[News] PC Gaming hardware sells double that of consoles
Reports of PC gaming’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, and it is in fact stronger than every current console combined. That’s according to a report by the PC Gaming Alliance which says PC hardware outsold that of every single console combined last year.
Are any of you PC gamers? Do you think the PC is a stronger system than consoles? Or do you think the PC Gaming Alliance might just be trying to push their vested interested in the system?
Feel free to leave your thoughts here.
I always take reports like this with a pinch of salt. For example, what is their exact definition of PC gaming hardware? The report talks about 'PC's capable of gaming' but whats to say that all of these are being used for such a function?
With a platform as versatile as the PC, quantifying the way people use one based on sales alone seems a little.... odd
As above. Where was that information gained from and based on what exactly. You can blame sales on social networking being much more attractive than 15 years - Oh my, I can remember the days of Freeserve and the MSN chatrooms and ICQ being peoples preferred methods of talking, oh and jeez you should have seen some of the websites back then
PC are too versatile to be used just for gaming. Though pc game production should continue indefinitely as some types of gamers only play when they have a spare hour or two, hence not worth investing in a seperate console. Some pcs are capable of rendering graphics as good as any console machine so why would companies resort to no longer catering to that niche market?
Actually most low end pc blow the consoles out of the water when it comes to gaming capability these days. If you look at the hardware specs of the xbox and ps3 are looking a bit shabby compared to pcs these days. When I compare games I play on my pc to what the same games look like on my consoles, it's like I turned down the graphics setting to minimum, so I'll always go for the pc version over a console if possible.
The problem with these numbers is that they don't distinguish between gaming pcs and non gaming, technically every piece of pc hardware is gaming hardware. For instance about 3/4 of the pcs in my work place are capable of running a modern game decently, but of course they never will. I didn't see anything in that article that distinguishes business cliets from home gaming clients. Obviously this somewhat distorts the perception of the pc gaming market.
While a pc has the potential to be superior to a console in nearly every way, there are two very important barriers to entry which will mean that it will always (well for the forseable future until cloud computing is the norm) a much smaller market place. Those are price point and accessibility and those are the deciding factors.
A console comes in around the £200 mark and you can take it out of the box plug it into the tv slouch down on the couch and you're away. You'd need to spend double that for an entry level gaming pc and to really get the most out of it you need to have a certain level of technical expertise. And to get a comfortable setup where you can play games on your couch with your feet up takes a lot of faffing around. The fact is there's a lot more people out there with £200 and no knowledge then there are pc enthusiasts.
I do think it is wrong to think of pc gaming as a niche market though. Look at Blizzard for example...they couldn't care less about the console market and are making an absolute killing and not just on WoW. One main advantage of producing pc games is that you don't have to pay the significant hardware liscence fees to the console manufacturers.
But, yeah...untill pcs become much more accessible and the price drops (which is unlikely as unlike console manufacturers, pcs can't be sold at a loss per unit as there are not software liscensing fees to make the money on), theres just not going to be as big a market.
The distinction between pc and games console is really starting to blur though, so maybe we will soon see a new breed of platform that has on demand performance and functionality. Cloud computing perhaps.
As has been mentioned, you can't assume all pcs are used for gaming, not even all that are capable of gaming, many will run nothing beyond solataire or minesweeper. Surely sales of actual games are what you need to measure.
Whilst pc gaming is versatile and broad, like for like sales of AAA games are much lower (exceptions like Starcraft not withstanding).
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