The latest Call of Duty game will once again be deprived of any DX10 goodness. According to Cesar Stastny of Treyarch:

Cesar Stastny: Maybe if there is a compelling benefit to doing so, such as new superior hardware which requires DirectX 10.

That’s quite alright, PC Gamers are now used to getting left out anyway.

Despite running Games for Windows campaign and being a member of PC Gaming Alliance, Microsoft has admitted prioritizing releases and favoring their game console - Xbox360 instead of PCs. Yes, hypocrisy is a wonderful thing…atleast in Microsoft’s perception.

On a global scale the Windows Vista business is as important as our Xbox 360 business. But in Germany for example, we want more gamers to buy our Xbox 360. If we launch a game that is on 360 and PC simultaneously, we basically shoot ourselves in the foot by allowing the German market to choose to play the PC version – because they are more likely to buy that than spend their money on the Xbox 360. On a global scale the PC is very relevant to us. And I would say that 90 per cent of the games that are pitched to us are on console. We’re strongly perceived as a console publisher because we’re the first-party publisher even though the Windows operating system is equally important to us. If we launched a Halo game on PC and 360 in Germany simultaneously, 80 per cent of sales would be on the PC. So we need to pick and choose our formats.

PCGames.de has 3 exclusive (and leaked) screenshots of upcoming FPS; Call of Duty: World at War. You can check them out here.

With everyone shooting their mouth off regarding PC gaming, it’s about time the graphics card giant nVIDIA said something about it:

I think we have to face the facts - the value of consoles is such that no-one is going to make a PC-exclusive game in the future. Why would they? Why would they ignore consoles?

You can read the full interview here.

In an interview with Next-Gen, Harald Seeley of Crytek has unveiled that Crysis: Warhead will be the last PC-only title from Crytek. Future titles from the german developer will be (sigh) multiplatform.

When Cevat said we would not create new PC exclusives, he was referring to any new projects we will start in the future.  Of course Warhead has been under development for quite some time, and we had no desire or intention to disappoint our loyal PC fans.  So, after some careful consideration, we decided to continue our support for the PC Crysis franchise with this release.  But yes, all new franchises we develop in the future will be created with a cross platform strategy in mind.  Of course we’re also aware of the danger of making a game that is only designed for one particular audience and platform, and failing to meet the needs of the others.  So any game we create will always offer something unique on each platform and will be carefully tuned to both the capabilities and strengths of that platform, as well as the intended audience.

Speaking at Ubidays 08 with Videogamer.com, Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software has confirmed a demo for their upcoming FPS; Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. The release date for the demo is unsure, but the retail version is set to ship out in August 2008.

“We’ve had Brothers in Arms games before,” he said. “People know what the brand is about. In general we’ve got a reasonable amount of trust. There’s a lot of people who know that they want the game and they’re just tired of waiting and they want us to get it out as soon as possible so we’re focusing on that. But there are some other folks who might be new to us, they don’t know if they should trust us yet or maybe they haven’t played a Brothers in Arms game before. We’ll get around to a demo for them and we’ve got it in our plans for that.”

When Slash isn’t busy snorting cocaine off hookers, screwing up performances or getting hammered, Slash is giving his two cents on video games:

The thing about video games is that they do promote this sort of lethargy in kids..

“They turn into gaming zombies. So I understand the concern that people who play Guitar Hero would never pick up a real guitar. But I think it’s the opposite effect.” 

You can read rest of the interview here.

Alex St. John, the guy who said consoles will be dead in few years and the founder of WildTangent (famous for distributing spyware) is back again with some words of wisdom;

“The internet is allowing the games business - which is a remarkably successful business considering how bad the business model is - into a broadcast model where you see enormous scale of efficiency and very mass market appeal of gaming,”

You can read the full statement here.

Shacknews had a chance to chat up Valve’s Doug Lombardi, and Lombardi had tons of things to say regarding PC gaming:

Shack: Do you guys ever get tired of the same old “PC Gaming Is Dying” stories?

Doug Lombardi: I mean, I think, we sort of laugh at it. Because we’ve been wildly successful–we’re very fortunate, you know. Our games have all done really, really well, Steam has taken off and become this whole other business for us, Valve has never been in better shape–and yet everybody is talking about how in the PC world, the sky is falling. And we’re like, we’ve been doing this for 10 years now–actually 12 years since the company started, 10 years since the first game came out–and we’ve never been in better shape, financially or otherwise. The company is over 160 people now–it was 20 people when we shipped Half-Life. We’ve got multiple projects going–we were always a one-project-at-a-time group.

The crazy brits at bit-tech.net got to play around with VALVe’s upcoming Zombie co-op title; Left 4 Dead. Here’s a snippet:

There’s a whole lot more depth to Left4Dead than we’ve let on yet though, like the fact that characters will automatically shout things at each other if the AI director deems that players need to communicate but can’t – it’s very handy to have the guy covering you automatically yell that he’s out of ammo when the two of you are trying your best to hold a front line.

Check out the full preview here.