A new organization dedicated to the support and promotion of PC gaming came into existence earlier this year. Dubbed the PC Gaming Alliance, the association gathered the resources and talents of a variety of industry heavyweights, including nVidia, AMD, Activision, Epic Games, Microsoft, and Dell. As its first president it named Intel’s Randy Stude.

Stude quickly got to work telling anyone who would listen that, contrary to popular belief, traditional PC gaming isn’t declining but rather, thriving. He came up with plenty of impressive sounding numbers, including one that suggested there are over 250 million PC gamers worldwide and another that argued global PC gaming sales are on the rise, growing 14 per cent in 2007 to $8.3 billion.

Inspiring figures, to be sure. And they should sound familiar; we’ve heard them before via Microsoft’s struggling Games for Windows division.
But they are misleading.

The vast majority of gamers counted in the quarter of a billion PC players currently existent are casual gamers, a category that counts as its primary constituents women over thirty years of age who use old hardware to play the sort of simple and cheap titles available through online portals such as Yahoo Games. Indeed, the Casual Games Association places the number of casual PC gamers at well over 200 million — accounting for four fifths of all PC gamers.

In other words, the industry that caters to so-called “hardcore” gamers is using casual gaming’s success and continued growth to beef up its numbers and make it seem as though traditional PC gaming isn’t in the kind of jeopardy many people suspect.

But, of course, it is. The symptoms leading to this diagnosis are obvious and unmistakable.
Look at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), North America’s largest video game tradeshow, held annually in Los Angeles. The presence of PC games at this past July’s show was frighteningly minimal, with only one significant PC-exclusive game announcement of note — BioWare’s Dragon Age.

And have you compared your local game retailer’s PC release schedule with those of the consoles? The number of games slated for release on Windows platforms is pitifully low relative to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii. Plus, the majority of PC games hitting shelves are merely ports of titles originally developed for consoles — meaning that, by and large, they aren’t optimized to take advantage of the potentially superior hardware possessed by Windows platform players, which negates one of the primary benefits of PC gaming.

Next: Hard to console PC gamers

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