Microsoft's Kevin Unangst

One, we need to make it clearer you don't have to pay to play... Two, I do think we need to add more value, and communicate to users the other things we could do on the PC to get them excited and make them think paying might be worth it.

There may be more things we add for free, too. There's no reason we have to charge for any innovations we're going to do... We've heard the feedback and we're going to move ahead.

You can be confident we want to enable things like digital distribution, the ability to do downloadable content for games - that's a direction we're definitely headed in. We don't have anything specific to announce in terms of timeframes right now.

There are There are 60 million DirectX 10-capable cards out on the market now. If you look at that compared to any of the console installed bases, that's a great number. If there were 60 million Wiis or 60 million 360s out there, no one would question it as a huge opportunity.

In the interests of being self-critical, I think we would have liked to have more games that took advantage of it early on in the year. Lost Planet and Company of Heroes did a good job. Right towards the end of 2007 we started to see games like Crysis ship - games that really took advantage of the technology.

If you look at the US retail sales, which a lot of people did... You know, I was at CES talking to quite a few folks who said, 'Oh, Crysis didn't sell well, the December numbers weren't very good.'

But first of all, worldwide, it's done really well - especially on the digital distribution side. Also Crytek did the same thing they did with Far Cry: they invested in technology that's a couple of years out and they will have a much longer lifespan for that game. It's sold consistently well since then, and the new systems people buy this holiday, they're going to be running Crysis on it. That will be the benchmark.

That's an easy judgment to make if you're just looking at US retail sales. If you look at where the growth is, there are more gamers on Windows than any other platform. There's more money spent on Windows games than any other platform. PC games outsold Wii games and PS3 games in 2007 worldwide. The growth of casual and digital distribution is huge.

I do think that, as much as I'm proud of what we've done over the last year, the industry needed to get together and be more focused on communicating those messages. PC gaming's not dying because US retailers are selling 7 per cent less games than they did the year before; it's about the exponential increases, the 80 percent increase over five years that's been predicted for the PC gaming business.

The PC Gaming Alliance is a consortium where we can get together to set the facts straight, and have a forum to address things like piracy - which frankly is a really tough issue on the PC compared to the console... We'll have a unified voice worldwide. There will be many companies, not just the big ones we announced, that will come to help spread the message.

We've just got to get the facts straight. I think it's easy for someone to make that judgment without knowing all those facts. That's our job to fix.

Haha, yeah, we had running jokes about the imagery you could have...

Mark Rein is the representative from Epic, he was at the PCGA press conference, and someone came up and said, 'Hey, Cliff just said this!' Mark was like, 'Look, you know, that's why we need things like this. That's why we needed Microsoft to go out and start doing this a year ago and invest, and start getting people's attention back.'

It's a great start. The amount of energy being expended on the Windows Gaming front is more than ever before and the amount of dollars being invested is more than ever before. I think we just haven't been touting it enough. We've got to set the record straight and get people excited, and that's what we're going to do.