The numbers don’t back you up. In 2011, the sale of new (physical) games across all platforms declined but the sale of used games increased.
PC gaming is so friggin awesome, that it’s responsible for MOST of the software dollars spent on gaming on the planet.
And that’s with no mega corporation spending untold billions of dollars marketing it as a gaming platform and subsidizing the hardware. Think about that. Consoles would not exist if it weren’t for the huge marketing campaigns and the subsidized hardware, except perhaps as a very niche market. Yet the Pc as a gaming platform not only thrives, it is the market trend setter in most areas of the industry.
The PC platform is where new genres are born (the FPS, the western RPG, the MMO, the MOBA), and experimented with (look at the resurgence of the true survival horror genre thanks to small projects like Amnesia, DayZ and other indie titles), it’s where new technology is developed and tested (HD gaming was on PC for years before consoles -sort of- got it, and every cycle it’s the same - tech lives on PC and years later it’s introduced into consoles), it’s where new market trends evolve (online, connected gaming was born on PC, the free to play market is thriving, and you can bet the consoles will follow suit next gen).
It’s also got decades of amazing games to draw from for it’s library, and it’s never been as popular and as affordable as it is now.
The issue with mainstream media that you are likely exposed to, as well as the retail space, is that in the States and in the UK specially, PC gaming is not as large as console gaming. It’s not a distant third either, however. Games tend to sell as well as the PS3 on the PC, and on occasion even as well as the more popular xbox 360.
Retail has largely fallen by the wayside on the PC market, specially in the states, which is why you can’t go into a gamestop and expect to see a lot of PC games (although now even they are carrying steam bucks cards 
).
But PC remains a huge market. Diablo 3 sold as many units as the last mega Call of Duty title, which was sold on 3 different systems. Indie titles flock to the PC because many are making a lot more money on it than on the console digital stores. Free to play games are making bank around the world, and even publishers who pay a lot of lip service to consoles are trying to break in to the PC digital scene.
About the only people who seriously think the PC gaming scene is in any sort of trouble, or is “niche” are people who are fairly ignorant about the industry as a whole.
The numbers do back Alessan up…somewhat.
LOL, and I ordered a used copy of Pharaoh because I was too lazy to make Rob go out to the barn and search for the CDs …
But you are correct, most people download games instead of buying them in hard copy. I haven’t bought a hard copy game for my PC since WoW. I much prefer to download.
Ubisoft had a painfully inept interview lately trying to reconcile their 95% number with their claim that their DRM was effective (against the face of an announcement that they were removing much of their DRM). Frankly, I wouldn’t trust their numbers for anything.
As others have noted, I think digital distribution has taken the place of physical sales enough that many stores just don’t stock as many boxes. I won’t assume that I’m typical but in the last couple years I’ve bought perhaps 130 games digitally and received one physical game as a gift. Which still would have been cheaper had it been bought digitally.
Actually, this is pretty accurate. There’ve been all kinds of studies involving various games that “phoned home” to the game company server and just reported if they were legal or not, and the piracy rate came out to be ~90%. Now, whether all/most/any of those people would’ve BOUGHT the game if they couldn’t get a free copy is up for infinite debate, but the number of people who pirate games on the PC is roughly the same hilariously large number it is on Android.
I’ll find a cite for you.
Yeah, I’m not buying 90%. (hehe)
And who cares? If your game sells 5 million copies on PC do you care about the people who don’t buy it?
Another company that said the same thing was the Crysis devs (although I think they’ve back tracked from that statement too). I mean, it just didn’t make any sense. About 7 million copies of Crysis have sold on the PC, are they seriously saying that 70 million people pirated it, and that all of those 70 million would have purchased the game (making it the best selling video game in video game history, ever!)
Part of the Ubisoft justification for their 95% number was…
I know some regions are rife with pirates; Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, enough so that companies deeply discount their games for that region hoping to get someone to pay some cash money. I’d be curious to see a break-down by geographic region regarding software piracy. Not that I have illusions that the US will be 10% or something but I think the 90-95% number is inflated by some particularly piracy-prone regions.
Cites for piracy:
Piracy is a fact of life, so why not just have fun with it? (Mentioned just above the video)
Machinarium Dev Saw Up To 95% Piracy Rate
And something with the methodology:
And you’ll note that none of these are huge corporations like Ubisoft - these are small outfits (Which gives the lie to the ol’ pirate excuse of “sticking it to the man”) trying to make a living (and, thankfully, usually succeeding). I don’t believe any of the examples above have DRM, which means that A) Ubisoft’s DRM was worse than useless and B) Not having DRM doesn’t really help, either, so you can scratch the “I pirated your game because I hate your DRM” excuse off the list too.
None of this means PC gaming is “dying” mind you, but it does have a few things holding it back from reaching its true potential. The other being the cost of developing for such a varied platform. The amount of QA required to even try to make sure your game runs on all the various PC platforms is quite costly, and you basically don’t see a game release that doesn’t involve a FAQ with stuff like “If your mouse is sluggish, try this” and “Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date” and “Yes, we know the game crashes on certain AMD video cards, but we don’t know why yet, sorry!” and a lot of users just can’t be arsed to deal with this sort of thing.
But yes, the main reasons you don’t see many PC game titles on store shelves these days are:
A) Piracy. Stores got tired of people buying a game, installing it, and returning it
B) Resale - since they don’t generally allow people to sell back PC games used, there’s a lot more money to be made in moving console games that they can then play the pawn shop game with.
You’ll observe that you basically don’t HAVE the equivalent of the old “Electronics Boutique”/“EBGames” stores that mostly sold PC stuff. In fact, really, the only dedicated game software store I know of at this point is Gamestop, which is ALL ABOUT the piratical resale practices, which means they have no interest in PC titles at all. As a result, PC titles have moved to mail order/digital.
As for why people are concerned about piracy, well, lets face it - outside of your small handful of big AAA developers (ActiBlizzard, Valve and uh… mostly those two, at this point) the industry as a whole is hemorrhaging money. Profits are down year over year, but games keep getting more expensive, and people desperately want to find a solution. If you follow the game industry AT ALL you know that barely a week goes by without some studio either laying off a bunch of people, or closing entirely.
The problem is the disparate approach to development. More standards have to be applied consistently. Third party engines, I think are the future and will be featured in almost all games. The old -“I’ll make my own game engine for this game” is just not going to be viable in an era of 1080p 60 FPS games with “next gen” quality visuals. Look at the announcement for Dragon Age 3. First thing they said is that they’re using the Frostbite 2 (battle field 3) engine.
Outsourcing of art talent is also probably going to become more mainstream than it already is.
As for the difficulty of bringing out a game on PC, it depends, but it tends ot be EASIER to do on PC, as well as less expensive. It’s why the system thrives with small devs. Otherwise they’d all be on console.
Abstraction API’s and an open platform that is well documented, and tends to have a lit more power than your average console means high end games are going to be cheaper and easier to develop. Lower ends ones - well you’re not dealing with Ms and Sony and their expensive deployment hurdles at least.
Think about it. In order for a high end game to compete on consoles, it’s got to look at least as good as other AAA titles. That’s NOT easy on aging 7 year old hardware. It takes a lot of programming talent to be able to squeeze out something that looks good there. On the PC, it’s much easier to rely on more powerful hardware and modern API’s to smooth out the inefficiencies in your code, or to much more easily create tighter, more efficient code.
It’s nice to see a reporter who isn’t afraid to ask pointed questions. It’d be even nicer to see the same persistence by political reporters, although I guess we’d mostly end up with the same content-free doubletalk that the Ubisoft flacks expressed when squeezed in that interview.
I agree; For “big games” this is absolutely the way it’s going to have to be in the future.
This one, I’m less clear on. What are the advantages of outsourcing art? Just not having artists “on the payroll” when they’re not doing art? But aren’t most studios doing art constantly?
Nnnnn. I think this is misleading. Yes, for small games where things like the approval process from Sony/MS, and dev kits are significant part of the budget, yes. I think the reason you don’t see more “small” games on the Sony/MS platforms is that MS, at least REQUIRES games to have a “publisher”, which most small indies won’t have. It’s not DEVELOPMENT costs or anything associated with the hardware, but almost ‘political’ costs. For larger games, where the technical underpinnings are more ugly, I expect it’s significantly cheaper to develop for a platform that doesn’t have a nigh-infinite number of configuration possibilities. Yes, drivers and DirectX are supposed to take care of that, but they clearly don’t entirely do so. And large companies don’t have the problem of “You need a publisher, and oh, that’ll be 20k to put your game on our service” that indie/smaller games do.
I’m not seeing the “more powerful platform means cheaper development” correlation at all. In fact, I think it’s backwards. The more powerful the platform, the higher the expectation that you make everything shiny and put more polygons in all your models, etc, etc, and your art budget goes through the roof.
I disagree - the average console gamer doesn’t care if his AAA title doesn’t look as good as it does on the PC because he’s never going to see it on the PC. There’s no need to push the envelope that hard. Besides, when you’ve been coding for the same device for seven years now, that experience adds up being able to do more with it more efficiently - the best titles for consoles inevitably come out towards the end of their lifespan, while launch titles are frequently lacking.
Edit: Oh, and holy crap, the degree of non-answers by the Ubisoft people in that interview is stupefying.
Steam alone regularly reports peak usage of 4.7 million people online. That alone is enough market to suggest PC gaming is not dead.
So, while that is about 30% of the overall expected gaming market that is still MORE than substantial enough to keep developers in the game.
Add in some of the distinct advantages of a PC (the modding community alone is enough to opt for a PC over a console) and it will not be dying as a gaming platform any time soon.
As for piracy well, the numbers are almost certainly overstated. And while it is a concern for developers it is wrong for them to suggest they are losing money. They still (largely) make money albeit maybe not as much as they could have.
The problem with DRM is you are screwing over your best customers while mostly leaving the pirates unperturbed. Indeed I have seen numerous times where people found a game they bought to be unplayable due to DRM and opted for the pirated version which actually worked. How much money are companies losing by putting resources into DRM which rarely ever even works? If despite their DRM Ubisoft really had 90% of their games pirated seems like money wasted to me.
When done right a company can even gain the trust of fickle game players by eschewing DRM strategies:
As an aside CD Projekt RED also owns GOG.com (Good Old Games) and none of the titles on that site have DRM. Awesome idea GOG is (now if only they would get Homeworld on there…).
Been seeing predictions for the imminent demise of PC gaming for decades now. Off the top of my head I have seen at least half a dozen threads on this subject on the board in the last year or so as well. 
Is PC gaming on the way out? Not a chance as long as folks still have computers. Now, if PC’s decline, obviously PC games will…but I don’t see that happening, even with the rise of slates (which also use the same model, so could be considered successors to PCs). I think the OP’s perception of PC gaming being in decline based on the amount of shelf space for PC gaming at traditional B&M gaming stores is actually kind of ironic, since I see such stores as being pretty old fashioned at this point (sort of like B&M book stores). The trend seems to be more oriented towards electronic downloads these days. Hell, I literally can’t remember the last time I bought a computer game that came with physical media…and, most of the games I bought years ago that had traditional physical media I’ve since re-purchased (at a huge discount) electronically, mainly on Steam. New games I plan to buy I always check to see if Steam is planning to have it (I’ve pre-purchased XCOM for instance), and if not I find out who IS going to have the digital download (Diablo III and GW 2 for instance) and set that up. That’s the trend today, IMHO, and systems that still require physical media are, again IMHO, on the way out. What I speculate will happen is that consoles will move towards this as their standard as well, since people are so used to being able to do this with their slates or PCs.
Anyway, haven’t read all the responses, just a drive by post here, but that’s my take FWIW.
Well, it depends what you mean by PC?
Standard desktop and/or laptop? Not sure.
But I think you could classify the ipad and various andriod devices as PC in that they are very multi-use. So, in that sense I think that games on multi-use devices, such as PC’s, ipads, etc is on the rise. . . and dedicated platforms no so much currently.
CD Projekt RED is awesome. It’s just a pity that the Witcher 2, where they bent backwards to accommodate pirates by completely excluding all DRM on the version they sold (cheaper) on their webpage, is still one of the most pirated games of 2011. That left me pretty much completely disillusioned by the so-called principled pirates. (CDR also did an awesome job of supporting their game after launch.)
I think PC gaming will continue to be a successful and profitable niche.
I don’t think PC gaming will return to the glory days of the turn of the century when it was probably the leading gaming platform and received a long line of AAA exclusives. Outside of strategy gaming it’s rare to see any AAA exclusives for the PC any more. And even in strategy gaming, many famous franchises seem to have run their course without any replacement: Age of Empires, Caesar/Pharao/Zeus, Panzer General, Railroad Tycoon etc.
Given that the platform is larger than any single console… I think you’re sort of stretching the word “niche” a bit, no?
I think the whole “AAA” game it’s a matter of perception as well. And it’s not like consoles are full of them either. The Xbox has Forza, Halo and Gears, what else does it have exclusive that could be called “AAA” - and again, we might have to define what “AAA” even means. Most console gamers I know associated it PURELY with marketing budget. The game can be of the highest caliber, but if there are no TV ads they don’t consider it a “AAA” game, for some reason.
I think LOL, Dota2, Planet Side 2, Sim City, Civ V, Anno 2070, Diablo 3, Tribes, Mech Warrior online, Warface, Project Cars, Arma 3, Company of Heroes 2, C&C Generals, Elder Scrolls Online, SWOTOR, Guild Wars 2, Rome 2 Total War, are all tripple A titles- my definition being polished, well budget titles with modern game mechanics running on modern graphical engines.
And that list is not all-inclusive. Not only are those not all the high quality exclusives of recent years and soon to come, but it doesn’t include all the amazing indie exclusives, and the multi-plats that either play/run better on PC or are specifically taking advantage of modern PC hardware.
Why?
The Witcher sold 2.1 million copies and The Witcher 2 has sold more than 1.7 million copies and still counting.
That places them firmly in the realm of some of the best selling PC games of all time (there are lots that have sold more but they are still firmly in the top 50 or so).
Yeah, it sucks that so many people pirated it but as noted above CD Projekt RED has built considerable good will among gamers and the devs themselves note that had they put DRM on it that it wouldn’t have helped much if at all.
So, instead of spending who knows how much on DRM that doesn’t work anyway they built good will. Would they have made more had the implemented a DRM scheme? Maybe but instead they got good will from their customers and made them loyal fans. That is priceless.
Thank you for looking those up. I swear I’ve seen this question a ton before.