Games for windows

I wandered into a GAME shop the other day, that place is fast becoming the sole reason for my ever increasingly jaded view of the traditional public image of games but more on that later. A quick look around any games shop confirms one thing, the PC section is shrinking skulking and further back into the shadows a sad collection of budget titles and console ports while the shelf space given to console titles seems to be ever increasing - hell the PS2 section in most GAME shops seems to almost dominate half the shop, the things almost dead yet its still given quadruple the space to the PC arguably the birthplace of all games.

While the revenue in things like MMORPG and casual online games are increasing ten fold a 10% drop in traditional titles from last years shows something’s up, with the ever shrinking public image of PC games it’s hardly surprising.

Well its fallen to Microsoft to address this issue, with there unveiling of games for Windows initiative, all console games have a standardised box layout, console name on the top perhaps on the back details of the numbers of players supported that kind of thing; with pc games its different there’s no fully standardised look with each publisher taking a different approach in presenting specifications, genre etc all the things customers look at when deciding a purchase. It maybe purely psychological but having a instantly recognisable banner and look on each pc game would make the pc look more like a viable gaming platform a brand if you will and less like a scary mix of specifications and publisher branded games to the casual gamer.

Addiotnally Microsoft are also tackling the traditional trap of the requirements box to Mr Casual gamer, working with Vista's new PC rating system the pool of numbers and stats are now broken down into a numerical score on your PC, if your PC scores a 3 and the game requires a 3 or lower than congratulations you can run it! Of course there’s bound to be mistakes in this approach but it massively increases the potential of people trying games on there PC's rather than simply being put off at the first hurdle.

Of course you could just argue that Microsoft is doing this simply to control the PC games sector much the same way it does with the 360 make the PC a closed system, they hold all the cards in the same way there trying to do with DRM for multimedia. Only time will tell