Valve PR honcho Doug Lombardi spent a while talking to CVG at EAs Games Showcase event in London last week.
Doug talked about a whole load of things to CVG ranging from Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike to Valve wanting to see a Wii game and much more. Some of his comments are really quite interesting.
In a very frank interview with Gamasutra Valve’s Doug Lombardi takes the time to talk about the success of AudioSurf, continued indie game support, Steamworks and on how he views the PC market as overtaking the console market.
Recalls Lombardi, “I can remember this story coming around in the mid ’90s… and then 3D accelerator came out, and Carmack released that patch for GL Quake, and everybody shut up, because all of a sudden PlayStation looked like crap. There’s a big shift about to come in the post-GPU space… all of a sudden PC will leapfrog what’s going on on the consoles, in many other ways besides graphics.”
In fact, continues Lombardi, the question mark might be floating squarely in the console’s future, as their prices continue climbing and more post-purchase purchases are becoming necessary. “How much longer will that story still have credibility?” He posits.
“Somebody go back and look at next-gen console install base numbers since launch time, and compare it to PSone and PS2. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we saw these guys stuttering out at 25,000 — nobody’s going to get to 100 million, which we saw from Sony on the last 2 [console generations]. I don’t think anybody’s even thinking of this.”
This is a very in-depth interview and it presents a fantastic insight into how Doug views the PC gaming market and the future of the console industry. Check it out here.