http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=873 2 pages Valve on PC gaming.
"Shack: Do you guys ever get tired of the same old "PC Gaming Is Dying" stories?
Doug Lombardi: I mean, I think, we sort of laugh at it. Because we've been wildly successful--we're very fortunate, you know. Our games have all done really, really well, Steam has taken off and become this whole other business for us, Valve has never been in better shape--and yet everybody is talking about how in the PC world, the sky is falling. And we're like, we've been doing this for 10 years now--actually 12 years since the company started, 10 years since the first game came out--and we've never been in better shape, financially or otherwise. The company is over 160 people now--it was 20 people when we shipped Half-Life. We've got multiple projects going--we were always a one-project-at-a-time group.
We don't understand why that story gets traction over time. I think people have finally started to clue in to the fact--there was a story last week where people finally looked at the online subscription revenues for WoW and all the things that look like WoW, and realized, wow, there was a butt-load of cash being made here that wasn't being counted at the register, at retail, in North America, which is where all these stories come out of.
It's hard to be able to have games that scale, and to write performance on the high end, and write performance on the bottom end, but you know, winning in any industry means some hard work.NPD, god love 'em, they release a US retail sales report, and people take that and say that's the world picture. And it's just not true. It's not like NPD is trying to be evil. Their job is to report North American sales data. They're doing their jobs. But people are taking that and discounting.. in Germany for example, retail sales of PC products crush all other games, with the possible exception of the DS. It certainly kills all of the next-generation consoles. So if people were looking at that and factoring it in, if people were looking at WoW's subscriptions alone and factoring it in, looking at Steam sales and factoring it in.. Just look at what Popcap's doing--Bejeweled and Peggle and all this stuff--they're not in that NPD data.
If you go around and you look at all these different things that are happening on the PC, and you add them together, my hunch is that [the sales numbers] would actually be much larger than all of the consoles put together. Again, minus the DS, because the DS is this crazy thing by itself. But talking purely in terms of the Wii, the PS3, and the 360, if you added those together and looked at the whole picture, I'd bet you PC would be even, if not bigger than those three systems in terms of the money that's changing hands and the opportunity for doing business.
So we always look at those things, and we always kind of laugh. We're doing just fine, Popcap's doing just fine, Blizzard's certainly--they're printing money down there. We always sort of shake our heads, and go, okay, sooner or later someone's going to write the bigger picture story and perceptions will change. "
Valve says PC > Consoles
Tease.
