shio said:
shut up, you fail. Do not base your argument on NPD reports alone, because: - Download services are not counted by NPD, which takes a chunk from the sales tracking. Steam alone has over 13 million users (as of May 23rd '07), and over 20% of the visitors are from US. Then add Direct2Drive, Gametap, etc... - Game subscriptions are not tracked, which means the money of the 2.5million americans who play WoW is not accounted for. That's like $330 million right there for 2007 (monthly pay of $11 x 12 months x 2.5 million players), plus other MMO's such as Everquest, EVE online, etc... - The US has a traditionally weak PC market. Germany alone has a bigger PC market than US. The entire Europe probably has 4 times bigger PC market than the US. Also, PC gaming is stronger than ever in Asia, with 5 million WoW asian gamers and PC controlling almost 80% of South Korea's gaming (with a revenue of 1.5 billion dollars on PC games, easily more than the US) - And even without counting the downloaded games, averagely PC has sold around as much retail copies as the consoles: PC retail copies sold - 36.4 million Home Consoles retail copies - 153.9 million, (38.4 million average, ignoring Xbox/GC sales) Portable Consoles retail copies - 77.5 million (38.7 million average, ignoring GBA sales) 36.4 vs 38.4 vs 38.7, not really that far, is it. |
Yeah, people need to understand that PC sales aren't as obvious or easy to track as console sales.
But about the lines I made blue, have you actually seen sources for that?
Because yes, I can believe Germany (pop 82 mill) vs USA (300mill) could be slightly bigger in PC revenue (since console sales are proportionately real crappy in Germany, it's really big on PC), but the EU as a whole 4 times bigger than the US? I strongly doubt that. You have Scandinavia, 25 mill... Benelux+Swi+Austria another 42 mill, they are strong PC regions. And then UK and France 60 mill each, somewhat strong... but then southern/eastern europe are more console dominated and lower income countries respectively.
EDIT: South Koreas has a pop of 47 mill, and medium income is about half of western countries, so that $1.5 bill is really incredible. Perhaps believable since they are so crazy about PC in S Korea, including MMORPGs, but... hard to grasp nevertheless.
If I go play let's say Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Counter-Strike or Battlefield 2 online I get the feeling there are almost as many American servers as EU servers, and there are even American players playing on the EU servers. I have a very hard time to believe that the percentage of North Americans who bought/play those games are only 20%.
BTW I saw somewhere that Oblivion sold 4-500,000 PC copies in the USA/NA in 2006 alone. It's a heavily regionalized game (has even italian voice overs) and RPGs are very popular in Europe too... so again, I can't see that NA is only 20% of total PC sales.
