Why Capcom Joined the PCGA
When you think of companies who are giants in the PC gaming world, Capcom's name probably doesn't come at the top of your list. That's ok. You can say it. It won't hurt my feelings. We know that historically, it's not what we're known for.
I said the same thing at an OEM event at CES last year and my promise to those people was that over time, we hope to improve that perception.
So for a couple of years now, Capcom has been making significant investments in the PC gaming space, breaking new ground (for example, we shipped the first DirectX 10 game in the world for example) and we've been quietly building a fan base here too.
So we believe in the potential of PC gaming and like other companies in the PCGA, we believe that there are things we can do to make it better for consumers, for developers, for publishers, for retailers and the hardware guys too. But it really does take everyone in the ecosystem working together for that to happen, a conclusion that was drawn out of an experience I had a few years ago at an Intel executive summit in 2004.
Intel had pulled some PC game developers and publishers to an offsite to pick their brains to talk about the future of the PC platform as they viewed it. I was there representing a former employer which also, primarily rooted in the console business but had aspirations of growing its share of the PC business.
For two days there was lots of tech talks about virtualization, resource allocations, dual cores and new instruction sets. There were some brief discussions to the retail market shifts, international growth ("I hear that Asia thing is gonna be big") and piracy's growing impact. But by the end of every conversation, it became clear to the people in the room that none of these were issues that Intel by itself, even with the help of the few executives in the room, could solve.
Every proposed solution to the issues discussed required some combination of input from retail, from ISVs, from OEMs, from GPU companies or support from Intel's competitors. And at that time, it seemed like a pipe dream like something that could ever happen.
Unlike the console business, where uniformity is managed by first parties, the PC business's biggest weakness (and arguably also its biggest strength) is that it's so decentralized. While there is never going to be a master of the PC platform, it would be nice if there were at least a Sherpa or two to point the way.
Fast forwarding to January 08, when our contacts at Nvidia and Intel approached me about the PCGA and told me about the membership that was prepared to form, I leapt at the chance.
I pushed Capcom to join because I recognized how important the PC is to our future business and the synergies it has with our existing business. I joined because all of the right partners that could affect meaningful change in the platform were aligned with a singular vision of making the PC a better ecosystem. I joined because having deeper relationships with those partners can only help our growth. I joined because I felt that the right issues were being identified as factors that were holding the system back and I wanted Capcom to have a voice in how those get rectified.
And that's the biggest deal of all. If decisions are going to be made regarding the future of a platform we're increasingly investing in, we absolutely needed to have a seat at that table and help lead the platform to a better place.