I think Microsoft would be in a better position to comment on their operating system and compatibility. We haven’t done any research necessarily to try and understand are PC gamers leaving PC gaming because of Vista. As a hardware vendor, if you ask me, I think it has more to do with hardware platform decisions that are being made than it does the operating system…

Mainstream consumers are not buying desktops now. They’re buying notebooks. And when they buy a notebook they go to store or they buy it online. No one’s telling them, hey you know what, this is a mainstream notebook, but it [can’t] play games. We all know there are gaming notebooks that are just out if this world awesome – Alienware, Dell, many, many other folks out there making just a great gaming notebook. But there’s a much wider market of mainstream consumers that are going out there buying $700, $800, $900 notebooks and they’re doing so expecting that every piece of software they bought for their desktop will still run on their new notebook. I think in large part when they start to play those games on their notebook they didn’t know when they bought that notebook for example that it wasn’t gaming-capable or it wasn’t able to play the games they had previously enjoyed o their much older desktop.

That’s a challenge for the industry. Notebook gaming is growing by leaps and bounds. If you look at some of the trends, casual gaming is on the rise. Why is casual gaming on the rise so much? Of course, [casual games] are available on just about every website. You go to Oprah’s website, I think she’s got games available... They’re everywhere. Aside from that, the fact that they play on just about every platform makes them ubiquitous and makes us able to say there’s this huge audience of PC gamers, 250 million of us worldwide - of which maybe half are exclusively casual gamers. And the PCGA, coming together as a consortium, is recognizing this trend and one of the main things we’re trying to accomplish is sitting down and saying, “Okay. Here is the experience we want to advocate as a minimum staring point of gaming on the PC.”

And we want the hardware OEMs and the game publishers to support that guideline and to advocate the experience of gaming on the PC at a stable starting point, something will last a couple years and then move on to the next [standard]. Something that when you know that you’ve got that equipment that’s gaming-ready that you’re gonna have an acceptable experience with the games that you want to play on that machine whether it’s a desktop or a a notebook.

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PLAYING:
GTA IV (PC)
Halo 3 (X360)
COD4: MW (PC)
Fallout 3 (PC)
Prince of Persia (PC)

So they want people to start buy gaming labtops?

And speaking of labtops, how much do the gaming ones cost? The one that can play COD: WaW.

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"Anything that humans can imagine is a possibility in reality" - Physicist Willy Karen

1000+. But desktops for gaming are 600+. Monitor not included of course.

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PLAYING:
GTA IV (PC)
Halo 3 (X360)
COD4: MW (PC)
Fallout 3 (PC)
Prince of Persia (PC)