PC Gaming Alliance adds five new members

The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) is not dead folks, it’s just very, very quiet. The non-profit consortium created to promote the PC Gaming Industry and be the authoritative voice of PC Gaming worldwide broke its silence today to announce that it has added new member companies to its fold - eight of them to be precise. The new members joining today are BFG Technologies, Bigfoot Networks, Flextronics, GameStop, GameTap, Gas Powered Games, Howie’s Game Shack and InstantAction.

“We welcome these new members to the PCGA, a rapidly growing organization where companies of all types can come together to expand and improve the PC gaming ecosystem,” said Randy Stude, PCGA president and Intel director, Gaming Program Office.

To find more about the PCGA visit www.pcgamingalliance.org.

PC Gaming Alliance Boss Irate With LucasArts

In an interview with VideoGamer, PC Gaming Alliance showed other advocacy groups how to alienate potential partners by “calling out” LucasArts for not porting Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Forget the fact that the game got mixed reviews, and that LucasArts could have been finessed into returning to the PC space in once served well; Randy Stude wants to call them out on semantics.

According to that interview, Stude took exception with LucasArts’ technology related excuse for not bringing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to PC. Stude went on to say that LucasArts doesn’t have a solid internal studio that handles its intellectual property and farms most of its work out anyway. Whether that’s true or not, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to target LucasArts for doing exactly what every other game publisher is doing when it comes to the PC: skipping it.

Instead of wasting his time bitching about the negatives in the industry, perhaps LucasArts’ technology related excuse for not bringing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to PC. should highlight the success of games like World of Warcraft, Spore, The Sims 2 and Warhammer Online - just to name a few - and encourage more developers to create games that cater to the PC market. To get its groove back, the industry needs less ports and more original content.
At the end of the day, public comments like these are best left as secret, unspoken thoughts. In other words, more diplomacy and less public outrage.

Source: GameDaily

PC Gaming Alliance Releases Horizons Report

The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) today unveiled key findings from its first “Horizons Report,” a research study of the PC gaming industry worldwide. Speaking at the Games Convention Developer’s Conference in Leipzig, PCGA president Randy Stude announced that PC gaming raked in $10.7 billion during 2007, with retail sales accounting for just 30 percent of total revenues. According to the report, growth was largely driven by online revenues from Asia, the world’s largest market, which is approaching half of total worldwide sales.

Online PC gaming revenue led the way in 2007 with $4.8 billion, nearly double the worldwide retail sales numbers for PC games. Digital distribution sales approached $2 billion, while advertising revenues from websites, portals, and in-game ads accounted for $800 million. Both are expected to grow substantially as major developers and publishers begin to adopt formal strategies to take advantage of new online opportunities.

“Our analysis clearly shows incredible growth in online PC gaming, proof that this industry is far stronger than anyone has reported,” said Stude. “Today’s consumers shop where they live - online.”

Of course, the PCGA did not say how much of that revenue came from MMO titles like World of Warcraft, which I suspect is a major part of that number.

PC Gaming Alliance Invades GCDC

The PC Gaming Alliance, the white knight of the waning PC gaming sector, will give a presentation at the GC Developer’s Conference in Leipzig, Germany on August 19. Randy Stude, President of the PCGA and director of Intel’s Gaming Program Office, will reveal details from the PC Gaming Horizons research report, and talk about the challenges like PC Game platform promotion and creating a standardized minimum system requirement. The latter is certainly a challenge that seems almost insurmountable, but good luck to those willing to try. The presentation, which will take place at 2:30pm in Room F on Conference Floor Level 0, is open to everyone.

For those of us not attending GCDC 2008, you will be able to attend the State of the PC Gaming Industry session during NVISION 08 in San Jose, Calif. on August 25 in the San Jose Hilton adjacent to the convention center at 3:30 p.m. in San Carlos rooms 1 & 2.

For more information about the PCGA, visit www.pcgamingalliance.org.

PC Gaming Alliance Announcement Next Week?

According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, a consortium that hopes to put PC Gaming back on the map will be announced at the Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco. According to the report this consortium of mega software and hardware companies will be called the PC Gaming Alliance. This powerful group will consist of such industry leaders as Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and a number of other unnamed companies.

So what’’s the goal of this group? It aims to put PC gaming back in the spotlight by highlighting its strengths against other gaming platforms and to solve problems that plague the industry, one would assume. Some believe that the strength of PC gaming is its ability to stay on the bleeding edge of technology and its quick turnaround time when it comes to game development (in most cases, anyway). It will be interesting to see what initiatives this group lays down when it is announced officially. Stay tuned.