi-core, DX10, shader effects, etc), but I don't know whether it amounted to that much.

[Zyphron]

Originally Posted by matee

I wonder why 6 out of 9 members are pc hardware companies..
Maybe if it was not for games no one would bother to upgrade PCs?
Of course there are exceptions, but its the games, that drive PC hardware business.

oh so true, the rate of development on the consumer side would be massively smaller not to metion since Gen2 Xbox/GC/PS2 all used GPU's (not 100% sure on the PS2) from nvidia or ati.

whats funny about stuff like that is here my friend is saying how his Xbox is just as good for obliv and COD4 as my PC.
yet... when I show him how much better it looks and plays.(mind you on the same 1080i TV) his Jaw drops.

i agree, it sems dev's are taking the easy way and sticking to Console releases because "PC's are too hard/expensive to develop for"

Whatever.

[Gen.Ignorance]

I don't think we can blame developers for the sharp decline in PC games sales, the blame should rest firmly on the shoulders of the publishers. It's the constraints placed on in house developers to stick to the same old tried and tested formula, which appeals to the broadest possible market, to generate the maximum amount of profit with the least risk, that has got PC gaming into the state its at right now.

The only developers thinking outside the box are the independents, but they lack the financial support because their creativity is also their weakness in the eyes of the money men who want the least amount of risk possible, something the indies cant give them with any concept that wanders slightly from the focus group data generated by the publishers market researchers.

Theres no way you can satisfy the broad tastes of your average console gamer, the key demographic for which is a teenager with a very limited attention span, and the interests of your average PC gamer who has more mature tastes and wont be frustrated if he cant master a game in the first 5 minutes.

To make the PC a viable gaming platform again it needs a kind of relaunch, a revitalising fresh approach to marketing PC games as being a whole world apart from consoles gaming, make it appeal to a specific audience. Otherwise PC gaming will continue to decline rapidly until it no longer exists.

[Bungle]

"One of our main major objectives is to provide one voice on PC gaming market"

The Alliance is composed of many of the most important PC focused companies, including;
Intel (hardware)
AMD (hardware)
Nvidia (predominently hardware)
Microsoft (Hardware/game developer)
Dell (hardware)
Acer (hardware)
Razer (hardware)
Epic (game developer)
Activision (game developer)

Ok i'm pretty bad for analogies but isn't this a case of the mechanic telling the race driver how to drive?