Tim Holman of Relic Entertainment Knows All!

Ah, the never-ending “PC gaming is dying” debate. For some, its a way to vent out their concerns, for others, its just a way of grabbing that extra bit of publicity while they can. Tim Holman of Relic Entertainment (Company of Heroes franchise) has criticised fellow PC developers and said they basically “shoot themselves in the foot” with the amount of resources they require. Oh and, in case you don’t know, you NEED a $6,000 dollar PC to play any PC game. Nevermind that even Crysis/Clear Sky work fine on sub $700 PCs. Quite ironic of Mr.Holman to make such statement considering how resource hungry Company of Heroes games are.

“I think one of the things that hurt PC gaming is PC developers,” he said. “If you make a game with such high-end requirements that only people with a $6,000 PC can play it at a decent framerate, of course your sales are going to drop.”

CliffyB.Well.Fall.Die.

The amazing douchebag known as CliffyB as struck once again with his ignorant and misinformed comments. In an interview with TotalVideoGames, the windbag cited piracy as an excuse not to bring Gears of War 2 on the PC. Here’s a quote:

Do you see the Xbox 360 as the main platform as opposed to the PC? During the whole Unreal time it was very much PC focused.

The PC right now is a fair amount different to what it was back in the day, with all the badly integrated video chips. Here’s the problem right now; the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC.

So piracy was a main point for you…

Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.

For fucks sake, Cliffy, do you have your head up your ass? Crysis sold 1 million copies despite the whining that Crytek did. Spore, after all it’s controvesies, lawsuits and hatred, managed to sell 1 million copies in less than a month. Seriously, how pathetic has Epic Games become. Way to orphan the platform that brought you to the dance…

John Carmack on PC Gaming….

With everyone and their grand-mother passing judgment on PC games and gaming, how can the legendary programmer and the man behind DOOM/Wolf3D be left behind? In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, Mr.Carmack took a good amount of shots at PC Gaming, though he was smart enough to present them in a polite way while making some good points across the board. According to Carmack:

Well, it’s hard to second guess exactly what the reasons are. You can say piracy. You can say user migration. But the ground truth is just that the sales numbers on the PC are not what they used to be and are not what they are on the consoles.

That gets a big “No shit”. Comparing 3 platforms to a single one (One that is often orphaned and left to dry) is hardly smart. But anyway, the good news is id Software will continue to release games on PCs and support the platform, though with their uber-cynical rantings, one has to assume the clock is ticking before id goes full consoles and tells the PC platform to fuck-off like so many other devs have.

EA in PC Crysis

EA will now be branding and selling PCs for Crytek’s upcoming title; Crysis: Warhead.

At Electronic Arts’ Comic-Con booth today, an EA rep mentioned that the company plans to market pre-built PCs in conjunction with the release of Crytek’s upcoming PC-exclusive shooter Crysis Warhead.  The idea seems to be to try and circumvent some of the intimidation that exists for gamers who are either new to high-end PC gaming, or have been out of the scene for some time, and reassure them that it is not prohibitively expensive to acquire a machine that can tame something like Crysis and its followup.

Microsoft on Games for Windows LIVE

Microsoft’s epic fail of a service; Games of Windows LIVE, got jackshit exposure/mentioning at this year’s E3. Why did that happen and will it actually evolve into a brilliant platform like Steam or die a cold/dry death? Kevin Unagnst has the answers as he tries to explain Microsoft’s ignorance towards pc gamers and pc gaming.

At the end of the day, E3 is the battle of the consoles. We know that’s predominantly what people are interested in, that’s what the air time is about,” said Unangst. “And so, rather than try and raise a volume level that’s five minutes out of an hour and a half keynote, we said ‘you know what, let’s give PC its due.’ We did an event in San Francisco two weeks ago, it had a whole separate rollout, we talked to folks, we showed some of the great new games coming up. And then here tonight we’re having our own dedicated event for the people who truly care about the PC and are tracking it. That was a decision on our part that says the consoles are going to fight it out, I’d rather have a dedicated event where we can talk, where we can showcase the news. There’s going to be even more. We’re talking about it at Gamefest next week. If we did it the other way, you’d be saying why was there only five minutes of Games for Windows during an hour and a half? ‘

Awesome.

PC Gaming - Midyear Report

Press Release:

Resonance-Gaming today released its midyear report on PC video games within the next 6 months. The report combines data from several external sources to provide a simplified data analysis.

Contained within the data are the four main topics which will affect gamers in the next 6 months. This includes Game Genre Distribution, which is the generalized chart using 10 games in each month leading up the end of the year. The chart shows which genres are currently being developed the most, and as a result, which are being developed the least. Read more

Microsoft: Xbox360 More Important Than PC

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.

PC Gaming is The Future

Valve has been notoriously loud about defending PC gaming and it’s titles, and this time it’s no different. Speaking with Eurogamer, Gabe Newell, the man behind brilliant Half Life franchise has slammed all the false accusations and snarky comments thrown at PC Gaming. According to Valve, PC Gaming is the future. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Where console platforms have merciless and well-funded PR armies poised to combat any criticism, negative stories about the PC - mostly publishers, or developers like Crtyek, complaining of rampant piracy and flat sales - run unimpeded. Sales data that focuses solely on boxed copies sold at retail appear to back them up. Valve has had enough. “There’s a perception problem”

“I don’t want anyone between me and my customers,” says Walker. “I want to write code today and I want all my customers running it tomorrow.” Possible on the PC - Steam in particular, naturally. Not possible on consoles. For his part, Fitterer added achievements to Audiosurf in a total of two days. This constant iteration creates a feedback loop between developer and customer that, reckons Walker, can only improve the quality of the game. “The more I talk to my customers, the better my decisions will be. Without a system of talking to my customers, I will make bad decisions.”

Make you read the whole article, as it’s, for the lack of a better word; Brilliant.

And VAVLe, we couldn’t agree more!

nVIDIA’s Roy Taylor Speaks on PC Gaming

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.

Valve defends PC Gaming, Steam sales to overtake retail Valve sales in 3 months

Valve’s Steam sales are doing extremely well as the company announced their digital sales will soon take over retail sales:

Right now we’re seeing close to 200 per cent growth in the alternative ways of connecting with customers.

It will actually pass over in the next three months, how much of our business is coming from retail versus how much is coming from other channels.

Valve also defended PC gaming, it’s kinda long, read it up here.

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