ssj12 said:
hard to call a platform thats been on top for 20 years not on top of the industry. And a video game crash would affect everything from PC to console to handheld. Its not a single area getting affected if this happened.
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PC wasn't on top until the late 90's, early 2000's. While Consoles became mainstream in the mid-80's, PC gaming only reached that status 10 years after consoles.
I've been reading about the crash of 1983, and apparently the crash helped PC gaming enter into the North-American Market and dominate the European Market:
Effect on other video game markets worldwide
In Europe, the early years of personal computing (1981–1985) were spearheaded by the very aggressive marketing of inexpensive home computers with the theme “Why buy your child a video game and distract them from school when you can buy them a home computer that will prepare them for college?” Marketing research for both the gaming and the home-computer industries sides tracked the change as millions of consumers shifted their intention to buy choices from game consoles to low-end computers that retailed for similar prices while still playing comparable games.
By 1982, computers such as the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum had launched in Europe and were selling extremely well there, dominating the European games market and growing throughout 1983/1984. The significantly lower price of computer games (some of which cost just 1% of the price of a computer, due to being stored on inexpensive cassette tapes rather than the silicone cartridges of consoles) strengthened this domination and helped quickly create a mass computer games market. By the time of the 1983 North American console crash, the European video games industry was mostly computer-based and most games were made by European publishers. This allowed the European market to continue to thrive despite the crashing American console market.
The PC market made its first competitively priced entry into American society. Though many had software libraries that catered to the early gaming crowd, their educational and office software gave them an edge. Some computers, like the Commodore 64, were priced and marketed to compete with game consoles.
Although the home gaming market was weakened by the temporary death of the dedicated console, the growing PC base provided a viable replacement for home video game production by the small number of companies that hadn't left the business or gone bankrupt. Also, even though the American arcade game scene was beginning its slow descent into obscurity, arcade games were still very near the height of their popularity.
Across The Pond, the European market was not dominated by consoles at this stage, but by early home microcomputers (predominantly the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64) with an outrageous number of one-person coders writing games for the far cheaper tape distribution system. These machines flourished and became the backbone of the industry for the next decade.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983
Oyvoyvoyv said:
Can you give some proof that it has really been on top for that long? And in the later periods, it does seem that the PC is no longer the biggest in most areas (it even falls behind the PS3/X360 in certain areas). Of course, World of Warcraft alone is on size, if not bigger than, the Ps3, so including that the PC market would be the biggest. Kinda depends on how you count it I guess. |
PC gaming is on a clear expansion, probably growing faster than any other video game market. In China, for example, online gaming increased over 75% in 2008 alone. DFC is estimating to exist 320 millions PC gamers by 2012.
