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Microsoft’s Dean Lester addresses the future of gaming on the Windows platform
"We are absolutely committed to the platform."
Windows is, without a doubt, the operating system when it comes to PC gaming. Yes, there are other operating systems that games have been built for, but 99.9% of games are on the Windows platform.
Say what you will, but without the Windows OS, the landscape of gaming – as we know it today – would be a shallow place. Windows made gaming accessible, and if Dean Lester has any say in that, the world of PC gaming is going to get a lot easier for that PC community.
Lester is the general manager of Windows Graphics and Gaming Technologies at Microsoft. He spoke in a series of private interviews during the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, and talked with GameZone.com about the future of gaming.
“The mandate and the role of my group is to make sure that Windows, as a platform for gaming, is thriving,” said Lester. “Ultimately, we take care of the end-user, the Windows gamer.”
“Right now my primary mission is to make sure that everyone knows that Microsoft has two gaming platforms – one is the Xbox, which had got an awful lot of the focus and attention, but Windows is absolutely equivalent in terms of priority for us in terms of a gaming platform.
“It’s got lost, I think, in the last two or three years around all the attention that was focused on Xbox.”
Perhaps one of the reasons that the Windows platform has been lost is that the console market has received a lot of the focus and attention, and because of that, the death knell for PC gaming has been predicted. However, if one looked around at the titles available for PC at E3, one could not help but be impressed not only by the numbers, but the quality of the games.
“The death of Windows gaming has been claimed multiple times before,” Lester said, “and each time – just like the NASDAQ and the new economy (the NASDAQ is never going to go down again, it’s always going to go up), history is a much better predictor of the future than certainly a snapshot in time.
“We’ve come from a time when the consoles have absolutely gone through a fabulous boom period, there’s no doubt,” said Lester. “But that peak is now passed, and this year there is double-digit decline in revenues and number of titles and units sold of hardware and software.
“It’s not growing this year, it won’t grow next year and probably the year after that. So right now the pendulum swing that happens every four or five years is swinging clearly back towards Windows.
“I would say that, because that’s my job, but what I would say to you is take a look around the show and as you seen the titles that everyone is talking about – ‘have you seen this? It looks amazing.’ – if you look down, most of it is games for Windows.
“So we have two or three things all aligning. We have the decline of the console – and they’ll come back, probably bigger and better in the next wave – but there is certainly two or three years now where publishers, developers and gamers are saying ‘where’s the next leading-edge platform where the best stuff is going to happen?’ And the most powerful gaming platform available today is a Windows XP PC, beyond any shadow of a doubt. The Xbox is very powerful, but a $600 PC from Dell today is significantly more powerful than an Xbox, and that’s just going to continue. The next generation, the coming generation of graphics chips from ATI and Nvidia are twice as powerful as the generation before. So this type of power is coming every six to 12 months as a wave, which means the previous generation is coming down in price. So for a few hundred bucks, you’ll get an absolutely killer machine.”
Windows XP is a solid gaming platform, but more importantly it is allowing developers to begin to design for the next generation console systems, according to Lester.
“Many of them are building cutting-edge Windows titles with the knowledge that the next generation console can take advantage of what they are building,” Lester said.
Lester stated that there are likely 10 triple-A titles being released this year and that bears into the cyclic nature of the industry and publishers returning to the Windows gaming platform.
“Those two things are aligning to give us what I believe is going to be a really good retail year,” Lester said. “The other angle on this is the online side, which everybody knew and everybody predicted – you know, years ago, ‘sooner or later that broadband thing is where I am going to get my games and where I am going to play’ – but no one ever made that connection, and we’ve been saying it, ‘is that time now?’ The answer is, it’s now! For Windows, last year was the first year where online revenues, taken as a whole, matched the retail revenues.”
But when you are talking about the platform, there are some areas, clearly, where the console platform has the PC platform beat. Even Lester is willing to admit that.
“There are console elements that the Windows PC aspires to,” he said, “in terms of ease of use and reliability. I love the fact that I know when I put the disk in the console it will run. However there is plenty of stuff going on in the Windows market that the consoles are looking at going ‘can we equal that?’”
Plasma televisions and hi-def displays, downloads, keyboards all are an attempt by the console market to capture what is endemic to the PC platform already.
“The average PC bought today is a killer gaming machine,” Lester said. “The challenge we have is the areas where the Windows PC doesn’t do quite as well in comparison to the console. So while I believe the games are awesome, we still have a challenge over the ease of use and simplicity piece.
“The fact is even buying a Windows game can be a bit daunting for the non-technical user.”
One of the ways that Lester and his group are working to make the experience easier for non-technical people who may not even be truly aware of the capabilities and specs of the systems they own. In the Longhorn time frame, which is the next release of Windows, that will make the gaming experience a “no-brainer.”
In Windows XP, there is the game advisor, which has 150 titles logged. People can log in and see if their system will run a title, as well as get information of the game. The program will also recommend upgrades for the player’s system should they be needed. The publishers put in the recommended upgrades, such as what video card to use.
But the Longhorn system will attempt to take it a step further.
“We have a big initiative underway right now with all the publishers to go set-up free,” Lester said. The idea is to be able to pop the CD for the game in the drive and not have to worry about the whole set-up process. Advanced users will be able to get in and determine the drive and install parameters if they wish. And there is a new driver model in the works to ensure that all display drivers are updated frequently.
And then there is the compatability between the next-generation Microsoft game console and the PC. Plans call for the peripherals to be standard between the two platforms. That will be addressed with the USB connection.
“We have things like patching solutions coming,” Lester said. “We’ve got a big investment in make sure the Windows gaming experience is just as powerful as it is today, that it is simple and robust.
“We are absolutely committed to the platform. It is critical to the future of Windows that there are great games coming for it. It just makes the whole platform that much more exciting.”
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