Well its an interesting article but I do think he failed to discuss the role that hardware manufacturers will play. Lets face it as long as consumers are willing to spend obscene amounts of money on their PCs, the hardware manufacturers will need devs like crytek around to help those consumers justify their hardware purchase.

So what impact does their push in the direction of increased PC development have on this market? Clearly the devs themselves would love to move exclusively to the simplified market of the consoles but the hardware market is substantial and accounts for a lot of revenue that they are certainly willing to fight for...the other thing is that if big monolithic devs move out of the PC market the fact that it is so accessible means that smaller groups can actually move in to that niche.

Still though, I agree with his overall conclusion that the market is vastly underestimated.

I will agree that NPD retail sales number for PC are meaningless.

They estimate that 910.7 millions$ was spent in retail in 2007.

 Well there's 2.5 millions Wow players in the US.

Those players alone spent 50$ (Burning crusade expansion) + 12*15$ ( monthly fee) = 230$.

That's 575 Million $ of PC games, only 125 Million of it that was accounted by NPD................

0.8% digital downloads? HAHA, I didn't even notice that number before.

Seriously though? I've got literally dozens of friends with at least a couple games on Steam...plenty of them use Steam exclusively.

this thread is awesome. Best thread ever. Nice info there shio. A+ job.

 Have you seen the insane and humongous list of massive hits that'll hit the PC in 08? Clearly not, there are at least 30-40 big PC games this year alone which will easily be million sellers! 

I think Bittorrent has done to movies and to a lesser extent games what Napster did to music, basically it opened up piracy of those things online to the masses. Sure there was videogame piracy for a long time (I remember going to friends houses to trade/copy Commodore 64 games and logging onto scene BBSs) but it has never been easier than it is now. There are games that are exempt from most of the problems of piracy like World of Warcraft but anyone who thinks that other companies aren't feeling the affects of piracy are fooling themselves.

As for PC Gaming, there is indeed a huge list of PC exclusives coming out but when you look at the actual development budgets on most of them and the expected number of sales the vast majority pale in comparison to console games. There are a few successful PC publishers/developers that dominate PC Gaming (Blizzard, Valve, EA) but everyone else is basically fighting for scraps and many of them are turning to consoles to help pay rising development costs and because of rampant piracy (id, Epic, Bethesda, etc).

The influence of gaming consoles is growing, it can be seen by the popularity of Unreal Engine 3 and the reasons behind it. It can be seen in more and more big PC games having simultaneous release dates on consoles. It can be seen in the number of PC games that push the envelope becoming smaller. For every Crysis how many games with far more modest system requirements are produced? Anyways that's just my two cents on the whole topic.

@ Garcian Smith
The moral of the story is... don't fuck with PC gamers.

@Legend11
The PC gets ports of most major console games, and has a lot more exclusives, so what is your point?