Indie Developer's Response to the PCGA (Updated)

Can you start with a little bit of your background? Where does your interest in PC gaming come from?

Matt Ployhar: So I'm currently at Intel, and have been for almost three years. I'm kind of a hybrid strategic graphics planner, if you will. One of the main reasons I came over was to kind of get exposure to hardware, and at that point in time we were actually working on the Larabee project.

...

I just felt like I'm much more aligned with Windows gaming than I am console gaming, at any level. And the Windows guys for years were trying to get me to move over into the DirectX group. So then I moved over, out of Microsoft Games, to get into Windows Div/DX. And then halfway through the [Microsoft Game Studios] re-org, I went on to my last Microsoft stint, which was a couple years on the Windows 7 planning team.

So the PCGA is -- how to describe it -- low-visibility. I hear from you guys maybe once or twice a year. So, do you think that part of your job is to bring up exposure of PC Gaming Alliance and what it does?

MP: Yeah, so once to twice a year -- that exact sentiment is something, I'm thinking, is one of the immediate aspects to fix. What's interesting here is when the PCGA was founded, almost three years ago, it was sort of when ... there was a lot of companies that just didn't feel like there was still really a champion for PC gaming, there wasn't really a voice or a place to air out things, if you will.

And, so, there was no sanity, etc. And there was also kind of a big, large sentiment to address with what I would call industry propaganda or FUD, right? There are a lot of people running around, Chicken Little-ing it, saying "Oh yeah, the sky is falling, PC gaming is dying, blah, blah, blah."

...

The PCGA was founded for two reasons. What they did, is they went into the mode, if you will, where they felt like instead of, "OK, it's better going loud and proud and being really vocal and visible," it was kind of like "OK, let's build out a body of research so we've got kind of a belated backup to what we're saying here."

Over the past year or earlier, what would you say that the PCGA has been able to accomplish or change? Or has it been more of an evaluation, a rather lengthy evaluation period, of PC gaming?

MP: I would say the most visible thing is seeing how analyst firms are talking more openly about digital distribution numbers, and talking about how that's replacing retail to a large degree, and acknowledging, "Oh, look. There's an extra couple to three billion dollars that we didn't account for."

Now granted, some of that may have happened automatically. But at the same time, the PCGA probably made it happen sooner. PC gaming is such an extremely dynamic ecosystem.

Externally, you'll notice that people aren't bashing PC gaming nearly at all anymore. And then internally [among PC game companies], I would say we are taking better stock of where we are, and having that self critical, constructive criticism thing going on.

In the coming year and beyond, what are the biggest issues for PC gaming that the PCGA needs to address?

MP: If I have to narrow that down, I think it depends on what discipline you're looking at. From a marketing research angle, I would say the big thing that we need to address is really redefining what the definition of a PC is, and what constitutes a PC game.

I wanted to ask you, too, actually, if you would elaborate on what PC gaming is, because it's becoming vaguer.

MP: Exactly. One of my cohorts up here in the office, I don't know if you know Mike Burrows or not. But he and I had this big whiteboard discussion about this. He said, "It's a shame that they didn't call us the "Gaming Alliance instead of the "PC Gaming Alliance." I said, "Well, look. I inherited this." [laughs] I only had been at this office for about two months. This is what I get to work with.

And I said, "I don't want to get hung up on the semantics, the nomenclature here." When I look at it, the iPhone I'm talking to you on right now is technically a PC. It's got roughly a gigahertz processor. It's got a 32GB-sized hard drive on it. It's got the graphics capability of the PC that I bought roughly about 14 years ago for $2,200, my Micron P/266.

And [another challenge is] there's also limited access to PC gaming content. You walk into EB Games or GameStop and it's hard to find a PC game, typically. They're really trying to sell where they make their biggest margins -- typically on the console pre-owned game. Access to PC games and awareness is another big issue. Just making PC gaming more profitable to the game developers and publishers is a challenge.

One thing when I spoke with Randy [Stude] a while ago was piracy. You're talking about publishers needing to be able to make a profit on PC. And you see some publishers commenting about how their PC games just get pirated before they're even released a lot of times. What stance does the PCGA have on piracy?

MP: I would love to talk about that. [laughs] There's a lot to say. I don't exactly remember what Randy's quote was. But there is a really good article. I don't know if you can find it off of Google right now. It's on a blog. The guy's name is David Rosen. And the name of the article is Another View of Game Piracy.

But let me expand on that. What's really interesting [according to PCGA research,] is piracy was largely, historically rampant when you had an optical drive or a piece of physical media. And people would go and download the crack for it.

In some cases the crack was done days before the game ever even hit retail shelves. Now what's happening is piracy was so bad in other geographies -- it's kind of bad everywhere but there are certain places where it spikes -- that it was an equation of survival of the fittest. The only PC gaming business models that existed and continued to thrive and that could continue to live were MMOs. They do really well. You can still pirate them but they're an order of magnitude harder to pirate.

And then there are free to play games. You can't really pirate free to play. You can but it doesn't make a lot of sense. So what's happening is game design is shifting and as a result of shifting game design, piracy, at least on the PC side, is actually declining as a result.

What's your stance on DRM, since that's something that PC gamers are very vocal about?

MP: Very vocal, yeah. I actually out got Slashdotted recently for something I said in some other article, it's funny. We've got [DRM providers] Sony [DADC] and Arxan that are part of the PCGA. DRM, I don't know what its future is.

...I don't have, honestly, a great answer for all my fellow gamers out there in the world to "what is DRM's role in the future?" But you have to take a low level approach [to protecting IP] that's not invasive or going to detract from the gaming experience. Again, there's no instant fix. We can't snap our fingers and wave our wands, so instantaneously that problem goes away, because you're always going to have retail to some level.

And to expand on the DRM thing, there is an interesting thing going on where I've heard of people -- I won't mention names -- who one of the first things that they'll do is they'll go crack the retail copy that they bought and load it onto a drive. And that way they can take it to any other PC that they've bought.

And the driving factor there is, that they want the extra level of flexibility that comes along with that, when you don't need that disc spinning in your optical drive. ... But they still legitimately bought the game, right?

But then, they're downloading this hack, which is going to light up in some of these forums, "Oh, there are 50,000 downloads of XYZ crack." And I'm like, "Well, yeah, but some percentage of those are from people who legitimately bought the retail box for that, they just want the extra flexibility that you would get, almost as if it was digitally downloaded." It's a weird perspective, but it happens.

Ployhar told Big Download in a brief phone interview that he doesn't feel that the departures will affect the PCGA, He also told us that he is moving the organization away from just being a group that does research and issues reports on the industry to a group that will be more active in trying to assist game developers, publishers and hardware companies make better PC games. In a post on Ployhar's Intel blog, he states, "Another key thing we'll be doing is creating a more technical based advisory board that you'll all be hearing more about very soon. We're doing this to flesh out the PCGA's technical expertise while simultaneously addressing perceived gaps in membership."