IGN has posted up a new article today that has Valve taking an in-depth look at the state of PC gaming. Here's an excerpt from the story:
To check out the rest of this new article, that includes much more commentary from Mr. Newell, visit here.
Statistics Valve pulled from the Gartner Group said over 255 million new PCs were purchased in 2007 and that more than 260 million worldwide use their PCs to play games, indicating there is a huge untapped potential with the PC platform. "In a single year the PC has much, much larger volumes of scale than the largest console ever did over its entire lifetime," Newell said. Of course not all the PCs purchased would be able to run many of the high-end games such as Crysis on high settings, but that's not what PC gaming is about anymore, according to Valve. It's moving away from graphical power and moving more toward accessibility, ease of use, and connectivity. "You're missing opportunities if you define yourself as a wrapper around a set of graphics hardware, which sometimes it seems like some of the console guys do," Newell said. "Graphics are certainly good, but if you're not trying to figure out how to connect your customers together and generate a community and social aspect... it's something I've talked to Will Wright about a lot and I think he's doing a great job in showing how much value there can be in connecting those customers together."
Valve maintains the PC platform is the breeding ground for technological innovation as competing hardware manufacturers continuously drive change. "If Intel stumbles for a while AMD steps in and solves their problems. If Nvidia slows down in terms of pushing graphics technology ATI is sitting right there to take as much of their business away from them as they can. We see that more and more it's the open PC platform that's driving the basic media standards, data standards, connection standards, graphics standards, compute standards that are being incorporated into consoles," Newell said. "Consoles are really just becoming step-children of the capital investments that are being made."
Valve maintains the PC platform is the breeding ground for technological innovation as competing hardware manufacturers continuously drive change. "If Intel stumbles for a while AMD steps in and solves their problems. If Nvidia slows down in terms of pushing graphics technology ATI is sitting right there to take as much of their business away from them as they can. We see that more and more it's the open PC platform that's driving the basic media standards, data standards, connection standards, graphics standards, compute standards that are being incorporated into consoles," Newell said. "Consoles are really just becoming step-children of the capital investments that are being made."
To check out the rest of this new article, that includes much more commentary from Mr. Newell, visit here.
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