Hardware companies join forces, form PC Gaming Alliance

In the wake of a shrinking market and continual ground being lost to consoles, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, ATI, Microsoft, Dell, Acer, Alienware Epic, Activision and other big names in PC gaming announced at this year’s GDC (February 20, 2008) the formation of the PC Gaming Alliance.

This new non-profit group, as it told Develop, is aiming to give PC game developers a “unified voice” similar to how Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft act with their respective consoles. The group will be focusing on what it considers “industry leadership, platform leadership and consumer experience.”

What that at least partially means is that they’re trying to further sell the idea of the PC as a viable game platform to not just consumers, but developers and publishers. They’ll also be helping industry professionals identify some of the challenges associated with the platform including piracy, phishing and the always pleasant cheating.

This also means the Alliance provide some pseudo-regulatory role, with one such order of business being a recommendation as to what the base minimum requirements for a PC game should be (as 1UP reports).

If nothing else, the PCGA’s rhetoric is certainly warm, fuzzy and at least superficially well-intentioned, if completely vague. Drumming up enthusiasm is all well and good, and trying to address requirements, which has been a complaint about PC gaming since time immemorial, is even better. But that’s all kind of minute against the destructive power of market forces and changing consumer tastes that have progressively left the PC with only about three genres to its name, making an already somewhat niche market smaller still. That’s the stuff that enthusiasm and fixing technical issues can’t solve alone.

Read [Develop] Also Read [1UP]