No Pressure: Lombardi on Steam and the PC

I've been meaning to post this Leigh Alexander interview with Valve's Doug Lombardi since she mentioned it over at SexyVideogameLand. While it's been over a week since it's gone up, I think it's still worth doing so as it's probably the most concise forwarding of the PC position of recent times. There's lots of interesting stuff. For example...

"I can remember this story coming around in the mid '90s... and then 3D accelerator came out, and Carmack released that patch for GL Quake, and everybody shut up, because all of a sudden PlayStation looked like crap. There's a big shift about to come in the post-GPU space... all of a sudden PC will leapfrog what's going on on the consoles, in many other ways besides graphics."

Which I have no idea what he means, but it does sound interesting. And if you were to play the PC advocacy role, you actually do need to denigrate the consoles a little....

"Somebody go back and look at next-gen console install base numbers since launch time, and compare it to PSone and PS2. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we saw these guys stuttering out at 25,000 -- nobody's going to get to 100 million, which we saw from Sony on the last 2 [console generations]. I don't think anybody's even thinking of this."

i.e. Is the console model actually sustainable? Which is probably one problem with the PC Gaming Alliance people - Microsoft can't play those cards, for obvious reasons.