Valve recently held a press event where they discussed the PC gaming industry, sales of both traditional media and online distribution, PC game piracy and other industry topics.
Gamasutra was there to cover it, and here are some of the more interesting quotes from Gabe Newell and the folks at Valve:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Gamasutra
"Is there a crisis in [PC] gaming?" asked Newell, who led the first segment of the talk. "You know, 'Piracy killed my game,' 'Console numbers are huge,' 'People don't want to play their PCs in the living room' - all these stories get written over and over again, and our view is that it's exactly the opposite. PC is where all the action is, and there's a perception problem"...
...Newell then returned to his "perception problem" angle. "We don't really have a champion of the PC platform. If you write a story about the Xbox 360, there's just an army of people who are going to descend on you to make that picture look as polished and rosy as possible. Same things for the other consoles - but there's no equivalent on the PC, and the people who are traditionally driving these messages, like Microsoft or Intel or Apple are, for various reasons, not very effective champions."
Still, Valve does not want to create the impression that it will solely take on that role for PC. "The PC does have that distributed management problem," he said, when asked about Valve's role in the platform's stewardship. "It's been doing pretty well since, you know, 1981, so we're trying to draw attention to that, and hopefully we'll hear more from the people who have traditionally provided leadership there. We're trying to do our part. We recognize we're part of this."
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Make sure you check out the full write up
here, some very interesting stats are given in regards to PC game sales, as well as noting that the online distribution of games is still in many ways an unknown quantity. Something that I found particularly noteworthy is the fact that among Valve's own products, retail sales still hold a slight lead over online sales, but they expect that to end in about three months time.