The sigh of relief that went out after the PC Gamer show at this year’s E3 summed up the sudo talk show perfectly. Whilst many, myself included, had high hopes for the first dedicated PC conference, the thing we got on the day was rather lack lustre and almost certainly overstayed its welcome.
The event itself lasted nearly three hours, during which the audience was subject to a mixed bag of titles that were already available on PC or had been announced during conferences earlier in the day. Thinking back very little new announcements were made, with developers using the PC conference as a chance to discuss the more technical aspects of their games; it began to feel more like the in-between segments hosted by YouTube and Twitch than its own conference.
By far the biggest announcement was the Gears of War collection making it on to the PC platform. Phil Spencer was being his usual elusive self when it came to discussing the possibility of porting Xbox exclusives onto PC. Gears is certainly a start, and hopefully the first of many Xbox exclusive to be brought over onto the PC platform.
Gaming segments were occasionally split up by members of AMD coming on stage to discuss the new Radeon 300 series graphics cards, which were announce during an earlier AMD based conference. Both AMD’s CEO and Chief Gaming Scientist, yes I want that title as well, came on stage and began alienating anyone who didn’t have a qualification in computer sciences. For what it was worth the AMD tech segments were at least something different to freshen up the stagnant talk show, for anyone who had missed the AMD conference it served to highlight the key announcements and show of AMD’s latest and greatest, including a rather interesting high power, small form factor GPU which will no doubt make for a good small gaming PC build.
The more laid back, talk show, style was certainly something new, the execution was certainly off. Day 9 was by no means a bad host, he certainly had the energy to make the event entertaining, it was just the report with the developers was lacking. The PC Gamer event was apparently the least rehearsed of all the conferences and to a degree you could tell, with various technical issues and on one occasion the developer forgetting their lines.
It is undoubtable that this was a poor showing for the first PC conference, with any hope PC Gamer and AMD will go away from this, knowing where they went wrong and how they can fix it for next year, actual unveils would probably be a good place to start.
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James Wood