Shacknews has a multi-part interview with the folks from Valve. Part one has the Shacknews team talking with Doug Lombardi about the current state of PC gaming. Is it really as in danger of dieing out as many would like to believe it is?
Shack: Do you guys ever get tired of the same old "PC Gaming Is Dying" stories?Lombardi goes on to say that the figures released by the NPD do not tell the entire story. A great number of data is not included in those sales figures, thus painting a picture that is not true. Additionally, Lombardi remarks that system requirements that are all over the place and skewed towards the higher end systems also cause a perception problem when it comes to the world of PC gaming.
Doug Lombardi: I mean, I think, we sort of laugh at it. Because we've been wildly successful--we're very fortunate, you know. Our games have all done really, really well, Steam has taken off and become this whole other business for us, Valve has never been in better shape--and yet everybody is talking about how in the PC world, the sky is falling. And we're like, we've been doing this for 10 years now--actually 12 years since the company started, 10 years since the first game came out--and we've never been in better shape, financially or otherwise. The company is over 160 people now--it was 20 people when we shipped Half-Life. We've got multiple projects going--we were always a one-project-at-a-time group.
We don't understand why that story gets traction over time. I think people have finally started to clue in to the fact--there was a story last week where people finally looked at the online subscription revenues for WoW and all the things that look like WoW, and realized, wow, there was a butt-load of cash being made here that wasn't being counted at the register, at retail, in North America, which is where all these stories come out of.[...]
We're doing just fine, Popcap's doing just fine, Blizzard's certainly--they're printing money down there. We always sort of shake our heads, and go, okay, sooner or later someone's going to write the bigger picture story and perceptions will change.
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