John Smedley: “It’s Ridiculous to say PC Gaming is in Decline”

With pretty much everyone throwing their opinions about PC gaming, why must Sony Online Entertainment’s John Smedley be left behind? Speaking with GameDaily, John Smedley shoots off at the recent “PC gaming is dying” discussions, as well as disagreeing with Tim Sweeney’s “PC is good for anything, not just games” comment. Here’s a snip:

“I keep reading all this doom and gloom. It’s the same guys that have been telling us for years that mainframes are doomed. If you just look at the actual facts on the ground, World of Warcraft – and I have to give props to our competition here – it sat on top of the PC charts for three years now. At some point, and everybody keeps talking about this, but they’re just not realizing that a lot of people’s dollars are going into these online games now and a lot of them you can buy truly digitally, which isn’t getting tracked. It’s as simple as that.”

Full interview after the jump. Read more

Tim Sweeney Talks PC Gaming

Recently, Epic Games has a lot to say regarding PC gaming, but in doing so, epic always went the wrong way. We either got dimwitt console producers with stupid haircuts bad mouthing PCs or clueless and sub-par console ports . Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, creator of Unreal engine and arguably one of the most respected and admired developers around, sat down with TGDaily to discuss the current stature of PC gaming. Here’s a snip:

TG Daily: What are your thoughts on the future of the PC as a gaming platform? Is scalability the future – we hear AMD talking about Spider and Nvidia is selling Triple SLI that will keep us upgrading over the next several years. Or did the industry lose its focus?

Sweeney: PC gaming is in a weird position right now. Now, 60% of PCs on the market don’t have a workable graphics processor at all. All the Intel integrated graphics are still incapable of running any modern games. So you really have to buy a PC knowing that you’re going to play games in order to avoid being stuck with integrated graphics. This is unfortunate, and this is one of main reasons behind the decline of the PC as a gaming platform. That really has endangered high-end PC game sales. In the past, if you bought a game, it would at least work. It might not have been a great experience, but it would always work.

Full Interview after the break. Read more