Rick Carini, Chief Technology Officer of gaming technologies at Dell, thinks that people "get fed up and don't buy PC games any more". Why are his remarks important to gamers? Well, Carini happens to be the chair of the recently created PC Gaming Alliance, which brings together major players in the PC hardware and software fields with the declared desire of making the PC a good platform for gaming again. In fact, Carini is speaking for companies like Dell, Intel, Activision, Epic, AMD and Microsoft, so his voice must be heard.

He laid out the philosophy of the organization as one that aims to bring the PC back to the forefront while inspiring more developers to consider the PC when they plan the creation of their games.

The PCGA believes that lack of standardization is one of the most important issues that need to be addressed with PCs. Even if the share of the PC gaming market is not as bad as some would like us to believe, growth is pretty much restricted to on-line games, mostly casual, and to MMOs. To Carini, it proves that "it's alive, and well, and thriving" but he says work must be done to focus on the experience of the PC gamer.

The solution that the PCGA proposes for the short term is to create a unified standard, easy to express through a ratings system, which would allow anyone buying a PC to see, at first glance, what kind of games the machine is capable of playing. The PCGA cannot standardize the hardware itself, but it can offer a rated view to the end user.

Carini says that "We're effectively going to take the hardware, take the software... and SMU is going to validate across a series of games and series of usability tests and prove that these are valid for a gaming experience".

There's no date attached to the implementation of the new rating system but if the PC Gaming Alliance really wants to act and make the PC a viable platform again, the time to act is now.