Already in ‘soft launch’, the program is to basically give a stamp of approval on titles that meet certain criteria but at much less cost than console certification. The PCGA wants more to sign up.
The program is OS-neutral and focuses on quality and technical implementation of the game, although the details remain in discussion at the moment.
The PCGA would charge developers $500 to certify a title or $2,500 if they wanted the PCGA to both certify and quality test the game. It’s their hope that this could be seen as an industry standard and help PC developers in the long run sell more as confidence grows in the quality of their combined work.
PCGA-certified titles could sport an official logo both physically and digitally, and the group is mindful of making sure their certification system isn’t just one giant set of flaming hoop jumps with little pay off for studios. They want to apply lessons learned from the console side of the industry.
”We don’t need to have it completely locked down and so restrictive,” says PCGA president Matt Ployhar. ”We don’t need to tell people, ‘This is your minimum configuration.’ But, you still need to hit a certain quality bar.” An example would be maintaining 30 frames per second at 720p on medium settings, with controller support if on another SKU.
”As various gaming cert programs come and go, we future-proofed this one by accommodating the flux and future directions of OSes and form-factors that comprise the spectrum of the PC ecosystem,” added Ployhar.
Can the wild frontier of PC games development be tamed into a certification process? More about the PC Gaming Alliance’s certification program will be unveiled in the coming months.
