HappySqurriel said:
I think my point is apparent even in the absence of sales statistics... Many gamers on this website are old enough to remember a time where you needed to upgrade your PC from bleeding edge hardware to bleeding edge hardware every 12 to 18 months to play the latest and greatest games; at this time the relative performance of PC components to videogame consoles was similar to what we have today (at a similar point in the console's lifetime) but PC games rapidly eclipsed the visuals of videogame consoles because of how rapidly PC developers took advantage of these capabilities. Contrast that to today where PC games tend to be slight graphical upgrades over their console counterparts, and designed around hardware that is 7+ years old in systems that have 5% of the graphical processing power of high end gaming PCs on the market. A market where the previous generation of handheld systems and videogame consoles was won by systems that were "a generation behind" their competition; and people are constantly bringing up that tablets and smart-phones are the largest computer market, and the market leader also tends to have hardware which is far behind the capabilities of its competition. Hell, on this forum I would say that roughly 60% of Sony and Microsoft fans are constantly arguing that Sony and Microsoft should hold off until 2014 or 2015 to release a new console because the XBox 360 and PS3 are already "good enough". Nintendo and (probably) Microsoft are moving away from the high end console model because the vast majority of consumers, developers and publishers are not interested in this enough to justify the costs and the pain associated with it. |
If you owned or had a friend that owned a high-end gaming pc, you would not make that statement. Top-end PC tech is incredibly far ahead of what consoles can push out.
You are also making the mistake of assuming that because the demand for 'low'end' tech in relatively under-powered home consoles is increasing, that means demand for high-end tech is decreasing. I do not have charts at hand, I'll find them if you're desperate, but whenever somebody makes a 'PC gaming is dead' argument (I know, yours is different, but bear with me) about 16 million charts are produced that show that PC software sales in particular are extremely healthy. I believe the gracious member with the Witcher 2 avatar could help you out with those graphs). But I do remember that Steam sales more than doubled for the seventh year in a row. Think about that.
http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch/
Graphics chips (GPUs) and chips with graphics (IGPs, HPUs, and EPGs) are a leading indicator for the PC market. At least one and often two GPUs are present in every PC shipped. It can take the form of a discrete chip, a GPU integrated in the chipset or embedded in the CPU. The average has grown from 115% in 2001 to almost 150% GPUs per PC. <- i.e. people are buying more discrete grsaphics cards.
CPU sales are up 8.9% in last three months of 2011 compared to 2010 also. They do mention that GPU sales are down 3.5% from the same period last year, but I'd wager that is because AMD have just released their new generation of GPUs in the past few weeks, and Nvidia are expected to follow suit in a month or so.
Hope that helped.
