PC gaming is bigger than ever - and likely bigger than Wii+PS3+360 in 2007

[shio]

twesterm said:

Mudface said:
From what I've seen, it looks like the US accounts for around 50% of video game sales revenue. In 2007, that amounted to around $8.6 billion, stripping out the PC revenue reported by NPD at 9.5% of retail sales. So let's really over compensate, and say $25 billion worldwide.

That was mainly split between 4 consoles (including the PS2) and a couple of handhelds. The PC generated $10.7 billion in the same year according to the report. Maybe the Wii accounted for over 40% of the console revenue and took more, but there's no way the PC is in last place.

If you're going to try that method, don't take the total and divide by 4, that's just silly.  You give a pretty exact amount for the PC to compare a very general for the other four, one of those not being a huge factor, and that just isn't right. 

If you want to try and compare that, find the totals for each indivual console.

actually Mudface was being generous, because DFC estimated that the Console Games Revenue was "only" $14 billions in 2007.

The reason I said PC was bigger than the 3 Next-gen consoles combined, was because if you took out the revenue made from PS2 (plus whatever little from GC/Xbox), you'd probably have an amount lower than $10.7 billions.

Mudface said:

guigr said:

Mudface said:
guigr- did you get to see any UK sales figures as well? I know Germany's a massive PC market, especially in strategy games, but I just wondered how we Brits compared.

 

Not much I only saw some totals. From what I saw multiplatform games were selling very poorly compared to console versions and games like Football Manager were selling very well.

You must know that already, sorry.

No bother, I was just interested. The last concrete sales figures I saw were about 4 years ago or so in PC Gamer UK. From memory, they mentioned that the PC accounted for around 30-35% of sales in the UK, slightly behind the PS2, but way ahead of the original XBox and Gamecube. It's a shame that Charttrack and the like are so tight lipped about sales here.

 

If I remember right, PC had 23% of UK's unit sales in 2007, but it was the highest selling platform. Ofcourse, that's not even considering the sales from digital distribution.

twesterm said:

Mudface said:
Why would a game not make money on 400,000 sales? That's $10- 20 million in revenue, and it would all go straight to the publisher/ developer, rather than a console manufacturer taking a cut. Stardock's games have made a mint for the company on those sort of sales figures, and any company making a game with a budget of a few million will make decent cash.

 

Console games do cost more but it still costs a lot of money to make a game.  Not all of that money goes straight to developer, there are a lot of costs to recover.  I my home I have the costs for a last gen game (PC and console) sitting around and I can list those costs assuming I remember to come back to this thread (I'm pretty absent minded a lot of the times, especially after long days).

dude, Sins of a Solar Empire (88% on Metacritic) only cost $1.5 million to develop, and it made a profit in the double digits. And the game is amazing, by the way.

Audiosurf was made by just 1 guy, and it was amazing. I'm sure that it will reach 1 million copies sold someday (if it hasn't already).

There are tons of stories like these from PC developers. PC games are much cheaper to develop AND have a higher profit margin for every copy sold.