Valve: “NPD Group is to blame”

Recently, “PC Gaming is dying” has been a hot topic across many, many forums. This argument was originally sparked when Crysis was released; Crysis was critcised heavily for being overly resource intensive and alienating a large player base by demanding a powerful PC to run on. Hence most people assumed PC gaming had peaked and it was time for it to go downhill… If that wasn’t bad enough, recent NPD sales charts showing poor sales have added fuel to the fire. If that wasn’t bad enough, developers have starting blaming piracy and statements like “Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare” certainly don’t help. Valve’s Dough Lombardi sat down with GamaSutra to for a QnA session discuss all these matters. Here’s a snippet from the interview:

Lombardi blames the retail-heavy NPD report for the anxiety wave. “That totally ignores the money changing hands, and properties like World of Warcraft with their monthly subscriptions. That totally ignores Steam sales, and any other MMOs and online distribution systems and a host of others… it also ignores things like PopCap games. Peggle’s not in that number.”

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