Last week I spoke to Randy Stude, director of Intel’s gaming program and the president of the PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA). The PCGA is an industry consortium made up of hardware manufacturers and PC games publishers, each with a significant commercial interest in the platform. The PCGA has so far released a couple of studies (pdf link) to its members, each looking at the numbers of PC gaming, for both hardware and software sales. They regard these as the most comprehensive studies so far, and Stude was keen to point out they didn’t support the figures we mentioned previously from Jon Peddie Research. If anything, the PCGA suggest, PC gaming hardware sales are even bigger than that. And they should know: the PCGA members make all the components.
I was keen to learn a little more about what Stude’s intentions were, and what the PCGA really intended to do for our chosen platform. The answers were encouraging, and Stude seemed straightforward about the intentions of this, an industry business consortium, as well as the methodology that such a group should expect to employ.
RPS: We’ve been following the PCGA stuff since we attended your press conference at the initial announcement at GDC in 2008. Can you explain a little more about how this came to be, and how you came to be the spokesman for the consortium?
Stude: The PCGA was actually first casually assembled at GDC in 2007. A bunch of us said “let’s get together and talk about what’s going on with PC gaming”, to see if we could come up with an agenda for dealing with the challenges that PC gaming faces, from an industry perspective. This is stuff that no one company can address without help. And it’s a unique challenge, because the PC is a mix of parts and software where the chief competitors are consoles controlled by one of the three major companies each. There was some noise being made about inconsistencies in approach for PC, and inconsistencies in the platform, and there was the problem of how we communicate with, well, not the hardcore.
Your audience, for example, generally knows how to get most games running, knows where to go for drivers, or to buy games. They know how to make what they like work. Our focus is on the mainstream consumer. They want to be able to play games on their PC too, but they won’t have the knowledge to know if this hardware and this software works together, and that’s what we were trying to sort out.
As we spoke to more publishers along the way they said “that’s fine and dandy, but can you try and do something about piracy, because that’s our big issue for PC games.” So that’s what we’ve been looking at.
As for the second part of your question – we’re a non-profit corporation, and we had elections. I was voted in as president a little more than a year ago.
RPS: So what’s the methodology? What has the PCGA done in the past year?
Stude: Well first up we’re a non-profit consortium, based out in Oregon, which is a friendly place for this kind of technology company. The structure is in place for companies who all want to collaborate for a particular direction on the PC to do so – the USB forum is here – and to be able to address specific issues together. So that’s what we’ve been doing. We’re not doing so casually, but also it should not be misconstrued as our trying to control the market, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to solve problems, rather than scratch each others’ backs.
RPS: And so far you’ve been gathering data, including the Horizons report, a report for your members which states that PC gaming software accounts for $10bn worth of the gaming industry in 2007. NPD’s retail report puts the entire industry in 2007 at around $18bn. That means that PC games software is half the industry in cash terms? Is that correct?
Stude: It’s more than half. The NPD and other reports always include console hardware, and it was our approach with our Horizons reports to announce software and hardware separately. PC hardware is about $43bn, when you add that on top of PC gaming software it’s huge. We knew it was a big market – we know the subscription, casual, free-to-play people were out there, and we wanted to record that. What we didn’t like was a retail-focused report like the NPD one saying that the market was heading in a certain direction, when we knew otherwise. Retail, as a percent of the market, is only 30% of PC gaming software. NPD aren’t measuring the majority of PC gaming software sales.
RPS: So if 30% still makes up half of gaming in total, then PC gaming software sales are still pretty substantial? You mentioned that publishers still wanted solutions to piracy: how much of a problem is piracy for the PC, really?
Stude: If a publisher says to me “I don’t want to release this game that I invested $50m in on PC, or I want to hold back release for six months” and the reason they cite is that of rampant piracy on the PC – whether that’s a legitimate concern or not, whether their business would really be impacted in that way or not – I stand up and pay attention. There’s an evolving problem there that is a real concern. A trend is evolving there that is disturbing. PC gamers who copy games exist everywhere in the world, and they may know it’s wrong, but it’s easy to do, as easy as it was to get music when Napster kicked off. It’s so easy on PC – it’s much, much harder to be a consumer of pirated materials on the console side. So we formed a committee to come up with data on piracy, and some of the best methodologies for dealing with it.
When I say “best methodologies” I mean that we want to know how big the phenomenon is, what the methods are that are being used today, and what our members can do to deal with it. We don’t want to alienate loyal customers, and we want methods that won’t cause a revolt against PC gaming. Rights management doesn’t have to impede on gaming.
RPS: Do you agree that big publishers are harming themselves with over-zealous rights management?
Stude: I agree that some of them are. I think they are losing some potential sales. The most controversial one recently was Spore, but Spore is selling insanely well all over the globe. So while the Amazon one-star blitz had impact in terms of creating awareness, I don’t think EA are that concerned about it impacting on their sales. Would they do things the same way next time? Probably not! They’ve probably got that message loud and clear, that the method of rights management implementation they used on Spore (and Mass Effect I think) was not friendly to the gamer.
You know the gamer will often say in the same breath “DRM is hurting the games industry, but you what? If you’re doing to use DRM, Steam is great.” It’s what I see on gaming websites: people see Steam as an acceptable way of dealing with rights management. Personally I had a laptop stolen, and all the games on it were on Steam, and all I had to do was retract rights on my machines, and then reissue. It was really easy to make sure that the fool who stole my notebook didn’t get several hundred dollars worth of games with it.
Another thing about rights management is that the companies that offer the solutions, offer very flexible systems, and to attack these companies, such as Sony for example, is probably not the right thing to do. If you look at say, Spore’s implementation of rights management and say “that’s not a good example of how to implement DRM”, that’s not necessarily Sony’s fault. With SecuROM they offer quite different options. One of the PCGA members, Christian Svensson of Capcom, corrected that notion by our own members who were not familiar with the system: Sony give you the menu, and you pick and choose how you implement this rights management. We want to look at all these options, see what works for gamers, and see if we can’t suggest a consistent approach. We’re going to say “this is what our research suggests” and “this is how you could implement rights management, based on what we’ve found”. We’re certainly not going to be issue claims against people with pirated games or anything like that! We just want to find the best method for approaching this challenge.
RPS: So you want the PCGA to be a centralised voice for the platform, just as Nintendo is for their platform, or Sony is for theirs? Although clearly not analogous in any controlling sense – not that there’s got to be a ruling body or anything like that – just that there should be a central body speaking for the platform?
Stude: That’s right.
RPS: Shouldn’t that be Microsoft’s responsibility? Hasn’t it fallen to everyone else associated with PC gaming because of the Xbox project?
Stude: Microsoft are a major component of gaming on the PC, and their focus as been a lot on the Xbox. But they’ll also be the first one to tell you, and show you, the legions of engineers that work on the Windows gaming technologies. I’m talking about the core toolset that all the publishers rely on to bring their products to market. The DirectX updates are far more aggressive than anything you see on the consoles. They’re static for five or six years at a time, and we’re getting DirectX 11 just a couple of years after DirectX 10. That’s important because the platform I enjoy the best has the potential – via Moore’s Law – of doubling its performance every few years.
Now some people think Microsoft should take the lead from a marketing perspective for PC gaming, and some people don’t. I’m in the camp that says the industry owns the platform, not any one company. If someone wants to play games on the PC there’s as much Microsoft involved in that that equation as there is Nvidia, ATi, AMD, or Intel. The marketing falls to Acer or Dell, or anyone else involved in selling on the platform. If there are people rowing in the wrong direction, well, that’s why we’ve got a Consortium to pull it all together: the consortium can speak for PC gaming, as opposed to one company saying how they think the world should be.
RPS: So there’s an extent to which you need to change perceptions about the PC as a gaming platform, both inside the industry and among consumers… Could there be a situation in which you can encourage people to say that buying a laptop for your family is better value for money than buying a next-gen PC and an HDTV?
Stude: I’d love to be able to make that claim! As an Intel employee and shareholder I’ve certainly enjoyed the success of laptops, but there’s a bunch of challenges to be resolved with that, in terms of consistency. A consumer wants to buy a laptop and they want to be able to go to a laptop sales men and have them say “this one gets seven hours of battery life, but it’s not PCGA compliant,” just for example. What does PCGA compliant mean? Well that standard doesn’t exist, of course, but let’s say in the future it could, and what would that mean? Well it would mean that a laptop was compatible with a certain category of games. No one is telling the consumer that today. They’re going out and buying something on a bunch of criteria which might be the operating system, a few other criteria described by the OEM. The consumer should feel comfortable that if they buy a notebook that it should play games, and we’re going to address that with our min spec.
We want there to be a min spec that says that a notebook is gaming ready, and that should be based in a set of criteria that an independent industry body came up with, that really makes sense. With that information a consumer can make an informed decision – and if they’re not buying for gaming they can buy something else. Those little netbooks, for example, aren’t really gaming machines, and people buy them for quite different reasons. But they should be able to buy that knowing that it isn’t designed to play games.
RPS: That will sidestep some disappointments, I guess. So you are going to suggest standards for rating PCs?
Stude: We try to stay away from the term “standards”. A stable minimum spec is probably the best way to look at it. Minimum game specifications are published on every game box and supported by most developers, so what we want to do is to stabilise that, and make them consistent.
RPS: Do you have a timeframe for that? Do you have a min spec release pending?
Stude: We’ll be announcing our approach next year, around GDC, but we’re still settling that.
RPS: So we were looking at the John Peddie research this week, which shows that there’s tens of millions of gaming PCs out there. And that seemed to suggest that the health of PC gaming, and the health of the PC gaming business were actually two different things. There are millions of gamers, but a lot of them are just settling on playing one or two games for an extended period – World Of Warcraft, for example. Or I play Eve Online regularly, and my comrades regularly play that to the exclusion of other games. Then there are mods which extend the lifespan of a single game indefinitely. The idea that the PC is in any way struggling is based purely on the picture of sold products, isn’t it? When in fact gamers are happy playing the same game for year on year. That’s a really significant aspect of the PC, isn’t it? It’s a cultural difference between PC gamers and console gamers, and one that people need to understand. Do you agree?
Stude: Right now it’s not part of our research agenda to look at how many gamers are playing a game that is a year or older, but that would be really interesting set of data. But yes, what’s powerful about the PC is how gamers will often have a love affair with one game, or with several games. That love affair doesn’t end when the game isn’t in the shelf any more. The console model relies on an attach rate of six or seven games per year, per console, right? If they don’t get that kind of sell-through, they don’t have a viable business model for selling the hardware in the first place. They have a demand that there’s a constant pipeline of games. I guess there’s this danger that games become too good, and players would play it day in, day out. If that happened then the console business model would fall apart. In PC gaming some gamers will have half a dozen games and play, say, Team Fortress 2 for a few months, and then maybe go back to Unreal Tournament 2004, or play World Of Warcraft or Civilisation for a few months. They cycle through these games.
Look at what sells so well on PC: Sims expansion packs. There is no comparison for that in console gaming, apart from experiments in downloadable content. And on consoles there is no modification of the games – which is particularly interesting for PC games. That could potentially be stopped overnight, and then it would become more like a console and we’d lose what was great about PC gaming.
The people who really address the PC market well – Blizzard, Valve, the Epic licensees – understand that you’ve got to keep it fresh. The PC market falls in love and sticks with a game for years on end, and they cater for that. Also Crytek are really starting to realise that, even if they’ve not had huge retails success so far. When we see more high end mods arrive for their games I think you’ll see more success there.
RPS: The console manufacturers are able to sell their consoles with the “next-gen console” and “next-gen game” message. Shouldn’t we be seeing the PC sold as “next-gen platform” and also “oh and we also have a twenty-year back-catalogue”? Could the PCGA members utilise what is unique about their platform a little better?
Stude: Well as someone who works for the producer of one of the most important components of the PC [Intel] I am guilty of the “next greatest thing” mentality. To provide value for the guy who decides to upgrade this year, I need some showpiece titles. If I don’t have a game like World In Conflict that scales to Quadcore, he might settle for Dualcore instead. We want games to make use of additional computing power, for games to evolve to do more – to wave your arms around to make things happen, to control games with your mind, right? To need the computing power to do that! That’s the reality of our business. We need the audience to buy into the need for computing power. That said, we are cognisant of the World Of Warcraft phenomenon and we do multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns with Blizzard. That’s a game that runs on a PC that is a few years old, but if you’re in a PvP scenarios or quests with forty people on screen it won’t run fine. I mean the big guilds might say you need a particular spec PC so that you don’t slow everyone else down, that kind of thing. That’s the last thing you want, if everyone’s experience in a dungeon run is slowed down because one guy is running on five year old gear!
RPS: Agreed. Okay, thanks for talking to me. We look forward to seeing the PCGA “min spec” announcements in the new year.
Related Stories:
The PC Gaming alliance is rubbish I have to say. Epic shouldn’t be on it since they are going the way of the console, they had the nerve to say that Gears of War 2 isn’t coming out on the Pc and they said that they are putting their unreal engine more on the side of the consoles then the PC.
Also they actually haven’t done anything, the piracy thing is one thing they don’t know. Also they say they don’t want to control the industry but they would if they had this rating system in. Oh buy this Intel over an AMD because it has a rating of 5 instead of a 4. If you don’t think this will be used to take control over the market.
I think he had some very good answers, but I’m not satisfied with the ones on DRM. Obviously he doesn’t want to bad mouth the members in his own consortium, but still.
Attack SecuROM and continue to. It was Ubisofts stupid idea to use it in Far Cry 2, but it was the turdware called SecuROM that crashed my computer several times. It was a perfectly legal copy of the game, bought in a store.
I know that if I had downloaded it, and used a crack, I could play the game without the damn DVD in my drive all the time, and I wouldn’t get blue screens every now and then.
That’s my biggest issue with DRM, it’s in my face. Steam is the best solution so far, though far from perfect (the ugly UI anyone?)
Indeed, the problem with OpenGL vs DirectX is that DirectX is technically a horrible implementation politically (since it is Windows+XBox only), but OpenGL has been so hamstrung by internal divisions in the standards board that is isn’t as competitive technically anymore.
What would be ideal would be something like DirectX, only open, but that’s never going to happen with DirectX itself…
steam isn’t ugly – it’s reserved! :)
sadly, i think we’d get a more user-friendly standard of “system requirements” if one of the two card manufacturers collapsed – the victor would be free to come up with whatever nonsense they’d want to.
dunno how good that’d actually be, or likely for that matter – i don’t think nvidia or AMD is going anywhere.
Ahh yes! Monopolies are always great for the consumer!
No way, prices go up when that happens!
Unfortunately what we’ve got now is two graphics cards companies competing with each other but not trying to compete and make things easier for the consumer.
I agree that one of the companies collapsing wouldn’t really lead to a better scenario. But right now, it’s not like they’re interested in creating a better scenario as it stands either.
I’ll be interested to see how their scoring system will work.
I initially thought of a “PCGA 2008″ type sticker, but what about people who only want to play WoW and Peggle? They’d need a few grades I think. you can quite happily play most less intensive games with a last-gen graphics card.
So do they need a few classes of sticker: PCGA A 2008, PCGA B 2008, PCGA C 2008 etc. and a game would report what it needs.
However.
What do you do in 2009? My PC may have blasted PCGA A 2008 out of the water, so what would it have earned if it was sold new in 2009? Would it have earned a PCGA A 2009, or a PCGA B 2009?
Is the company that sold me the computer going to contact all its customers and let them know what their PCs re-qualify as?
Or is it up to the publishers to list:
Required PCGA A 2006, PCGA B 2007, PCGA C 2008
Recommended PCGA A 2007, PCGA B 2008
That’s messy, and it might not be as simple as one grade down per year.
Something running on the PC which can issue a report like: “PCGA score= 1407″ might work. That could be on the PC at retail and games would require an ever increasing number to run.
That’s not even considering the perils of producing one score for an entire PC though, a good CPU and crap GPU will be no good on certain games, and fine on others, but the reverse might not.
I was thinking more along the lines of each title has a machine corresponding to it, so say “PCGA 2008″ means systems of x specifications at least. For games that require less in terms of system requirements, they could say it only requires a “PCGA 2004″, even if it’s a new title.
I think a yearly delineation of systems like that would help simplify things a lot, and people would know that if they have a “PCGA 2006″ system they can play games up to and including “PCGA 2006″ system requirements.
System specs don’t really change too much during the year, at the very MOST you’d only ever want a half-year delineation for the sake of the graphics cards, but like I said, a yearly step up would probably be more clear.
If there’s going to be simplification of the buying process so that the average consumer can know what kind of games machine they’re getting, then some sort of standardisation has to happen. Right now, there’s no way for the home buyer to know just because their PC has a quadcore processor doesn’t mean Jack since the company they bought it from only gave them a Geforce 7200 and still called it “the latest, greatest games machine!”
@Quercus: I would pay for Windows gaming OS. As it stands, I only keep XP around for gaming.
@Jon: For the average consumer, that system is still confusing, especially compared to consoles where things “just work.” In the early and mid 1990s, PC games “just worked,” at least that’s how I remember it. Part of the problem is an emphasis on graphics over gameplay, prevalence of shitty on-board graphics, etc.
Anyway, I’m glad we’re all discussing the real problems faced by PC gaming instead of engaging in circular arguments about piracy :)
We need a PC Gamer’s Alliance. Not one made of companies who have commercial interests in PC gaming, but of the gamers themselves. It would allow us to mobilise more and further pressure developers and publishers on issues such as DRM, digital distribution and post-release support.
Yay Oregon!
“In the early and mid 1990s, PC games “just worked,” at least that’s how I remember it. Part of the problem is an emphasis on graphics over gameplay, prevalence of shitty on-board graphics, etc.”
That so isn’t true :D Back then you had to fiddle with things like the IRQ of your GRAVIS SOUNDBLASTER or whatever before a game came close to working. And the amount of fiddling one could do in DOS, with boot discs and everything, was mental.
Things may not always “just work”, but i’m pretty sure they work more often than they used to :) Well, in my experience anyway!
I’d be a bit happier with the idea if there were more games publishers on board. No disrespect to Epic or Capcom, but what about Atari, Blizzard, EA etc.?
Between nVidia and AMD there should be pretty accurate graphics chipset sales data – a fairly good barometer of gaming PCs. Between this data and Intel / AMD CPU sales it ought to be pretty easy to draw a rough idea of the percentage of machines capable of running games too.
That said it’s my picky, pedantic view that it’s easy to draw skewed conclusions without all the players on board. To take an example, I work in electronics supply. I have read press releases I know to be untrue simply because claims of market share do not take into account the whole of the market because selected competition doesn’t get invited to these fora. In turn this creates false advertising data (although in fairness, it is seriously awesome PR).
To be honest I think PC gaming’s biggest problem at the moment is lack of retailer support.
I wandered around my local shopping centre on Sunday with some birthday money to spend, and thought I’d buy a new game, but I couldn’t find many PC games on sale anywhere. The major retailers only had a few titles, at outrageous prices, tucked away in a corner and most of them were Sims expansion packs.
By contrast they had hundreds of DS games – 99.9% of which were licensed tat. But I digress.
Ok there’s an argument that PC gaming’s future is via downloads, but it seems the retailers are generally doing their level best to kill off PC gaming simply by not stocking PC games.
Can we get some retailers in the PC Gaming Alliance please?
Yeah, the yearly thing doesn’t really work, since e.g. an 8800GT from 2007 won’t be incapable of playing new games at high settings until 2009-2010, and there’s no way of predicting which year that will happen. And if you instead backdate current games so a new one might have a “2006″ rating, people won’t buy it because “it doesn’t have cutting edge graphics.”
Demos/render tests are the way to go. Game stores should give out DVDs full of demos. Alternatively publishers could get together and make one uber-benchmark program that will analyse your system and tell you which games you can play.
If there was one little thing I could talk the PCGA into it’s getting ati/nv to stop making graphics cards that support different RAM types of varying speeds. It’s really difficult to explain to someone why their 512 megabyte card doesn’t perform as well as one with a smaller amount of faster RAM, especially when they cost about the same. They already have 10 different models per generation, and unlike the diversity of models this wrinkle is primarily designed to rip non-technical people off.
Well for starters, games companies aren’t interested in doing pre-release demos as much anymore. They feel it impacts negatively on sales.
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/04/14/study-publishers-shouldnt-release-demos-just-trailers/
The general gist is that it’s better to release hype building footage than actually allow people to try the game, the latter has a greater possibility of having a negative effect.
I disagree that people won’t buy a new game because it doesn’t have “cutting edge graphics”. The rating scheme would be more along the lines of an indication of how powerful a PC you would need to run said software. If that were the case, half the console games on the market wouldn’t sell, the Wii would be toast, and GOG wouldn’t even exist. If people bought games purely for the latest graphics then I honestly don’t see how “backdating” would affect that anyway when in comparison to saying that a new game only needs a 64 MB graphics card. Still, I’m willing to concede this is more a point of perspective than anything and agree to disagree, largely because I don’t feel the PCGA would ever even attempt something so drastic and far reaching.
I agree that half the cards on the market are designed purely around giving the illusion of being a good enough card without actually being quite all that good, tricks with naming conventions and minute changes to statistics that make large differences and all the other crap. The problem resides with the fact that the PCGA is made up entirely of hardware vendors, and this is a strategy that is in their interest, so they’re not likely to change it.
I’m not sure if I’d even call it a conflict of interest. The PCGA’s individual members WILL NOT allow changes to those conventions even if it helps the consumers and the platform as a whole. It’s not in their interests to do so, and the PCGA is about THEIR interests. The difference is that they’ve somehow gotten it into their heads that their individual interests coincide with those of the consumers, or even the platform as a whole.
Me? Cynical? Most certainly. I don’t believe I’ve seen any evidence to the contrary just yet.
One idea would be some kind of “template PC” for a given year, or several. A very demanding game that doesn’t scale very well could be a targeted at year “2XXX high-end computer” and a more forgiving game could be targeted at middle tier computers. That would account for the average computer performance increasing every year.
The templates need to be generic enough though, it can’t be “2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM and nVidia x249.5Z TURBOX”, since AMD would never agree to that. “2 GHz Dual Core CPU, 2 GB RAM and Blabla GFX” would be better although I have no idea how you would specify the graphics card. I’m not sure if any hardware vendor would agree to that though, they want their product mentioned on the box.
Anyhow, games could then have a “2008 high-end PC” sticker on them and the less techno savvy among us could go home, look at their dell and say “hey it’s got the right sticker on it”.
This is more or less an elaboration of subedii’s idea. I am however skeptical if it will ever work for the same reasons as he is.
“If people bought games purely for the latest graphics then I honestly don’t see how “backdating” would affect that anyway when in comparison to saying that a new game only needs a 64 MB graphics card.”
I’m not saying everyone, just a significant percentage of people that publishers would like to sell to. And the difference is that everyone understands “lol, 3 year old grafix” whereas most people don’t know that 64 MB of graphics ram isn’t that much these days.
And, to the broader point, I can just as easily reverse your argument and point out that if graphics weren’t important then the PS3 and 360 would be utterly dead in the water, since their primary attributes besides higher resolution are, respectively, being really expensive and breaking all the time.
The DirectX updates are far more aggressive than anything you see on the consoles. They’re static for five or six years at a time, and we’re getting DirectX 11 just a couple of years after DirectX 10. That’s important because the platform I enjoy the best has the potential – via Moore’s Law – of doubling its performance every few years.
And yet while i love the PC as my primary gaming platform this is one of the weaknesses. I think DirectX 9 (a,b and c) was the most successful version of the code base because it was stuck in that version for a long time…. moving forward quickly is just as harmful as being stuck in one place for too long (see Left 4 Dead as a gaming example of this ;) .
Seriously though, the hardware doesn’t even fully support dx 10.1 (and doesn’t even run dx10 smoothly for the most part) and games don’t support dx10 apart from a handful of titles. I think that they move forward without regard for the stability of the business/development side of things… so next year (or 2010) developers are going to be developing across three versions of dx (9,10 and 11) since the majority of ‘gamers’ out there only have cards that are capable of running dx9 smoothly (i’m talking older and low-mid range current cards) and the minority are running the latest and greatest nvidia and ati dx10 and 10.1 cards(respectively) – just look at the steam hardware survey. IMO this needs addressing and quickly considering developers seem to admit (ask David Braben) that they can’t help but want to put the latest and greatest into their game – even if financially it’s not the best decision.
You could probably get away with using a synthetic benchmarker along the likes of 3DMark06 to give you a score. It won’t be 100% accurate, but saying “You must have a 1500 PCGA Rating or higher to run this game” would clear it up for the average consumer enough to sacrifice the wiggle-room on how that translates to actual performance.
I like the idea of the rating – but you would just have to tone down the numbers.
Basically each system (or component) would be rated similar to the 3D benchmark, to give an overall score, then you could just divide by 100 to give a three-digit score.
Likewise games would be tested to see what they demand with most settings on high to run smoothly and would also be given a score. Then you just look at the numbers on the game and compare to your system.
Older systems could simply download some software to run a few tests and find out what their system is rated as.
You can’t really reducing it to a rating, it’s not a one-dimensional thing – some games need shader performance, others need texturing power, etc. In the most extreme case there could be games that require advanced features but very little processing power – if Bejewelled was DirectX 10 it’d work on a useless-at-3D Intel X4500 but not on a Geforce 7950 that can run Crysis pretty well. So what number do you give it?
The only option is to make the benchmark aware of what specific games need to run and have it tell you if you can/can’t handle it.
Yes, Stude sounded a bit subtly snarky (at least potentially) wrt Epic Games…but don’t miss that Epic has also lost no opportunity to be snarky about Intel, blaming Intel Integrated Graphics for everything from UT3’s dismal failure to the total apocalypse of PC gaming. Still, I’m a lot more interested in hearing positive noises from folks like Stude than more backwash from Epic, now that they’ve repeatedly and very publicly pooh-poohed the PC platform and have no (announced) PC games in the pipe. (They are, at least, still planning to support UT3 with an expansion pack…for all of the 250 people worldwide who actually play that game.)
@cliffski
There is no such thing as ‘gaming ready’. laptops that will play bejewelled and Diner Dash and Habbo Hotel might not play Crysis. A laptop that won’t run bioshock can still play almost all indie and casual games.
I dread the idea of a triple-A retail focused group of devs declaring what spec is needed for ‘gaming’.
Actually, I think it’s more likely that they’re going to try to simplify the specs requirements so a complete initiate can tell whether their PC can run a game by comparing the game’s rating with their PC’s rating. Someone hypothesised a “PGCA yyyy” rating. So for Bejewelled you might be able to go to the PGCA website, input your system specs and it could give you a rough estimate of a PGCA specs rating, which you could try to match to Bejeweled’s own PGCA specs rating.
I don’t see that being a terrible system to work with. You could check your PC’s specs (or even take your Quick Reference card shipped with the PCGA-compliant PC) so that when you go to the shops, or buy online, you have a quick, easy point of reference.
If Publishers were encouraged to submit PCGA min specs ratings to the PCGA, at least this might encourage the PC to exploit the millions of PC users at the msot casual end of the scale, and perhaps this may see the PC being deservedly seen in a more high-profile light by the masses (and therefore the Publishers) as a platform on a level footing with the console market.
At first I was very skeptical about the PCGA, but this interview gives me a lot of hope for the future. People might complain that they’re not doing anythign, but I think by giving hard facts on sales figures, piracy figures, and so on, they are going in the right direction.
Oh and to hypothesise further on the ratings, looking at my L4D box I can see 5 categories that could be given a PGCA ’specs rating’. You could do this on the year the hardware was (widely?) available on the market. So, for example, a 128MB graphics card might get a (takes a stab in the dark) PGCA 2002 rating in the Graphics category.
However, this could be misleading for some people who may think a 2002-bought PC should have the necessary graphics card. Perhaps if the PGCA began collective hardware data from its well-placed companies, you would be able to see when the majority of users were equipped with any given hardware, and use this for the PGCA specs rating.
I do think splitting it up by category is the only proper way to do it, though.
Oh good. I thought you were going to do something weird, like ask if there was any possible conflict of interest between having a stated charter of being a platform for the well-being of the industry and supporting it with their own “research”, which is coincidentally only available to member companies who’ve paid between $15,000 and $50,000.
Or how his completely made up position as Intel’s “gaming director” and foresight into those lovely integrated video chipsets lends credible insight to the needs and directions of the gaming industry.
Or how the PCGA’s Chairman of Data Research is also a a chair on their marketing subcommittee; Roy Taylor, who also happens to hold nVidia’s prestigious position of VP of “content relations”.
Taylor on piracy:
“Or, we just accept that it is what it is and it’s here to say and will never change. Going down that route means we’ve got to think about other ways to increase revenue and sales on the PC. Maybe we don’t need to sell games any more – look at Asia, the biggest PC gaming market in the world. They don’t sell games in Asia and revenue is instead driven by microtransactions, subscriptions and advertising. Most people think about advertising as in-game billboards, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s also product placement, portals, webpages and endorsements.”
YES! When i think about what could possibly make the Western industry better, it’s about how to mimic the makeshift industry that came about purely because no one else fucking thought to serve them properly! WINNER!
Fuck’s sake, Rossignol. This isn’t good enough. You’re either putting the screws to them hardcore until you get an answer or an admission to the lack thereof, or you’re willingly engaging in the PR program of what is ultimately a glorified marketing effort.
@ Jon R
I thought the answer was pretty clear: it’s a body that has the commercial interests of its members in mind. They’re in this to make money – Stude says so in the interview. There’s nothing coincidental about the research only being available to their members.
So, if it is ultimately a “glorified marketing effort” (or actually a kind of fact-finding and regulating exercise, as it seems to be) and consequently they get some things sorted for both consumers and their members while they’re conducting it, then fine.
If it is a glorified marketing effort that ultimately achieves nothing of practical value, or even works against consumer interests, then I’ll be happy to start asking those tougher questions. At the moment PCGA haven’t done much worth commenting on either way: it has provided reports that are available only to its paying members, as is the prerogative of an industry consortium. So this interview is little more than finding out what they intend to do, and how they intend to do it.
Once the PCGA starts doing things that actually have some ramification for the consumer at large, then I’ll be happy to start making judgments. The min spec thing will be the first test of that: if it’s a sensible recommendation, then great. If it’s not – if, for example, it unhelpfully lends credibility to crappy integrated graphics – then we’ll aim to say so.
That’s the thing killing PC gaming. Forced obsolescence. People become jaded when they simply cannot play games on their machine anymore, and have to upgrade for the umpteenth time.
Valve learned. You can play Half-Life 2 on DX 7 machines. They helpfully had a widget that would tell you whether it would run on your machine. The game sold bucketloads.
Look at MMORPGs. They have to make the game scaleable, because they make all their money after the game is sold. If the game says ‘Ha, get a new computer N00b’ then the company has just lost far more money than they get from the retail sale.
Why can’t devs get a game to work on a five year old computer, then add in the whizzy stuff? It seems like a much sounder financial plan than ‘Screw those twats who supported our other games,they don’t have a brand new computer’.
Sure, on minimum specs, it won’t look as good. But if it plays as good, people are more likely to upgrade their graphics card/whole computer to see what they are missing.
That’s the thing killing PC gaming
Incorrect. That’s what’s killing off the stupid bunch. As you said yourself, the studios who make scalable games are doing great. TF2 played fantastic on my old Radeon 9800 Pro and plays fantastic on my beefy 8800 GTS.