Had they ”stuck to their guns” PC gaming would be ”in a much better position” today says Hewlett-Packard’s Rahul Sood. PC was ‘too good’.
”Rumor has it that there was a project many many months ago at Microsoft that was under wraps. The goal was to bridge XBOX gamers with PC Gamers so they could play against one another in games like Unreal, or Gears of War,” read Sood’s Blog.
Rahul Sood is CTO of Hewlett-Packard’s gaming division, and founder of computer designer Voodoo PC. It’s fair to say he likes PC gaming. ”This was all part of their Live strategy, and had Microsoft just stuck to their guns and made it work PC Gaming might be in a much better position than it is today,” he continued.
”Not to say that PC Gaming is in a bad position, but it’s not like it used to be. The PC is shifting, as I’ve said many times over the last couple of years. The need for multiple high performance graphics cards is all but dead.”
Sood offers an apparent explanation as to why Microsoft canned the project…
”Personally I wish it would have stayed the course. I’ve heard from reliable sources that during the development they brought together the best console gamers to play mediocre PC gamers at the same game… and guess what happened? They pitted console gamers with their “console” controller, against PC gamers with their keyboard and mouse.”
”The console players got destroyed every time. So much so that it would be embarrassing to the XBOX team in general had Microsoft launched this initiative. Is this why the project was killed Who knows, but I’d love to hear from anyone involved — what happened?”
It seems even on a bad day the keyboard and mouse will take a controller pad to the cleaners, which is something we can be righteously smug about at least. Perhaps Microsoft were scared of potential rages leading to destroyed Xbox 360s?
