News Gaming PC market bigger than you’d expect

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/11/19/gaming-pc-market-bigger-than-you-d-expect/1

New market information from Jon Peddie Research finds that global sales of gaming PCs far surpass those of all three home consoles combined!

 

Big time Pc gamer. Even though i have a PS3, my two gaming pcs are where the funs at. Good news about the hardware sales. Will be interesting to see what valve say about sales especially since i think a big propotion of sales of left4dead will be on steam.

 

This bit of information is much more accurate than "PC Gaming is on a decline" imho. Much more logical.

 

PC games only because I'm not rich, I can't afford console games(they're generaly more expensive than PC games). I'd rather buy mixture of 20 new & old PC games instead of 4 console games per year.

 

This looks like another useless analysis to me. 196 million gaming PCs? What constitutes a gaming PC to these guys? My bet, something along the lines of a PC capable of playing a game, shock horror, that is every PC.

Raw facts, PC games don't sell well, no need for companies like this to talk ********, AAA PC games aren't selling as well as their console counterparts in most cases. It doesn't matter if there's a "bigger" market if most of that market aren't interested in anything other than the sims or peggle.

 

guess it depends on what they class as a gaming PC, something with a low end ATi or Nvidia chipped would be classed as a gaming PC by the likes of PC world but wouldn't be able to play any new **** from the shops, just the other day I had to convince a guy that his new £400 'gaming' laptop from PC World wouldn't play Stalker, perhaps good for a bit of peggle or the odd flash game but lets not get carried away.

Consoles have made stuff really easy for people so you can see why people prefer to use them, you pop the game in your system it works, no tweaking with graphics options and resolutions to get the best playable compromise, no keyboard configurations to mess about with, just pop in and go, nice and easy, how it should be, Pc gaming is a bit of a minefield for people who don't know about them.

My PC is just a gaming PC I don't use it for much else the problem is that you have to sit in an office like position to play it due to mouse/keyboard being the best option for shooters, I personally wouldn't mind if the PC became more like a console and with games for windows in some respects it has, plug in your 360 control and away you go but even there its flawed, not all games work solely with joypad which is a right pain in the arse, my PC plugs into my 1080p TV via HDMI, the machine has the power to play every title at max detail at that res and its great when the joypad controls work but when they don't in stuff like Valve games I can't be arsed to go and sit upstairs alone with the PC just to play, so what if keyboard and mouse it better I just want to sit downstairs on the big screen and sound setup and truely experience my games.

Consolification of PCs, i'm all for it

 

/lends you flame proof suit.

I've already called the Fire Brigade , Army.

 

PC's will always have a good market for games just for the simple fact of MMO's and to a lesser degree RTS gamess.

Fair enough theres been some porting on MMO's onto consoles (can only think of FFXI right now) but PC is the way to go if you want to play a MMO, pretty similar with RTS games its murder trying to coordinate a battle with a controller.

Yes you can get mouse/keyboard combo's for consoles but the playing position for most console gamers isnt right to use them, i know it aint for me.

Same vice versa thou i dont like playing racing games or things like GTA on a PC it just doesn't feel right. I have the same pc controller problem, they are crap they barely work. Maybe if PC's got a decent controller that needed little setting up for all games it would help the PC game market. loads.

 

if you want to sit downstairs with your sofa and big tv then buy a console thats what theyre for, in my eyes anyway. Personally i cant use a controller for **** in anything other than racing games.

I dont want my PC to be consolified i want to be able tinker under the hood not bogged down to standardised components that i have no say over,.
Big stores have a big part to play in this i mean the cheapest 'gaming' PC on the pcworld website is £900 for the base unit and it has a 9800gt?! now im not saying its a crap card but id say a ps3 or xbox360 would run games better and for a significant amount less money too.

 

They're right about the 1 game for ages thing imo. Most of my friends and I do that, UT04, CSS, WoW, TF2, and now Left4Dead. 5 games, 5 years. I have bought a few other games along the way (mostly this last year), but most of them haven't.
I know that doesn't really make it a compelling market for developers, which is why I've been buying more over the last year than usual (gogo Mass Effect), but most people wont be swayed from a free product (singleplayer), thus the multiplayer offerings are the main purchase.

 

This sounds about right to me. Console games are more designed (mostly) for a quick, casual, pick-up-and-play experience whereas PC games tend to be more time-consuming. Though of course that's not true in all cases it seems a general trend.
Consoles probably suffer as well from a bit from lack of backward compatibility - I'm still playing PC games I bought years ago rather than going and snapping up the latest AAA title as soon as it comes out.

 

Greetings!

If I see you being dragged by a Smoker, I will not save you.

 

I had a feeling it wouldn't be the most welcomed comment for around here but I like the quality the PC brings due to its ability to have greater hardware but don't want to sit at home the same way I do at work, right in front of screen left hand and on keys for control and right hand on mouse for input/action, a more relaxed posture at home is welcomed.

Of course the downside is that devs are now focusing all there effort on consoles due to that being where the money is and there is zero effort in the PC version, look at CoD WaW how can that play so bad on PC compareed to console or if the new Tombraider Underworld Demo is anything to go by how can a PC version at high res look worse than say Uncharted on PS3 for texture detail etc. lame.

 

I disagree with the performance statement. I'd be willing to bet that my 9600GT would be on par with consoles when it comes to playing GTA4, they didn't have fantastic draw distance and I'm pretty sure they weren't even 720p.

 

I bought an Xbox 360 in August, and sold it last week. The games are OK, the console is great, but it doesn't come anywhere near close to my PC.

Glad to hear that it isn't all doom and gloom, and most of the negative PR is coming from companies like Epic as justification for selling themselves out.

 

Yes, the market continues to grow and yet the retail sales don't. Yet those figures don't take into account digital delivery of games, which I would think is a very rapid growing market since I will buy a game through steam if I possibly can, coupled with the fact that almost all of the AAA titles we were meant to covet in the past couple of years have either been very bad ports or just plain crap/unchallenging games.

The best games I have played this year have all been independent titles like Mount & Blade, World Of Goo and Multiwinia.

 

exactly. The reason console games sell so well relative to the number of consoles out there is because the owners of those consoles really have very little choice. Why have an xbox and not play Halo on it? That would be foolish. But to not buy Halo for your gaming PC... well what's strange about that when there's so much else you could be playing instead? Especially as most have played it on an xbox already. This social/'playing on your mate's xbox' side of console gaming is probably a factor as well.

 

As we can see, more competition is the pc market results in a higher chance of amazing games. The sort of games you can keep playing for years. While this is great for the customers and great for the companies that can create such games it is not good for cash cows. These cash cows are considered with making money. The amount of time or actual enjoyment that one gets from the game does not matter, only how much money it makes. It is easier to release cash cows on smaller markets as there is a reduced risk of an actual good game coming out to compete with it. Also it is smart to target a younger group with cash cow products as marketing will be the main sell for these products and younger audiences will be more supceptable to the campaigns.

Therefor one can conclude that companies such as Epic are no longer interested in trying to create high quality games that you will want to play over and over again because there is no money in that (they believe). Argo they are now focusing more on consoles and trying to promote there former customers to follow them.

 

IMHO I think pc games are a whole lot better than console ones. This is mainly because you can do so much more with it. I fell in love with pc games when I found out how to mod some of my games, to be able to cheat (on single player of course) and use trainers for games that didn't have cheats, and take apart the games to extract certain files like the cinematics.

 

It's all about money now. If you can make 10mil making a console game and only 3mil making a pc game what would you choose? Very few Devs do both with success. The casual market dwarfs the "hardcore" market. I prefer PCs and if it wasn't for the change of heart on the Devs part my last console would still be the PS2. I only bought a 360 because the PC wasn't doing much at the time.