Shack: How does this tie into the PC Gaming Alliance?

Brent Barry: We're very proud founding members of the PC Gaming Alliance, very proud to be a part of it. This is along the same philosophy as the PC Gaming Alliance, we always wish that the industry could move faster than sometimes it does to the benefit of customers.

What we we feel like we have is an opportunity, because we deliver all of these components and we have support from so many members of the PC Gaming Alliance, that we're able to step up and take the, kind of what we wanted to do there, we can step forward and do it with all of our customers, be the innovative leader in getting it done.

It's definitely in the same line as the PC Gaming Alliance, it's just we know we can move a little bit faster. One of our goals is we want the rest of the industry to bring out these kinds of programs. We don't need any kind of exclusive right to this kind of marketing.

We know that if we can make the industry so that it's easier to find and play and have a really good experience, it's gonna be to our benefit, to our competitors benefit, to everybody's benefit.

Shack: I guess I don't get why isn't this a part of the PC Gaming Alliance?

Brent Barry: We're a part of the PC Gaming Alliance. It's an industry-organization-coalition-type thing. We're moving forward by ourselves on this piece with our partners.

It's not really about the PC Gaming Alliance not picking it up. We have our own set of goals and objectives and we want to try and solve this problem right away. We don't want to have to deal with the.. we know we can move fast because we don't have to do the politics, we know what we need to do because we can go ahead and run with this hardware.

We hope to really have a positive effect on the PC Gaming Alliance. The PCGA is the right thing for gaming. We need to come together, we need to set standards. But we also know, as individual companies, we can often affect change very quickly.

Shack: Who else is a part of the AMD! Game initiative?

Brent Barry: We work very closely with lots of software publishers, developers, and such, middleware vendors. We work with them mainly to help them with optimizations, help understand exactly what's coming on the software front, so that we, at the end of the day, can really provide a better experience.

A lot of the way that the software market works these days--I'm not really a fan of how some of this happens--but there's a lot of exclusivity, marketing arrangements, partnerships based on large-dollar marketing agreements. [They] really don't have anything to do about the technology at the base and the experience the end user is going to have.

I don't like it. I don't really want to be supporting of that kind of stuff, those kinds of arrangements. The software developers that we do work closely with, folks like Stardock, NCSoft, Ubisoft, and others, they're all folks who are very supportive of what we're doing with our efforts.

We do not have a piece of this program which is specifically targeted at exclusive marketing arrangements. Now, some of our partners are gonna be using the logo as part of their box and packaging, but that's more of a nod, I think, to what we're doing.

Unfortunately, the blockages that happen and the siloing of the industry that happens because of those kinds of marketing agreements are something that we have to try to overcome. Again, I would love to see our competitors and partners look to make this more about the experience that the end user gets to have and less about trying to silo and cut off end users from a better experience.