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Newell says Wrath will save PC gamers (as if they needed it)
Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve (bringer of Half-Life 2), says that the PC gaming industry is waiting excitedly for the release of Wrath of the Lich King to rescue its market.But, even though I breathlessly await Wrath, I beg to differ with Mr. Newell's comments. I don't think PC gaming is anywhere close to leaving the building, as some so-called experts in the field would have us believe. (Call me cynical, but I'm guessing a lot of those experts came from console manufacturers or optimistic mobile gaming companies.) The trouble with making these kinds of predictions is that there are currently no completely accurate ways of tracking the success of a game except to take press releases on faith. And in that case, you might as well believe the fox's promise to guard the hen-house. (Did you hear clucking? I thought I heard clucking.) Another problem with estimating market share for various games is that you're comparing Mana to Rage: each company can define "sales" and "subscribers" any way they please, making it nearly impossible to come up with clean comparisons of market share.Blizzard makes approximately $120 million dollars a month. Compare that to Iron Man's opening weekend gross of $109 million. Blizzard beats that number every month, not just with one summer blockbuster per year. Also consider that most PC retailers have devoted entire sections of their hardware floors to gaming PCs. This devotion goes all the way up to the hardware manufacturers themselves. When I worked at Toshiba, we had a product manager whose sole job was to create and improve gaming laptops. (Oh, how I envied that guy!) Yes, Blizzard's release of the Wrath expansion will juice the market, but it's more like an injection of steroids, not administration of last rites.
WoW and the PC gaming market
With over 10 million subscribers, World of Warcraft commands a pretty hefty chunk of the PC gaming market. Stopping by my local Best Buy, I asked their Geek Squad members to simply: "Show me the machines for WoW." One guy smiled, nodded, and took me to what he called "the WoW rack.""These are the machines," he promised me, "that'll get you through the game." According to my Geek Squad advisor, there's been more than a few memos in the store about which machines to recommend for World of Warcraft. "Corporate wants to be sure," Brian told me, "that you people can get Warcraft machines right out of the box."Best Buy isn't alone in this preparedness. AMD Game! is a branding label that, in theory, recommends the best-of-the-best, all according AMD. They prescribe a set of base, minimum requirements for a computer, and then run that box through a series of games to be sure the game plays the way it's supposed to play. If the system passes muster, then the system is allowed to stamp itself with the coveted AMD Game! label. And, yup: World of Warcraft is certainly on that list.And since the World of Warcraft XPS sports an nVidia card -- you can be pretty tootin' sure that gets tested as well. While the XPS still costs a little more than most might pay, it's branded, toyed-out the wazoo, and all about WoW. WoW: Im in ur PC market, designin' ur boxes.[Via Gamers Hell]
