A 'They Would Say That' Report: There is No PC Gaming Crisis

According to Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve, there is no crisis in PC gaming - those that say there is are just looking at it all wrong.

Speaking at a Valve press event at the company's Bellevue, Washington headquarters, Newell said, "Is there a crisis in PC gaming? No. But there is a perception problem."

The reason such a perception exists, according to supporters of PC gaming, is that data on revenue for the platform tends to focus on boxed retail games. Recent US figures from NPD, for example, appear to show that revenues from PC gaming have fell year on year from just over $1 billion (£507 million) to $910.7 million (£462 million) in 2007.

"Only now are organizations such as NPD beginning to track alternative revenue streams (MMO subscriptions, etc.) and discovering billions of previously unacknowledged spending on PC gaming", Newell said.

NPD has recently begun tracking other revenue streams and recently reported that online revenue has reached $1 billion (£507 million) annually in the US alone (although it should be noted that the figure includes online console revenues). Newell said that in three months Valve's revenue from digital sales will exceed those through bricks and mortar retail.

Newell also pointed to the influence of console makers on the perception of the games industry. A slide in his presentation carried the words, "As all of you know too well, the three of the major console holders spend millions of dollars each month on PR teams to seed stories to the contrary."

Newell said that no one is "taking ownership" of the PC gaming story. His comments mirror those of his colleague, Valve's director of marketing, Doug lombardi, who told SPOnG last year, “I mean, whenever you see stories about, 'Oh, the PC's dying, consoles are winning', all that kind of stuff, that's mostly the product of Sony having 140 PR people sitting on top of the guy's head who's writing that story, as does Microsoft talking about the Xbox, probably Nintendo as well. But nobody's really been doing that in the last 10, 15 years for the PC.”

Newell arguably contradicted himself, however, when asked why Valve isn't part of the PC Gaming Alliance. "Shipping products is more important than companies sending representatives together to all agree that PC games should be doing better”, he said.

Anecdotally, this week's UK Charts add weight to Newell's assertion that PC gaming is performing better than people think and that subscription revenue is an important factor. Funcom's latest MMO, Age of Conan, landed at Number 2.

Newell also mentioned a few new features set to be coming to it's online games platform, Steam, soon, the most interesting of which being 'Steam Cloud'. This will allow Steam users to not only access games they have bought online from multiple PCs (which is already possible) but also to access accumulated game data, such as game saves.

The numbers indicate that this "They Would Say That" report comes down in favour of the statement in terms of cash generation.

^{Source: Next-Gen}