Microsoft will increase focus on PC gaming - Moore
Microsoft's games boss Peter Moore has pledged to do more to promote and support PC gaming in the coming months and years, after apologising for neglecting the company's "number one platform" in favour of the Xbox.
Speaking at the DICE summit in Las Vegas, Moore admitted that Microsoft was partly culpable for the decline of the PC platform at US retail, and apologised openly for "the dereliction of duty to our company's number one platform, the PC, in terms of gaming."
The recently promoted head of the firm's entire videogames division - encompassing both the Xbox platforms and the PC gaming division - outlined a number of key problems he sees with the PC market at present, including technical issues such as the lack of a unified online service and troublesome install processes, and a lack of coherent branding leading to consumer confusion.
Moore hopes to address many of these problems through the launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next operating system which is due to be released at the end of this year after several major delays.
Games will be a key element of the Vista OS, in the same way that images, videos and music have gradually been integrated into the system, and the new system also promises to introduce a more stable environment for games and a simplified install process.
The company will also be driving for the standardisation of PC game packaging at retail, Moore told the summit, and will be providing developers with new tools to build online community functionality into their games on Windows Vista.
While Microsoft's new focus on PC gaming will be welcomed by the industry, it's likely to come in for a cynical response from many gamers, who already see the software giant using videogames as an excuse to force users to upgrade to Windows Vista.
The company last week announced that Halo 2 will be available exclusively on the Windows Vista platform, meaning that people wanting to play it on their PCs will not only have to wait for two years after the launch of the Xbox version, but will have to pay for an expensive operating system upgrade to do so.