| richardhutnik said: UGH, please don't remind me of the IRQ and DMA days, and having to edit DOS files, and create bootdisks, and trying to use RAM Doublers, and 640K was all you needed, and someone telling me a 386SX was all the computing power one would eve need. Today, it is easier to get into, but then, you run into more headaches. The scope of PC gaming is shrinking in regards to the type of game genres it has, with MMO having a few dominant MMOs and other quirky stuff. MMOs are the place to get high production value games for the PC. I would estimate World of Warcraft is at least 25% of the PC gaming market worldwide. ONE GAME is this. |
The PC games market was worth $13 billion worldwide in 2008 (compared to $32 billion for all the consoles). I'd imagine WoW takes in around $1-1.5 billion p.a, given 8-10 million subscribers paying $120 each per year. As big as it is, it's nowhere near 25%. But even if it was, so what? No one suggests dismissing Halo sales on the 360, or Mario Kart sales on the Wii, even though these made up pretty significant proportions of total games sales on those platforms during the year they were released.
As for 'genres shrinking', I'm not really sure where you're coming from. There aren't as many sports games, mainly because they work much better on consoles, but there are plenty of other games of all types- even platformers and fighting games. The only area the PC is shrinking in is straight retail sales, which is being replaced by digital downloads in any case. Once again, the PC is ahead of the curve- digital downloads are more lucrative for publishers and, quite simply, are the future.
