Last month Valve head honcho Gabe Newell invited a bunch of journalists from around the globe to their HQ in Seattle. Part of the reason was to hype Steam Cloud, their service for remote storage of game data. But there was another reason. They wanted to spread the word far and wide that the PC is the gaming platform of the future. Period. Dot. Exclamation point.

He was quick to point out that the big guns like Intel and Microsoft should be the ones trumpeting the greatness of the PC, not companies like his, Blizzard or GameTap. It's no secret that Newell doesn't much care for the whole Games for Windows concept, or rather Microsoft's apparent lack of promotion and backing for their own initiative. Perhaps it was Newell's goading that made Microsoft respond as they did yesterday in San Francisco.

PC gaming has come under some exceedingly heavy fire of late, with talking heads once again (for the thousandth time it seems) heralding the end of the platform, bemoaning rampant piracy, and crying about flat sales. "There's a perception problem," says Newell. "The stories that are getting written are not reflecting what is really going on." There are 260 million online PC gamers, and each year 255 million new PCs are made. Granted, not all of them can play games, but Newell believes the enormous capital investment involved in the market basically ensures that PCs will remain the leaders in hardware development. "If you look into the future, there's an important transition that's about to happen, and it's going to happen on the PC first."

"Until recently, the fact that World of Warcraft was generating 120 million dollars in gross revenue on a monthly basis was completely off the books," Newell says. He went on to say that Blizzard is basically creating a new Iron Man movie every month (based on gross revenue the movie took in). Every Hollywood studio would do back flips if they could make that much money. Newell believes WoW to be "the most valuable entertainment franchise in any media right now." And it could only happen on the PC.