In an effort to save the purportedly decaying PC gaming platform, major gaming industry players including Microsoft, Intel, and Nvidia are joining forces to form what has been dubbed the “PC Gaming Alliance,” reports veteran video games journalist Dean Takahashi from Mercury News.

An announcement is expected at next week’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, with the PCGA expected to focus on addressing problems which make the PC a less desirable gaming platform than consoles. One such issue is the complexity of developing games for the PC: not only do the various components within a PC vary widely, but the performance ranges widely as well – hence PC gamers are often unsure about how well a game will run (if at all) until it is installed and loaded up.

Consoles, on the other hand, while less powerful than the average PC, at least offer a stable, consistent hardware platform in which users need only to pop-in a game to start playing. The PC Gaming Alliance would exist to bring this unified, standardized experience for PC gamers. The Alliance looks a bit like an extension of the ‘Games for Windows’ initiative, though exactly what they plan on doing remains unclear.