Not the topic of discussion in this link, but the information is valuable nethertheless.

 http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3167296

Highlights:

" DFC Intelligence reported that people spent more money on PC games than on any other platform last year" 

"15 million people on steam"

"10 million WOW subscribers"

Looks like the PC is flourishing as a platform. There are no licencing fees and developers that distribute through steam don't have to pay that $10-15 retail markup, nor do they have to have the expense the disk or packaging.

Further proof of this - no link sorry, but discrete GPU sales have increased year on year over last year.

It looks like the PC will have another bumper year, with plenty of growth online.  

Squilliam said: Not the topic of discussion in this link, but the information is valuable nethertheless. http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3167296 Highlights: " DFC Intelligence reported that people spent more money on PC games than on any other platform last year" "15 million people on steam" "10 million WOW subscribers" Looks like the PC is flourishing as a platform. There are no licencing fees and developers that distribute through steam don't have to pay that $10-15 retail markup, nor do they have to have the expense the disk or packaging. Further proof of this - no link sorry, but discrete GPU sales have increased year on year over last year. It looks like the PC will have another bumper year, with plenty of growth online.

 lol ... you actually forget a couple of facts . First of all a major ammount of those sales come from extremly old titles : Warcraft 3 , WoW , UT04 , HL , Oblivion and thousands of other games that sit just there in the bargain bin and bought just because they are cheap and everyone in the world has a PC . Console software sales die out in max 3-4 years with a few exceptions , while small PC games can sell at a budget price for 6-10 years ( Starcraft anyone ) . The development cost for games like those are extremly low , and even if they sell , major releases dont sell that much , at least not in their first month . And here is where the console market will have allways the upper hand . Major opening weeks , and the fact that developers/publishers can make a profit in matter of days , while they often have to wait months if not years , untill they start making money on a huge PC games .  

 

Well, "last gen" I was a PC gamer, so I'm quite pleased to hear that, but I'm still skeptical. Anyway, last year, the major PAL markets took 8396m Euros in software revenue with PC taking 1465m Euros of that, or 17.5%. That is just my aggregated value of Western Europe + Australia, but it shouldn't be much different to what most other estimations are for PAL territory.

i'm technically a steam member, but the only game i have is peggle. The only other PC game i play is warcraft 3.

there's pretty much no facts on here, just 15 million people on steam and 10 million WOW users. Well the 10 million WOW users is great for blizzard, but it doesn't really help anyone else, in fact it hurts everyone else greatly. Many of those 15 million on steam are just playing Half life. PC gamers don't buy nearly as many games as consoel gamers do. Europe is better at it, but in America it's a pretty small market unless you have a huge game. Only a few games can tap the potential millions of people with computers.

It seems like the numbers are weighted extremely heavily by those WoW subscribers. I mean, that's basically 10 million people paying $20/month right there, so that's a couple billion dollars a year that I'm sure is unequaled by the rest of the industry as a whole.

Aside from that, 15 million Steam subscribers doesn't mean that every single one of those accounts is active - it's extremely likely that a very large percentage of those subscribers just signed up with Half Life 2, or just use it to download mods/demos, or signed up a couple of years ago with the intent of using it and never did, or whatever. Point is, far from all of those 15 million subscribers are actually buying games.

Finally, how much of that PC game revenue came from soccer moms registering a copy of Bejeweled or some such?

Thats 15 million active users, not just 15 million people with accounts silly. Furthermore 2 billion dollars in revenue for WOW is 33 million games sold. To put that in perspective thats Wiisports+Wiiplay+CoD4+Halo3+more or something, im guessing here. If steam was doing badly, then why have Ubisoft and Activision joined up?

"With total GPU shipments at 336 Million units and total CPU shipments hitting only 273 Million, double attachment can help explain why so many more GPUs were sold than CPUs: if CPU sales more closely represents the number of systems sold or built last year, there are a large number of computers with unused integrated graphics in them which count as two shipped GPUs. This overlap would mean that Intel's shipped graphics number greatly over inflate the market impact of their graphics products."

Edit: Thanks anand http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3282&p=2 

 

Reading between the lines, thats 60 MILLION discrete GPUs sold per year. If just half of those are for gamers, thats more than the Xbox360/PS3 totals to date.

@hunteralien - Crysis sold over a million. That was just a very niche pc game because of the graphics requirement. If you don't pay $12 to the retailer, nor do you pay $8 for the physical disk and you don't pay $10 to the console maker, but instead pay $5 to Valve... You get to keep $45 out of $50 on steam. Beats the $30 you get on a console.

Garcian Smith said: It seems like the numbers are weighted extremely heavily by those WoW subscribers. I mean, that's basically 10 million people paying $20/month right there, so that's a couple billion dollars a year that I'm sure is unequaled by the rest of the industry as a whole. Aside from that, 15 million Steam subscribers doesn't mean that every single one of those accounts is active - it's extremely likely that a very large percentage of those subscribers just signed up with Half Life 2, or just use it to download mods/demos, or signed up a couple of years ago with the intent of using it and never did, or whatever. Point is, far from all of those 15 million subscribers are actually buying games. Finally, how much of that PC game revenue came from soccer moms registering a copy of Bejeweled or some such?

 lol thats just so funny man :P

Garcian Smith said: Finally, how much of that PC game revenue came from soccer moms registering a copy of Bejeweled or some such?

 Did you bring up Bejeweled because casual PC games often cost less than $10 at Wal-mart and dollar stores?   That seems like a good points.  Because puzzle games sell for all systems and have even been system sellers before (Tetris for Gameboy and NES, and all of the Bejeweled / Crossword type games for DS).  Frankly, I love puzzle games :)

Overall, I don't think PC game sales = console game sales but then I am not sure.  Do new PCs still often come with 6-12 games preloaded? 

Console games are more fun in my opinion than PC games. I prefer the controller over the mouse and keyboard.
BTW the average person does not own a state of the art gaming PC with latest Graphics cards with Fast speed dual processor with RAM of 2GB or more. PC's need to be upgraded too regularly to play latest games. The console last up to 5 years with no upgrades required.
I notice VGChartz tracks the console games well but the PC games well they are not tracked at all.