14 DAY TRIAL // Everybody who is anybody in the game industry is busy predicting that the game consoles, like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, will attract more and more gamers while the PC will no longer represent a real gaming platform.
Alex St. John has a long involvement with the PC and games. He had been, until 1998, one of the people behind Microsoft's Direct X initiative and also the company's "games evangelist." He quit Microsoft to found and become CEO of WildTangent, but the "PC games evangelist" element didn't disappear from his biography. He still thinks that the PC is the future and that consoles may be dead after the current generation.
While talking to ExtremeTech, St. John lauded the PC for the way it pushes innovation and makes hardware producers always create new and more powerful hardware. Even Microsoft and Intel, which are really big enterprise-oriented companies, tend to become more innovative because of the way PC development works. And one of the main elements, when talking about games, is that graphics on the PC are set for a revolution, with both Intel and AMD ready to launch processors that have the CPU and the GPU on the same chip. St. John thinks this will revolutionize PC gaming as graphics computing power will become affordable.
When talking about the consoles, St. John is much less enthusiastic. He points to the success enjoyed by Nintendo as the real road that consoles should take, one of accessibility coupled with very fun games. The consoles that Sony and Microsoft have developed, however, are just closed PCs, which means that it's much harder to bring change to these consoles. St. John is sure that as PCs negate the performance advantage that current consoles will have a harder time attracting customers. For the CEO of WidTangent, it seems hard for console makers to recover the original investment they made in the consoles that they are currently selling. As costs spiral out for a new generation of consoles, there's a real chance that Sony and Microsoft will go the SEGA way: on top of the market one day, nowhere to be found the next.
St. John's company, WildTangent, is creating what they call "a console on the PC" currently offering all Internet connected gamers the possibility to play games, both casual and quality, via a simple Internet-based portal. A new version of their product, called Orb, is due in April, together with a vastly improved catalog of games from the likes of THQ or Sierra.