Microsoft: We Think The Future Is Without Console Generations

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Cerebralbore101 said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

 

Not to mention that Steam users are just a part, although quite large, of all PC gamers. When Windows XP reached 1B user base, gamers, including the most casuals, were already estimated to be  ~300M, of which ~100M core gamers. And this was before Steam boosted PC gaming again to golden age percentages, but on a total user base much larger. Just a large minority of PC gamers are power and graphics whores, the majority totally upgrades PCs roughly at console generation time intervals, if not longer, possibly with minor upgrades in between, so the sales of new PCs have dropped, but people, including gamers, keep their PCs longer, so PC user base, and PC gaming one too, still grow steadily, alhough slower than mobile ones.
Just to be clearer, on PC there are TWO kinds of hardcore gamers, those that look for technical excellence and those that like complex and deep classic PC games, and there can be overlapping of the two groups. "Complexity whores" that aren't power whores too will upgrade their PCs just when really needed, but they are nevertheless big buyers of games.

Yeah, I looked at the steam stats, and that's the gist of what I got out of it. There are a lot of questions that I have though. How does steam gather its information? Do they just take a snapshot of everyone that is online every friday? Do they survey the entire group or just part of it? If someone didn't log into steam on the day the survey was taken does that mean that they are not part of the survey? If the average CPU speed is 3 gigahertz, and the average user has three physical CPUs does that mean the average user has 9 gigahertz total, or just 3? Or to put it another way, do they include both CPUs in CPU speed, when doing the CPU speed section of the survey? 

It really would be interesting if VGchartz tracked the sales of PC games, as well as console games. Do they? Does steam track the sales figures? 

Steam tracking is almost surely the widest partial tracking available of PC gamers, but I'd lie if I told I understand well their results, one thing that strikes me is that AMD GPU numbers look a little underestimated, but another thing that initially struck not just me, is that Steam statistics showed that older PCs remain active in gaming much longer than tech enthusiasts suspected (I too initially thought relatively old and slow PCs were mainly stuff for retrogamers like me, but they are far more widespread), and they are the ones that allow PC gaming to grow even with lower purchases of new PCs.
The true power of gaming PCs is quite nebulous indeed, and I suspect the average is, again, lower than expected by a minority of enthusiasts that would like PC power to continuously skyrocket. Now these things aren't really surprising anymore, but initially, when Steam numbers started becoming more significant in PC gaming, they were so.  OTOH I don't think SW houses were taken by surprise, as PC/console multiplats became very common during 7th gen, when the gap between the average gaming PC and consoles was a lot wider, particularly in main RAM size, while now, compared to then, even if consoles are far behind high-end PCs, they are a lot less limiting if compared to the average PC.
About SW sales, well, even Steam cannot represent reality well enough, as didital download is becoming very strong in large towns and all the areas with fast connections, but most of the world still has slow connections and digital download is very weak there, particularly for PC games, that can be tens or even hundreds times larger than mobile games.