Now lets not sound the death knell for PC gaming(again) just yet OP. Sales reflect mainly laptops and bad desktops from high street retailers and the tidal wave effect of people being able to connect to the internet and namely things like facebook, twiiter, youtube etc through other avenues either by tablet or mobile phone. They were not buying major PC titles on their bad laptops anyway so its not really any revenue lost for PC games when it all comes down to it. Its not really a reflection on PC gaming.
More of a reflection on people not upgrading their malware ridden laptop for facebook when they have just bought a tablet or an iPhone.
Most gamers are building or buying customised futureproofed longer lasting systems with a decent CPU as a base, ive had my base system since June 2008 and its been untouched barring the odd GFX card update 2nd hand off ebay (mythbusting: and no not an upgrade every other month just to run any games). And i can see another year or 2 out of it with maybe 1 more GPU update 2nd hand off ebay and im only considering a few CPU bottleneck problems in CPU heavy games like Crysis 3 & GTA5. other than that today im still running Skyrim with many mods layered on top, Dead Space 3, Hitman Abs, Tomb Raider, Defiance, Dishonoured, Sleeping Dogs, FarCry3 and every sports title etc etc etc at 30-60fps 1080p. Got a Q9450 @ 3ghz, 6gb 1066mhz RAM, Ati HD5870 1gb. And its still running things sweet as a nut. The long haul console lifetime this gen has held back games a touch but it has a plus side that people have been able to run games very well on their older systems for much longer.
Fact is the gamers have not gone away and more people are joining the PC world. Actual game sales are on the rise dramatically, SC2:Heart of the Swarm sold 1.1 million in 2 days and it requires the previous game to play it, did it outsell God of War in the same timeframe? Diablo 3 was widely reported to have sold 3.5 million copies in 24hrs, making it the all time fastest selling exclusive ever, and it went on further to sell 12+ million copies making it one of the best selling games of 2012 only behind COD Black Ops 2 and the best selling exclusive of this gen between PC, X360 & PS3. Even though VGchartz only has Diablo 3 down as selling 3 million. rofl. Good old VGchartz with its PC list. Half life 2 only selling 2 million, really? And Portal and many of the Command & Conquer games selling zero copies. come on now, zero copies!
High end Free to Play games like Firefall, Hawken, Planetside 2, Warframe and a bunch of good looking MMOs have brought a different dimension to the PC scene and this is very attractive to people looking in from the outside who previously would pay £40 for a game then pay another £15 for a bad DLC a month later have now seen great online games given away for free every other month with large player bases and being part of a community in something new and fresh. Showing the amount of playercounts and sign ups for these games even in beta stages its looking good and these games are only really being played on gaming PCs, try playing Planetside 2 on a laptop or bog standard desktop from Walmart, it aint happening.
League of Legends is the most played game in the world bringing in consistent monumental numbers even COD couldnt manage to do on first release day, Dota 2 is bringing in big numbers among many other games and dont forget World of Warcraft which brings in millions a day. Theres more concurrent users on Steam than ever, it all points to a large rise in PC gaming as a whole.
Esports has been taken over by PC exclusives and has rejuvinated the whole esports scene making it profitable for once with major competitions every other weekend on Twitch.TV with good viewerships and the PC games have even given the flagging MLG a massive boost in viewerships and revenue more than doubling, trippling nay quadrupling what the old lineup of COD/Halo could bring in. What MLG was working up to for years but getting nowhere came to fruition when the PC games took over. At the last MLG in Dallas they brought back COD to much fanfare and it averaged 20k viewers all weekend peaking at about 25k, the MLG before that the unreleased Halo 4 only brought in an average of 12k viewers, even a sneak peak of the yet unreleased game could not attract viewers and certainly not any amount of people paying extra for the gold packages for the tournement.
In comparison LoL average well over 100,000 viewers peaking at around 170,000 and Starcraft 2 averaged 100,000 peaking at about 150,000.
It does not really concern PC gaming wether Toshiba can sell another laptop with an advertisement hook of "8 gigs of RAM" and no other details like CPU speed . Selling them to parents who want to keep their kids quiet on Facebook while watching TV. They can do that with tablets now and mobile phones, kids have no real need for a PC update every few years now, just to browse facebook till they get a virus or instal loads of crap so it grinds to a halt and they go out and buy a new laptop when the old one is perfectly fine.
PC gaming is perfectly fine and not at all effected by this downturn in hardware sales.
Essay Pro