pcga posts

Last December we were the first web site to conduct an interview with the new head of the non-profit PC Gaming Alliance Matt Ployhar. Since that interview we discovered that two of the organization's founding members, Microsoft and Nvidia, decided to depart the organization (the companies have both not revealed their reasons for their departure).

Last week as part of GDC 2011, the PC Gaming Alliance revealed some details of its latest Horizons report, claiming that PC gaming as a whole generated $16.2 billion in worldwide revenue in 2010, up 20 percent from 2009. Big Download decided to get back in touch with Ployar to find out more on the status of the organization including hints about its upcoming Technical Advisory Board.

The non-profit PC Gaming Alliance has gotten some big name members (Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, Activision, and others) since officially launching last February. However the high cost of joining the group has apparently kept some companies from joining. Gamasutra reports that the organization has launched a "Contributor" membership tier for $5,000 in annual fees.

The Contributor membership will allow smaller publishers and developers to have an advisory seat on the PC Gaming Alliance's subcommittees as well as share in the group's market research, promotional efforts and more. The "Promoter" membership is still around for $30,000 in annual fees.The article also states that the PCGA is still developing their ideas for anti-piracy efforts. Another sub-committee is also working on efforts to set a minimal standard for hardware to play PC games.

People are wondering what will the future of PC gaming will be in the next few years. The head of the PC Gaming Alliance, Randy Stude, seems to think that the future could see PC rigs that could allow for console games to be played on those systems.

In a new interview over at GamePolitics, Stude states, "The guts of every console should tell you that the capability is there for the PC to act as the central point for all the consoles. If you bought a PC and as part of that equation you said, Okay, when you're on the phone with Dell, "Hey, Dell, on this PC, this new notebook I'm buying, can you make sure it has the PlayStation 4 option built into it?"

If that sounds like a fantasy rather than a real prediction, Stude disagress, saying, "[Sony is] certainly not making any money on the hardware. I mean, can't they create a stable enough environment to specify that if Dell's going to sell that notebook and say that it's PlayStation 4 [compatible] that it must have certain ingredients and it must meet certain criteria? Absolutely they could that. Are they going to do it? I don't know. I predict that they will. I predict that all of the console makers over time will recognize that it's too expensive to develop the proprietary solution and recognize the value of collapsing back on the PC as a ubiquitous platform."