Microsoft has had more false starts in the PC gaming field than can be counted at this time. While the company has undoubtedly been influential in the PC gaming arena – its DirectX and XInput APIs in particular were hugely beneficial to PC gaming, and some of its games, such as Age of Empires, are beloved by PC gamers worldwide – Microsoft has had an inability to commit to PC gamers and to give them what they want.
However, on the eve of Microsoft’s newest push for PC gaming, especially in the light of the announcement of Age of Empires‘ remaster for PC at E3 this year, Microsoft Studios’ Adam Isgreen discussed the company’s aspirations to be a major player in the PC gaming field with VentureBeat.
“The thing is, there are a lot of us at Microsoft — my whole career, I’m going on 25 years making video games,” Adam said. “Most of my career has been making PC games. I’m not alone at Microsoft. There are tons of people there that have been there a long time, and new people, who are real PC gamers. Yes, I have consoles. I have every console built since the 2600. But I’ve had a PC since the Apple II. We’re all PC gamers. We believe in PC gaming. It’s not a hard conversation at Microsoft to say, “Hey, this would be great. What are we going to do on PC? How can we make it great?” There’s a lot of discussion about what features we need to bring specifically to PC to make games great, to make people love them. We want people to believe in Microsoft as a place they can get great PC games.”
He also heavily teased a major Age of Empires announcement coming at Gamescom this year. “I’m super-excited. We’ll be talking more at Gamescom about Age of Empires. Everyone that tunes in will be super excited the stuff we’ll be talking about.
“E3 is a wonderful show, but it’s very Asia- and U.S.-centric. With Gamescom, Europe has a long and storied history with RTS games. We want to make sure we do just as much justice for Gamescom and all the European gamers as we did at E3 here today. It’s important to us that we take this here — it’ll be further along. People will be playing the beta. We’ll have more to show and talk about. But yeah, we have a whole event planned around Age of Empires for Gamescom.”
Microsoft, if you announce a proper Age of Empires 4, I will buy a copy of Windows 10 the very next day.