Retail Sales of PC Games Dropped 14% in 2008

[shio]

Slimebeast said:

shio said:

It's not fair to compare figures from 2 different years. And that $10.96 billions includes handheld games sales, not just consoles.

And how do you know the genres have declining sales? if they are declining, then how on earth is PC's global revenue increasing every year? FPS and Strategy games seem to have a big part of the DD pie when you look at DD Stores Top selling games. And it's obvious that the RPG genre on PC is atleast 5 times more successful than 5 years ago. Your problem is that you don't seem admit the fact that there are other viable business for PC games.

Anyway, great PC games can be developed way cheap. Look at Sins of the Solar Empire, which is winning several GOTY awards - the game cost less than $1 million to develop!

 

 I do admit that PC market as a whole is expanding and doing well. But the viable business is outside of the traditional genres I (and most people on gamings sites) care about. For me it's a concern that the revenue growth is coming from MMORPG subs, MMORPG microtranasctions, advertising and casual games.

The revenue from traditional genres - RTS, FPS, RPG and adventure - isn't doing well because of piracy (and competition from consoles).

About Sins of solar, are u sure about the $1 million? Because I recall reading in PC Gamer that Stardock's dev team is at least 35 guys (split on two parallel projects perhaps, but still) and a game like that must have taken a couple of years to dev.

 

 EDIT: $1 million is only 10 man years in a Western dev studio (and rufly 20-30 man years in a Eastern studio) - on average 10 guys working on a game for just 1 year.

You think that the online revenue is only from MMORPGs, which is false. There are several non-MMORPG games that use subscriptions/micro-transactions/advertisement, and 2009 will be an even bigger year for them when games like Quake Live, Battlefield Heroes, Love, Jumpgate: Evolution, Infinity: The Quest for Earth, Battleforge, etc... and let's not forget that digital distribution gives a higher profit margin for each copy sold to the developers.

As for Sins: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6197305.html