The new president of the PC Gaming Alliance says one of his priorities for 2011 is to make the historically low-profile organization “a lot more public and vocal.”
The PC Gaming Alliance was founded three years ago by numerous industry heavyweights as a way to promote the mouse and keyboard in an increasingly console-centric world. Or so it seemed, anyway; the reality has been considerably different. Since its founding, the organization has put out a grand total of ten – yes, ten – press releases (including one announcing its formation), most of which were simply notifications of new members joining the group.
It’s not what you’d call gripping stuff (although the March 2010 announcement that PC gaming software revenue had grown by three percent year-over-year had the hair on the back of my neck standing straight up) and while the PCGA may be an industry-focused group, it’s tough to be seen as the champion of a cause if nobody knows you exist. That’s one issue that Matt Ployhar, who succeeded Randy Stude as PCGA President in December 2010, wants to address right away.
“The PCGA was founded for two reasons. What they did, is they went into the mode, if you will, where they felt like instead of, ‘OK, it’s better going loud and proud and being really vocal and visible,’ it was kind of like, ‘OK, let’s build out a body of research so we’ve got kind of a belated backup to what we’re saying here’,” Ployhar explained in an interview with Gamasutra. “And you can’t really do that overnight. People know that you’re a real entity, and you’re data-driven, and it’s not opinions and emotions-based.”
Ployhar said the PCGA has done a great job at assembling statistics to show that the condition of the PC gaming industry isn’t nearly as dire as some people think, but hasn’t been as effective in communicating that information to the public. “That was one of the things I’m looking at and going, ‘You guys got all these software best practices, all this stuff, but you don’t talk about it’,” he said.
“We’ve got a ton of things to talk about, and a ton of things that we are already working on. So, better communication, level-setting expectations, outlining what we’re going to be doing for 2011. We’ve got a pretty big announcement coming up for GDC,” he continued. “The way I look at it or articulate internally, is taking this organization from crawl to walk. This is a marathon, not a sprint. That’s where we are today. It’s helping and gathering, building things out, so that we can be a lot more public and vocal, and vociferous.”
