EA wants to sell you a PC

At Electronic Arts’ Comic-Con booth today, an EA rep mentioned that the company plans to market pre-built PCs in conjunction with the release of Crytek’s upcoming PC-exclusive shooter Crysis Warhead.  The idea seems to be to try and circumvent some of the intimidation that exists for gamers who are either new to high-end PC gaming, or have been out of the scene for some time, and reassure them that it is not prohibitively expensive to acquire a machine that can tame something like Crysis and its followup.

Apparently, the rigs will come in various configurations, which will correspond to Crysis Warhead’s levels of graphical detail, with a likely price range being $600-$800 (I doubt EA will want to market a machine that meets only the game’s minimum spec), and they will probably be named accordingly–the Crysis Warhead Performance PC, and so on.

I like the idea of Electronic Arts looking for ways to make the PC platform more approachable, and this idea is sound–buy this PC that says Crysis on it; it’s designed to run Crysis, and you know that if it plays Crysis it’ll play anything else on the market.  I was also impressed that EA had no less than three PC exclusives–Crysis Warhead, BattleForge, and Warhammer Online, and other games on display like Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space are in development for PC as well–in its booth at Comic-Con, a mainstream show if there ever was one.

As the rep also mentioned to me, EA’s own internal analysis indicates the PC market is growing–publishers just have to learn how to capitalize on it.

http://chrisremo.com/bloggin/2008/07/27/ea-wants-to-sell-you-a-pc/

My new 8800gt can run the Crysis demo on high with (I believe) 2x AA and get a playable and usually smooth 30-50 with some drops lower in certain areas.

Bring on the games!

This is a good thing.

I will ALWAYS advise building your own PC over buying any sort of prebuilt PC...it will be much cheaper and easier to upgrade, assuming you know what you're doing. And if you don't, it's really not that hard to learn...if you know what a graphics card is, and what kind of graphics card is best, you're on your way. Just look up compatible parts on something like tomshardware.com, or ask a friend to help.

But other than that, if you don't feel like doing it yourself; if you prefer the ease of consoles, then this is a good thing. Anything's better than a high-performance Dell or HP, because it costs a ton to get a good graphics card and such with them...Alienware is just ridiculous, and you can't always trust other custom gaming PC companies.

Making gaming on the PC more popular can only start with more capable machines on the market.

But remember these are "Crysis Warhead ready" PCs...not Crysis-ready...Crysis Warhead will be a bit lighter on the requirements apparently.

I think this is a good thing as well. Some people just aren't comfortable messing around with the insides of their computers, and this will give them a great pretty darn good PC to play 99% of the games on the market at high settings, and a lot of games to come. If they price it below Dell's and HP's gaming computers and market it, they should make a pretty penny from this.

Nice, I'm going to stick with building my own but I'm sure the un-tech-knowledgeable of us will be helped a lot by this. So this definitely is a very good thing.

I hope that this just means that Warhead will be better optimized so it'd look similar to Crysis.

Very good idea. I hope it works out.