In a new interview with TG Daily, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney, the creator of Unreal, talked about the unfortunate state of the retail PC game market. Ultimately, when it comes to gaming, Sweeney feels the hardware makers are not looking after the mass market consumers.

"...it is very important not to leave the masses behind. This is unfortunate, because PCs are more popular than ever. Everyone has a PC. Even those who did not have a PC in the past are now able to afford one and they use it for Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever. Yesterday's PCs were for people that were working and later playing games. Even if those games were lower-end ones, there will always be a market for casual games and online games like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has DirectX 7-class graphics and can run on any computer. But at the end of the day, consoles have definitely left PC games behind," he said.

One of the major problems for developers, he said, is that the difference between high-end machines and mass market machines is huge (as much as 100x), and the prevalence of integrated graphics makes the situation worse.

"Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference [to more capable gaming PCs]. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that," Sweeney continued. "Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs."

Sweeney lays a lot of the blame at the feet of PC chip giant Intel. "PC gaming is in a weird position right now. Now, 60% of PCs on the market don't have a workable graphics processor at all. All the Intel integrated graphics are still incapable of running any modern games. So you really have to buy a PC knowing that you're going to play games in order to avoid being stuck with integrated graphics. This is unfortunate, and this is one of main reasons behind the decline of the PC as a gaming platform," he said. "That really has endangered high-end PC game sales. In the past, if you bought a game, it would at least work. It might not have been a great experience, but it would always work."

In the end, Sweeney acknowledged, "PCs are good for anything, just not games."