While speaking to Destructoid, Croteam CEO Roman Ribaric gave his opinion on the PC gaming market. He believes PC gaming is far from dead thanks to Valve's Steam platform. "With Steam now strongly commanding the digital market, PC's future looks better for us developers," he says. "I have to congratulate Valve for creating Steam, such an awesome piece of technology and server infrastructure, and making it available for other developers to use. I may sound overly enthusiastic with Steam, but this is nothing compared to what our programmers were saying when they started to implement it. I think it's enough to say that we always aim to do our technology, instead of using 3rd party, but with Steam, we don't need to do that."
Of course, Croteam's Serious Sam HD is also coming to Xbox Live Arcade January 13, so Ribaric commented on the use of that platform as well. "Having said that, XBLA platform is great as well. It allows for games that are really great to play and not just great to watch," he added. "They also don't have to cost ridiculous amounts to make, as you don’t need 100+ people to create it...XBLA Certification process took a bit longer than expected, but it's all sorted out now."
No matter which way you look at it, he's write about Steam. That being said, it's also one step closer to a more console-like experience, with a unified service not much different from Xbox Live or PlayStation Network, but one thing's for certain: PC gaming is not dead.
