Everyone who has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous compatibility issues will tell you their story about how all their buddies were playing World of War Craft and then they logged on to find the version they purchased is not compatible with their system or the computer they inherited from their second cousin twice removed after he married (sorry about the example-this happened to someone I know) isn't powerful enough to handle e-mails. So it isn't surprising that in a world where gaming is typically the province of gaming systems there are compatibility issues.
Lets face it, until someone makes the universal grail of a consumers information and entertainment needs, I mean a tool that is a computer, home entertainment system, office system, and will play any game you plug into it, there will be a kind of raw distrust that manufactures of PC's will be forced to suffer through. But now the PC Gaming Alliance is moving to do something about it.
The nonprofit PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) aims to unite hardware and software creators, game developers, publishers and others committed to the PC gaming market with the common purpose of advancing the PC as a gaming platform. The group's founding members include Acer/Gateway, Activision Publishing, AMD, Dell/Alienware, Epic, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia and Razer USA. Together, member companies plan to cooperate on accelerating innovation, improving the gaming experience for consumers and serving as a collective source of market information and expertise on PC gaming, the group said.
It should be no surprise that in an age where gaming platforms like Playstation, Wii, and Xbox are as powerful as some low end PC's, that such a standardization of PC's would help manufacturers keep their consumers happy.
The PCGA has a long haul ahead of them. Among the many challenges ahead is to produce a set of minimum expectations as to what game developers should be targeting in terms of minimum system requirements for their games.
Uniformity of system standards would be a great boon to game designers who would like to see everyone playing their games. I know that the first time I saw the price of the Playstation 3 when it was released last year was to gulp and assign myself to not being one of the cool kids on the block. It was too expensive. As for my friend with the junk from his cousin’s yard sale I can only offer him my sympathy. Hang in there man, he may be upgrading to Vista soon.
Any thoughts?
Here is the link to this story:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Can-the-PC-Survive-as-a-Gaming-Platform-61760.html
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