PC gaming: a platform to rule them all
It’s one of the most debated issues within the PC world together with the digital downloads’ true weight: how much is the computer video games market worth, what financial results does the PC gaming hardware gain compared to the - seemingly much healthier - major home consoles one? The reply comes from the PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA), the publishers and producers non-profit organization “dedicated to driving the worldwide growth of PC gaming” which details heavy numbers and proclaims: the computer definitely is the largest, most widespread and financially important gaming platform out there.
PCGA lately unveiled its latest “Horizons Hardware” report regarding the “major aspects of the PC gaming hardware industry worldwide“. According to key data included in the report, in 2009 computer gaming hardware shipments were “over two times larger than the combined Wii, PlayStation, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 console units shipped in the same period“. “Revenues from consumer PCs capable of gaming that shipped with a discrete GPU (excludes Netbooks and integrated graphics-based PCs)“, PCGA further says, totaled 54.6 billion dollars in 2009 and are expected to rise up to 61.3 billions by 2014.
PCGA evaluates that the number of worldwide players equipped with discrete graphic hardware PCs (desktop and notebook) amounts to 212.6 millions for 2009, and that it will rise up to about 322 millions by 2014. The PC is the largest gaming platform compared to which home consoles pale, PCGA suggests, and as for the different regions of the world the Asia Pacific continues to be the largest gaming market with a 33% market share followed by Europe (24%), United States (22%) and the rest of the world (21%).
Users owning a gaming PC are willing to pay a 25% more for the experience compared to mainstream systems, the IDC analyst Richard Shim says as quoted by the PCGA press release. In turn the PC platform rewards passionate players with skills that are seemingly unreachable by the most talented console users, if it’s true what the HP gaming division CTO Rahul Sood stated in the past days namely that a Microsoft project to make PC Windows systems and Xbox 360 consoles compete each other has been rejected for disproportionate inferiority of players with a joypad against the ones with a mouse+keyboard combo.
Gaming skills aside, owners of fairly armored gaming PCs can now enjoy the exclusive StarCraft II, Blizzard’s announced masterpiece which sold 1 million copies in the first day and threatens to sell at least 6 millions of them by the end of 2010. Casual gaming? Social pastimes and tiny free appliances on Facebook are the future of PC video games? Yeah, for sure: their revenues “pale in comparison to how much World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare are making“, Epic Games co-founder and vice-president Mark Rein says.
It’s the Unreal and Gears of War developer’s opinion that “triple A” titles will never stop being the video games market core business, on PC as much as on consoles. The same opinion is shared by another long-time protagonist of the field, renowned for his deeds as designer and coder of unforgettable PC classics like Syndicate and Dungeon Keeper: “Triple-A is here to stay - Peter Molyneux says - When TV came along it didn’t replace the movie industry. Social gaming is like TV. It is going to co-exist“.
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- Xbox 360 is (even) cheaper in Europe. And outsells Wii in Japan
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