So this is my idea for a discussion not only on where the two markets stand, but where they are going and ultimately (and perhaps most importantly) what will it mean for us gamers in the near and not so near future?
The idea for this thread really came about from some discussion (heated and otherwise) between myself and Justin Bailey in the Left 4 Dead thread and elsewhere. Justing makes the case that PC gaming is a niche market and is essentially dying.
Now I’ve heard that before, ever since the 90’s really. Still hasn’t come to pass. But is he right? Are the current market trends spelling doom for the PC as a gaming platform? And whatever the answer to that question might be, what will it mean for the state of gaming in general?
Justin’s latest piece of information which he says illustrates his point is that PC retail sales last year only accounted for $911 million out of an $18.8 billion pie.
My rebuttal went thusly:
This figures do not take into account three important sources of revenue in the PC market, specially today. First, digital download sales for PC are up by a huge margin and continue to grow. I personally have purchased more than 80% of my games last year and this year through digital download services. Secondly, we have huge ongoing revenues from MMO gaming fees. So the 11+ million warcraft players and the millions of other MMO players paying to play every month are not counted in the figures Justin provides. Finally, console and portable gaming hardware sales are included in the figures Justin mentions, but the PC gaming hardware market is not. The PC gaming hardware market apparently stands at $20 billion right now and is responsible for over 6 billion in sales.
It is not exactly fair to put up the PC as a single platform and contrast it with ALL OTHER retail sales and then call it a niche. Even ignoring my points above (and why should they be ignored, as they are all significant) the $18.8 billion in retail sales includes ALL other platforms from cell phones to portables to both current gen and previous generations of consoles still alive and kicking COMBINED. Compare the numbers for the PC market against any SINGLE current gen platform and you get an entirely different picture.
Finally, don’t forget, that with the exception of nintendo, the other two next gen consoles have been losing money on every console hardware sale for a couple of years now and are only now starting to go into the black in terms of hardware sales. This is not an issue in PC gaming.
I really don’t think PC gaming is going anywhere, just as it wasn’t going anywhere 10 years ago when people said it was dying. It is instead evolving. Digital downloads, new technology, more capable internet connections, it’s all changing the PC gaming world (and the console world too for that matter).
So what do you guys/gals think? Is the PC market going down the tubes? Whether you believe it is or it isn’t, how do you think gaming will change in the upcoming months and years? Would it be a good thing/a bad thing for either platform to decline?
It is my impression that PC gaming has a much stronger position in Europe than it does in the US (or Japan). It seems to me that if one is going to make case regarding the health of PC gaming from sales figure, one should not just compare like to like, but also use global figures, since the gaming market is a pretty global market.
I don’t see PC gaming going away. As a caveat, I wish to disclose that the latest console game I’ve played was Super Mario Brothers III on the SuperNES. So I’m not exactly plugged into the console market. But…
I just don’t see consoles as anything but extreme luxury items. A PC can be used for a million things other than games. You can do your taxes, connect to the internet, keep your household finances, communicate with Mom, write a novel, make business presentations, do schoolwork…AND play games. Some of the newer consoles also offer internet connection, but other than that…what? Yeah, console games almost all have 64 or higher bit structure now.
But I can’t afford to drop $300+ on a machine which is only used to play games (which cost $30 or more themselves). I can’t afford to monopolize the television when there are two other people living in my house who actually watch TV. I already have a PC, which I can play games on to my heart’s content without discomfiting anyone else in my house.
Console/PC both have their positives and negatives. But they’re literally two different things…we just blur the line between them because they’re used (sometimes) for the same purpose.
I think PC gaming is really strong in places like Korea as well. They play a lot of massively multiplayer games there.
I’ll keep buying PC games if they keep making them. For any FPS or RTS game, a mouse is a much better controller than a joystick. Plus you can get better graphics on a PC, as well as mods to tweak gameplay, or convert it entirely.
Well Korea really is just a phenomenon unto itself. I hear that in Korea the way you find out that your father finally thinks of you as a man and not just as a boy, is that he gives you a copy of starcraft. PC gaming over there really is like a sport.
PC gaming isn’t going anywhere, that said it IS easily second to console gaming these days. Many people, myself included, got tired of having to constantly upgrade hardware to keep up with the industry. THere was a period when I dropped $300 every 6 months on a new graphics card, and I was spending LESS than what some of my friends were paying to update their machines.
I love PC gaming, I love what you can do on it, but console gaming is much less of a hassle and, more and more, is offering nearly the same services (online multiplayer, mods, etc. Obviously the mods aren’t as widespread, but they’re starting out). You can even download free demos, pay-for TV shows and Movies, stream media including music and videos from your computer, and now Xbox even has Netflix service. Once they start allowing mouse-and-keyboard adapters widespread, or even requiring them for some games (might not happen, but we can hope) it’ll be damn near equatable on most fronts, other than graphics (but that gets back to my annoyance and pained wallet experiences with constant upgrades). However FPS’s aren’t THAT bad with two joysticks, you get used to it. Still not as good as mouse and keyboard, but not bad. And the Wii remote, were it used properly and not just as a crap gimmick in most games, would solve all problems with strategy games (though Civ Revolution does a good job on the 360, I gotta say. Has less depth than PC Civ games, but still quite good)
I upgrade my PC every few years, usually just a new motherboard and CPU for $200 or so. Whatever CPU is $100, plus a motherboard to go with it. Every couple years I buy a new video card for $100 or so.
Really just keeping your machine optimized with as few background processes as possible lets you squeeze maximum performance out of it.
It’s nice seeing that PC titles are cheaper than console games these days.
oh yea, and PC gaming really needs to do away with that crap DRM, especially the SecureROM stuff. It’s really just a hinderance, and it only punishes the people who buy the game legally, exactly the people the industry should be rewarding.
I agree with the OP that it’s ridiculous to pool all hardware and software sales for all the consoles and then compare it only to retail software sales on the PC and declare PC gaming is dead.
People often seem to share this complaint (in the other thread, there was hyperbole about needing systems costing “thousands of dollars” to play Crysis), but it’s not really true. I’ve only paid more than $225 or so for a computer component once and it was a bit of a splurge, but it lasted me a few years. You can certainly end up spending a lot, but it’s because there’s a huge premium at the high end - for example, the same CPU at different stock clock rates might be $150 for the 3 ghz model, $300 for the 3.2 ghz model, and $800 for the 3.4 ghz model. For a 13% speed increase you’d be paying over 5x as much. If you stay at the best price/performance point, PC gaming is pretty economical. Buying the high end/cutting edge is sort of like flying first class and then swearing off air travel saying it’s ridiculous that it costs a few thousand dollars to fly from Dallas to Miami.
I’m an avid PC gamer and I tend to only upgrade parts once every 3 years or so, and then I usually only spend about $700-800. And I rarely feel very behind the times. Granted, I get even better price/performance because of my tweaking ability, but it’s still not that expensive if you’re value conscious. It’s nowhere near necesary to upgrade every 6 months - you can, if you want the cutting edge experience - but you won’t suffer that much if you upgrade less frequently.
People will complain though that you “have” to upgrade your PC more frequently than a console. In my view, you “get” to upgrade your PC - consoles are stuck in their technological generation for years - any Xbox you get now is functionally identical (except for some stuff like HD size) as a unit bought in 2005 - whereas with a PC, spending $120 on a video card now will get you something more advanced than the most expensive graphics card of that time. You’re frozen in time with that console - upwards of 5 years - in an industry in which change comes blazingly fast. People cite the inability/lack of need to upgrade consoles as a plus - in your view then, would it be ideal if we never moved beyond this console generation and in 15 years we were still using the same things? Then you wouldn’t have to spend a cent on hardware upgrades.
Consoles are already several generations behind PC hardware, and we won’t see a batch of new consoles for a few years when PCs are WAY ahead. I hope that ushers in a new PC resurgence - in 2005, what an Xbox could do was behind what a computer could do but not THAT much. In 2008, the gap is much bigger. In 2011 the gap will be huge.
My biggest concern is that games tend to be developed for all platforms now - it has resulted in the dumbing down of game interfaces and gameplay depth. And it removes some incentive for the game developers to push the hardware because they don’t want to produce games that can’t run well on a console. Sometimes developers put in the extra work - for example, the developers of Mass Effect took months after the console release of the game to add content and improve the graphics and then released the PC version. But most of the time games get released just as ports. It still looks better on the PC - you can play at higher resolution, apply FSAA, anisotropic filtering and other effects - but it doesn’t fully utilize the power of the PC.
Regarding the $18 billion figure, the money spent on console hardware was included but for PC only software spending was counted. Also, console games cost more (twice as much or so) than pc games.
It would be better to look at number of sales by platform over the last few years.
Seriously, do you know what one of the top selling PC games was recently? Sins of a Solar Empire. You know what DRM they had? A CD key you have to enter once in your life and then you can download it hassle free from their site for the rest of eternity if you register, or pop in the disk and CD key again if you want. I know someone who doesn’t even LIKE strategy games who bought it JUST TO SUPPORT THAT KIND OF BEHAVIOUR.
Agreed. It’s really unfortunate how boutique PC manufacturers like Alienware and Voodoo were allowed to dictate what an ‘entry-level’ PC is. The fact is, $700 is more than sufficient to get graphics better than anything you see on a TV screen.
I don’t think PC games are going anywhere. There are a few popular types of games that are really only viable on a PC. RTS games and shooters being in the top. Sure, you can play them on a console, but the freedom of movement with mouse/keyboard really is superior to the clumsy dual analog controllers. As long as these types of games remain popular, they will be released for PCs. And as long as people play these kinds of games on PCs, other types will follow suit.
How many of you want to play Starcraft II on a console?
I guess I should climb into the fray seeing as how it’s my fault we’re in this mess.
But before I begin, I just want to say that I don’t think the PC market is dying. You can’t kill a market that could theoretically tap into every PC in the world, literally billion and billions of people. So let’s get that out of the way. But I do think the market has essentially stopped growing and will only shrink in light of bigger and better and easier to use consoles and handhelds.
Right here is the major crux of our disagreement. While I agree there are plenty of sources of revenue connected to PC gaming that are not counted in the “18.85 billion total game industry” number, I don’t think they level the playing field at all.
Yes, digital distribution is huge, but that number does not count digital distribution in the console realm either. The Wii’s Wii Shop (Virtual Console and WiiWare games), the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade and the PS3’s PlayStation Network put out a lot of games and a lot of them are major sellers. It’s my belief that PC DD and console DD are basically a wash.
Secondly, while WoW is huge, the market has never been able to successfully support more than one MMORPG at a time. Sure, there’s a few minor ones (LOTRO and WAR spring to mind as new releases), but that 11 million number really only applies to WoW. It doesn’t close the gap, you could say.
Finally, I don’t put much stock in that “$20 billion PC hardware” number. The study doesn’t say what exactly a “gaming PC” is and it makes the case that PC gaming hardware is a larger market than…
All PC games, All console games, All handheld games, All console hardware and All handheld hardware combined. Color me :dubious: at that one.
This is a good point, but 900 million out of an 18.8 billion pie is still a ridiculously small slice. A niche slice you might say.
World of Warcraft is one game. Nintendo will likely pull sales of 11 million copies of Wii Fit out of their ass this year on top of nearly a dozen other million sellers.
Wow. So you just ignored everything I said and decided to stick to comparing retail PC game sales vs all game and hardware sales of all other platforms combined.
Okay…
Wait, did I wonder into an evolution vs creationism thread by mistake?
PC gaming over there really is like a sport.