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Zekkyou on 16 July 2014
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tak13 said:
Zekkyou said:

"900 million PC gamers worldwide"

See, this is my problem with these articles. They throw around hugely inflated numbers that have little context in a direct comparison to consoles, then use said pointless comparison to claim the possible irrelevance of consoles.

It makes me happy to see the PC market grow (especially since it directly benefits me as a PC gamer), but pretending the core PC market is maybe going to replace console gaming (despite accounting for a pretty small portion of major publisher software sales), is just silly.

That's not to say the core PC market isn't huge, it is. It's just not 900m huge :p


mmmm there are 1.5 billion windows pcs 91.8%!1.5 and 6.7 linux mac  marketshare...so lets say 1.7 billion overall pc s:P 

What does that have to do with anything? I didn't mention the total PC install base, just that the 900m figure is representative of something irrelevant to console gaming. Farmville or candy crush aren't exactly competing for market share with GTA5 :p

If we were talking purely about the PC market, then that 900m figure is likely a legitimate estimate. Gaming is a rather broad industry after all. The second you want to compare it to consoles though, you have to restrict your comparison to the parts of the PC market actually competing with them. 

A 900m install base isn't worth much when a much smaller install base of 180m HD consoles can dominate so frequently in with the software sales of major publishers. You'd almost think there were several parts of the PC market not part of the core industry :p Same with the console market, the "other" parts just make up a smaller portion.