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Forums - Gaming - How big are the sales difference between console and PC games?

Titanfall according to VGC numbers sold 900 thousands on the X1 and 120 thousands for the PC. These numbers are, if I understand it retail/disc sales and do not include digital tales of either version, yes?

So by judging these numbers there's almost 10 to 1 in favour to the console version of Titanfall, especially if we would add the X360 version later on.

Titanfall is just a fresh example, I am thinking of the whole gaming industry as a whole here.

Another example could be The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim;
PC: 3.39m
PS3: 5.38m
360: 7.87m

For consoles that is 13.25m vs. 3.39m for PC. That's 25% or 2.5/10 of the total sales. Not a small difference.

So, is this the reality, do PC versions of multiplatform games really just sell 10-20% of a games total sales? Or if we include sales from Steam, Origin and other digital markets, would we see a more equal sales in regards PC vs. consoles, or would consoles versions still kick the ass of PCs?



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Well, to be fair, majority of the sales from PC is digital since not that many retail stores even care about PC gaming... Heck, its hard to even find any PC games in the ebgames I go to... So until Valve releases some actual sales numbers for once, its hard to tell

As thats also pretty good when you take into account piracy issues



                  

PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

They do, otherwise publishers would care about pc more than the consoles, and we don't see that.

Destiny, for example, isn't even announced for pc yet.



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English is not my native language.

I think console sales would have a substantial lead over PC sales with digital included.



Looking at financial reports, PC is usually as big as a console (ps3/360).
Sometimes, bigger than both combined (SEGA: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-02-07-pc-and-digital-now-driving-forces-for-sega).



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Console games dominate the market, but the PC economy has never been better. Steam ensures that piracy is way less of an issue, and digital sales are huge. The PC community is more active than ever, and developers have taken notice. Will it catch up to console gaming? Probably not. But it'll be a lot closer.



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Xbox One - PS4 - Wii U - PC

I don't pay attention to PC Software Sales. It looks like it depends on the genre though.



There are a few factors to consider. Most retail stores don't care about pc games and it's actually hard to find them so is easy to deduce most of the sales are digital. That said, I still think consoles are a bigger % than pc by a good margin, especially because majority of people only buy when there is insane deals on steam.



Games like Diablo 3, The Sims, Half Life, Portal (I.E. PC Centric games/franchises) generally do far better on the PC than console.

PC as a market is actually larger than the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 combined in terms of how much cash is floating around.
In terms of the amount of gamers, there are more PC gamers than any singular console.

And Steam has more games than exists on the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

So really, it's not a case of how much worse games sell on PC, but how much more competition there is for everyone's dollar, you have more chance of a small/indie developer being incredibly successful on the PC than on the console, the consoles reward the generic rehashed AAA franchises on a yearly basis.

It doesn't help that a game on Steam can sell millions of copies and never be counted, also doesn't help that the more high-end PC gamers *hate* the lazy horrible ported console games that don't support PC centric features.

On the flip side, console games once released can sell large amounts of copies of a particular game, but after that the game will generally fall into obscurity, never to be heard of again.
On the PC however games have stupidly long legs, for instance lets take the original Fable as an example, when it was brought to the PC all those years ago it sold moderately well, then almost a decade later it was re-released on Steam, hit the top of the sales charts and shifted hundreds of thousands of units.

Then every-time it's on sale, it again hits the top of the charts, selling 10's of thousands more units, so over time PC games can outsell the console version and those legs can last well over an entire console generation, the bonus is, the developer needs little/no extra work for such a long income stream.

The problem is, the PC's sales tracking is almost non-existent both in the short and long term, thus sales should always be taken with a grain of salt on vgchartz for the PC.




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Depends on the type of game. But overall, console game sales are still at the top by a huge margin.



I am the Playstation Avenger.