The PC Gaming Alliance is meant to promote the PC as a gaming platform and help member companies work together to tackle some of the problems facing the platform, such as piracy and hardware requirements. A lot of big name companies like Sony, Microsoft, Intel, AMD and Nvidia are still on-board, but one major company has recently picked up their bags and walked out the door.

Find out who is no longer a member of the PC Gaming Alliance, why they may have left and what this could mean for PC gamers in the future, after the jump!

Activision Blizzard has taken its leave of the PCGA just over a year after it helped launch the Alliance (why’d you even bother?). While the vast majority of the big name companies involved in the Alliance remain committed, the loss of arguably the world’s largest video game publisher and the company with the 12 million gamer strong WoW and the upcoming, destined to be HUGE PC title, Starcraft 2, has got to hurt. In terms of the software side of the Alliance, their team captain just walked away from its team.

PCGA president Randy Stude has this to say “regarding the Activision situation:”

“The PC Gaming Alliance is an industry consortium that relies on membership dues to perform its research. Membership turnover is a fact of life in any industry consortium, [and] particularly so in the current economy. Recently, a few members have decided they cannot justify the budget (membership and staff) required to maintain an active role in the PC Gaming Alliance at this time. However, we have also added several new members yielding a net gain for 2009.”

Activision Blizzard has not yet commented on why exactly they pulled out. I suppose I can see how the current economy “could” be a factor, the Alliance being a non-profit organization and all. Still, if that was indeed the case, I would have expected some of the smaller companies involved in the Alliance, Capcom or Epic Games for example, to have pulled out long before a company as massive as Activision Blizzard.

The PC Gaming Alliance, like PC Gaming itself, is not dead. Its just been sucker punched…again. With WoW still a raging success and the uber anticipated and destined to sell like gangbusters Starcraft 2 just around the corner (we hope), one who’d think now, more than ever, Activision Blizzard would want to be a part of an Alliance whose focus is on the very platform that made them (the Blizzard side) rich.

Why couldn’t Sony DADC, the douche bags who came up with SecuRom DRM software, be the company that split? “By, see yeah! Try not to get smucked by an asteroid on your way home!”

I know the Alliance will keep on trucking and Activision Blizzard will continue to dominate, but I can’t help but feel gamers are going to miss out on something great for PC Gaming that a PCGA, that had Activision Blizzard as a member, would have produced.

Source: GameSpot