March 4th, 2010 @ Sway Bar, London
UK studios converge to battle over who's the cleverest - have you booked your place yet?
Thursday April 22nd, 2009 @ The Brewery, London
The countdown to the MCV Awards 2010 has begun – with date, venue and categories announced.
July 14th, 2010 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
Technology firms will join forces at GDC to ensure PC remains a viable platform for developers, says report
Anyone familiar with the games industry will tell you that in historical terms, the PC's star has waned, with market share amongst core gamers gradually lost to the Xbox and the PlayStation iterations.
Microsoft, Nvidia and Intel and other technology firms have different ideas however, with a report on The Mercury News saying giants from the computing hardware and software industry will join forces to form the 'PC Gaming Alliance'.
The paper's Dean Takahashi reports that the three firms along with other "top players" such as AMD, will make a formal announcement in the coming days - just in time for next week's Game Developers Conference.
The PC Gaming Alliance would have "a vested interest in keeping the PC alive as a gaming platform".
Those involved of course already do have a 'vested interest', with all those mentioned selling the various compenents needed to run a modern core PC gaming title, such as OS, processor and graphics technology.
Advertisement
A more formal alliegance, however, would go beyond the individual firms' marketing campaigns such as 'Games for Windows' (Microsoft) and 'The Way It's Meant To Be Played (Nvidia).
Takahashi adds: "The consortium will coordinate and expand those efforts to improve the experience of playing games on computers."
Will an industry-wide allegiance like this help boost the PC games market and make it a more desirable platform to make games for? Or does the platform not need such efforts? Let us know what you think via the comments section below.
Ultimately, it's a good thing, but has the PC market really floundered when it comes to games? Admittedly, the PC FPS market may have migrated to Xbox in an extent, but the PC is still home to Facebook, MySpace, etc. and casual games - all of which are prime sources for ga*****ntertainment, even if it is lo-fi.
The PC market has phases like any other - when the latest technology arrives backed up by the latest games, people are prepared to shift platform - just look at Crysis. Despite being initially criticised it's now selling well - just as next-gen titles on PC have always done in the end. The consoles then play catch-up for a few years. Many gamers prefer not to play an FPS on a console, it's just not the same - myself included. Although they can do it adequately enough for many people these days, the consoles are better at other styles of play.
Sounds good, but with the exception of Microsoft (sort of), none of those copmpanies develop games. It's good that people are getting together to preserve the future of the PC as a gaming platform, but there will probably need to be a community of developers who decide to focus on PC as their main (if not only) platform.
I love that fact that these people are getting together to try and help the Pc Gaming get better.....i do think they will succeed come on its M-Soft they've got money to spent and to be honest and dont blame them,, i love pc gaming shooters, racers any game that come crossplatform i'll prefer getting it on the pc,,and i really wouldn't wana see the end,, i hold strong hopes thoe, cant wait till that day when the pc fly passes these console again,,with graphics and everything else...
Huh? How about not publish extremely buggy console ports like gears of wars. Thank you, losing my save games repeatedly is great fun. Going towards 4 months now, and now fix.
If you are releasing games for both xbox360 and pc, try to avoid long waits in between. And when you talk about exclusitivity for xbox360 make that consoles only, that is exclude the pc from those multiplatform waits.
