US gamers woke up on Tuesday to a full page advert in the Wall Street Journal, proudly proclaiming ‘PC gaming is not dead’. Razer, manufacturer of high end gaming peripherals, placed the spread to announced the start of a new campaign to highlight the enduring popularity of the personal computer.

Couched in the form of an open letter to “our friends at Xbox, Playstation and Wii”, the advert is a thinly veiled response to the gloomy regard the PC market is often regarded with—a haven for piracy, churned out console ports and absurdly expensive upgrades. In other words, the gaming supremos at Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony just got served.

According to Razer’s letter, signed “for the PC gamers of the world”:

“The rumors of our untimely demise have been greatly exaggerated. We are more than 300 million PC gamers worldwide and this legion is growing every day. Today there are more PC gamers than all console gamers combined and we have been silent in the face of the closed gaming systems that have been propagated.”

“We, the PC Gamers, have been here since the beginning and have seen the industry grow to surpass movies and music, and we look forward to an open world where console and PC gamers will stand side by side as gamers in arms.”

The figure quoted for the PC gaming population is more than a little suspect, as it would indeed be extremely difficult to measure the amount of PCs used for playing games that are never connected to the Internet, or PCs installed at cafes that serve many users in a single day. Also unclear is whether casual gamers, who may play games on Facebook or Kongregate, but would never pay £30 for a AAA title, are included.

The campaign letter links to a website at pcgamingisnotdead.com, which consists solely of a newsletter signup and a countdown clock ticking down the minutes to August 26th. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

It’s difficult to work out where exactly Razer are going with their campaign, but as a wild stab in the dark, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was aimed at getting platform holders like Sony and Microsoft to open up their systems to cross-platform play with PC gamers. The prospect of multiplayer gaming into Xbox Live and PSN has been raised before, but the big media firms are understandably reluctant to release their grip on their walled gardens.

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