Ahh... the site relaunch makes me feel very good. It's actually a project I was intimately involved in. It took a while and was long overdue, but these things take time when there's a lot of folks involved in the decision. It looks hot with Will from Dark Void sitting on the main page... it'll rotate though so it won't always be Will )

To answer some of your questions, if you read the site a bit more, you'll see there are several sub-committees (piracy, min-bar, marketing, research, etc.) and then within those sub-committees there are work groups convened that work at a project level.

Sitting above all of those, is the board of directors to manage the direction, process and budget. I now sit on that board of directors.

Each sub-committee has seperate standing conference calls where business is discussed and project deliverables handed out. The work groups execute against the projects and the directives arrived at and approved by the board of directors in the time between calls.

There are occasionally face-to-face meetings at all levels, usually once or twice quarter (often scheduled around industry events where our people are already travelling to).

So in short, the companies involved put a fair amount of resources in terms of people's time into the PCGA. While a lot of what's gone on in the past year has been somewhat "behind the scenes" (aside from the Horizons report we announced last August) there's a ton going on that's already affecting our business.

You'll hear more about the PCGA as time goes on.

Your question about the Russian market is an interesting one and the answer is "maybe". For those who aren't familiar with the Russian market, it is heavily PC focused. Traditionally, it was also heavily a pirate market, with pirate goods sitting on physical shelves (often English versions or EFIGS versions... and at times, the pirates were so driven, they'd do all of the localization themselves, mod the games to insert their loc files and sell them).

In recent years however, an emerging market of legitimate goods, localized, has given rise to a high volume, low cost marketplace. This approach only works on PC where the cost of goods are low enough that this could still be incremental revenue. Street prices used to be $7-$10, though prices have been steadily climbing for a few years.

The reason it works as a business is that the volumes are sizable and consistent... or at least they were until a couple of months ago when the dropping oil prices wrecked the Russian economy... it'll recover but in the short term, it's a difficult market for a while.

So could this work elsewhere? Potentially, but the key bits are as follows:

Local partners in a territory with the ability and wherewithall to place hundreds of thousands of units. Scale is what makes relationships of this nature worthwhile.

Local partners who in some cases, will help with the localization process.

A territory where the content being produced elsewhere (let's say, the US in our case) is broadly culturally acceptable to the target market. For example, the Russian market has in most cases, similar tastes to US and Western European markets. The same may or may not be true in places like India or China.

The installed hardware base is broadly powerful enough to run the same or similar software as Western markets. Nvidia, ATI/AMD and Intel sell an obscene amount of gaming capable hardware in Russia. The same can not be broadly said of India... yet. Tied to this is the growth of a sizable middle class with disposable income that can afford to have gaming capable PCs in homes and a desire to use them for entertainment.

One of the benefits of the PC in general, is that it can be the gaming platform in territories where consoles are highly unlikely to ever get a foot hold. Asian markets like Korea, China and eventually, India are good examples. Brazil is another example of where the PC is strong and growing given that tarrifs inflate the cost of consoles and console games (though this fact is also changing). It's possible to manufacture PC titles in-country and thereby avoid the import tarrifs that often make console games the equivalent of $100 or more.

Needs more light, but it looks good from a modeling standpoint. :)

Very nice site indeed, that's certainly a good start.

Though as much as I'd like to believe PCGA will change things in the PC gaming realm for the better, I really don't and everyone I have recently talked to shares my pessimism.

It's a well-known fact that PC gamers are treated like second-class citizens, PC as a platform lacks advertising (360 and PS3 commercials are everywhere), unification of some sort (blame nVidia and Intel for selling useless graphics cards with hundreds of variations) and blockbuster exclusives (they make people buy the hardware, spark their interest in what other games the platform has to offer. "Say, you bought Crysis, why don't you try King's Bounty, Dawn of War II or Empire:Total War, Disciples III? Or DMC4, it's much better on PC. Or classics like Commandos series, Quake, Arcanum, Fallout, Baldur's Gate?").

Now, who is about to make improvements? Microsoft? They're focused entirely on xbox and have been closing PC-centric studios lately. Halo Wars - an RTS (RTS!!!) won't be seeing a PC release. GfW LIVE has improved a lot, but still leaves much to be desired. Epic? "We won't make GoW2 for PC".

I don't know what to think about all of this, really. But I hope that you succeed eventually.

P.S. Nice job hovakim, keep it up!