http://techreport.com/news/24575/pc-gaming-market-grew-8-in-2012

http://pcgamingalliance.org/press/entry/pc-gaming-alliance-releases-two-member-exclusive-reports

• up 8% this year, 90% over five

• worth 20 billion

• over a billion PC gamers last year

• ~250 million were "core" gamers

• Chinese market was 34% of the whole, went up 9%

• All regions experienced growth

• by 2016 will be worth 25.7 billion

• mobile games are helping by pushing "the growth of small self-funded teams that can develop more targeted products on a modest budget."

aaaaaand no one cares lol xd

There are a lot of gamers in China paying to win

B-b-but PC gaming is dead guys??

A 20 billion dollar market with over 1 billion gamers, less then $20 per gamer per year...

Not bad. Should grow steadily for as long as PCs exist I think.

From what I remember, this is probably a result of the F2P models that most MMOs have started to adopt. A minority end up paying huge amounts to progress and effectively fund the game for everyone.

but 20 billion dollars.  i mean, piracy is huge and free to play is also not so small (dota 2 and so on) so it's not really a wonder that the market is "only 20 dollar per gamer" but that doesn't make the whole number smaller. btw does that include sales of gpus and gaming keyboards and stuff? if not and it's only related to games it's not that bad. how big is the market for wii+ps3+360 without revenue of sold consoles and equipment?

Not entirely unlike the smartphone/tablet situation, yet people are praising that to the sky. Not disagreeing with your overall point though, which is that number of "gamers" doesn't always matter.

OT: PC gaming is dead, confirmed yet again.

they define someone who played a flash game in the last year a PC gamer so yea that gamer number is super inflated.