Microsoft wants to lead PC revolution

Microsoft has hit back at criticism that it isn’t doing enough to support PC gamers.

The platform holder says it should be its job to offer leadership in the sector, and will step up with three market-leading PC titles: Fable III, Age of Empires Online and Microsoft Flight.

There’s been a fair bit of criticism aimed at Microsoft that we were spending a lot of our focus on console, and we need to be putting resources behind PC as well,” Microsoft Games Studios’ general manager Dave Luehmann told MCV in an interview.

Other companies should look to Microsoft for leadership, but I’m not sure they do. It is our job to lead the way on PC. And in some ways we are doing that and in other ways we are not. So we need to step up.

We are putting some real investment and big IPs behind the Windows platform. We’ve spoken of the first three, Fable III, Age of Empires Online and Microsoft Flight. However we are not going to stop there.”

All of these games make use of Microsoft’s Games for Windows – Live service which is the PC equivalent of Xbox Live. Luehmann says it is Microsoft’s job to experiment with new business models to help inspire other publishers and developers worldwide.

I think it is the responsibility of first parties to push the business models in to new directions. We will test some ideas – some will work and some won’t,” added Luehmann.