Microsoft on the State of PC Gaming

There's an interesting Q&A with Kevin Unangst, senior global director for Windows Gaming, over on Kotaku. Discussing the current state of PC gaming, Unangst seems to believe that the biggest difficulty facing the platform is perception. "When you look back to some of the [NPD] numbers for this year, just in 2007... more people in the US bought Windows games at retail than they did for the Wii," he says. "It's 36 million units for PC games, versus 31 million units for wii. When you look at the numbers from DFC Intelligence, people spent more money on PC games, including online distribution, than they did on PS3 games in the U.S. in 2007. When I try to do an apples-to-apples comparison, surprising figures come out."

No doubt, the outlook for PC gaming is a little brighter when you take online distribution and alternative forms of revenue into account. Nevertheless, I think there are some serious barriers to PC gaming that consoles don't have, including cost and accessibility. Contributing to the problem is Vista, which has so far delivered very little to make PC gaming either cheaper or easier.