The pc market is deceptive as a lot of people only look at retail sales. Which is a very flawed way to look at the market. The pc market has the largest casual audience in the world, much larger then the DS or wii and a lot of those sales happen online and aren't tracked. Look at bejeweled, according to wikipedia its been sold 10 million times and downloaded 150 million times. 10 million for bejeweled! Thats ridiculous.

One must also take into account Europe which in many places still has a bias towards pc gaming and Asia. Last time I checked Starcraft had sold 4.5 million copies in South Korea alone! Its probably at about 5 million now. Not to mention the recent thread talking about hellgate londons success there. Plus Crisis despite failing in the US still sold a million. I wonder why?

Then of course you have steam, which as far as I know isn't tracked, but considering it has more users then xbox live I think the sales on steam would be significant. Thats not even taking into account other services that are similar to steam.

On top of that you have the mmo genre which is massive. Blizzard makes more money then EA does because of WOW. Lineage has at some points in its life had millions of active subscribers. Everything from browser based mmo's to niche space trading mmo's (eve online) flourish.

Plus bargain game sales are pretty big. Just because a game is sold for 10 dollars doesn't mean it shouldn't count. Plus there's the indie games scene, with titles like darwinia seeing success. The consoles still don't support indie games.

Is pc gaming dead? hell no

I love the PC as a gaming platform, but is WoW still considered in those sales? It is one games that sells extremely well, it takes away from other titles' sales. So i don't think it helps.

That doesn't make any sense at all. Thats like saying Mario galaxies takes sales away from the rest of the platforming market. Its a ridiculous satement as galaxy sales still happened. And as I mentioned in my post lots of MMO's are doing well on the pc. So its simply not true.

I can believe the PC gaming revenue numbers, but I think there may be a slow shift to consoles going on. It's a heck of a lot cheaper to buy a console for $400 and be able to play the newest games on it for the next 5-6 years compared to buying or building a kick-butt PC and then upgrading the critical components every other year or so. That's what lured me off the PC for most games.

On the other hand, two of the 3 guys at work that bought PS3s last year have gone back to PC gaming so they can heavily mod their games. And the RTS genre just cries for a keyboard and mouse.

It is the easiest way to game since almost everyone has a PC that they can play games on.

FYI top ten MMO by subscription, june last year.

http://gigaom.com/2007/06/13/top-ten-most-popular-mmos/

Thirty five point eight MILLION active accounts!!!! WOW.

It'd probably have hit forty by now. WOW alone has jumped 2 million since that list.

Also WOW was released in 2004, so they may have made more profit than Sony by now on the PS2. They can't have spent more than a half billion on running the thing.

SSJ12 - you got a link for audiosurf?

Almost everyone has a PC that older games can be played on.  The majority of systems in place can't play the latest, most aggressive games well.  Halo 3 and a lot of the newer games are fairly demanding, system-wise.  I know... I used to do a lot of PC gaming, and I had to regularly replace or upgrade my system to be able to play the newer games.

Also, compatibility issues are more of a factor in PC gaming...

 PCs last 5 years too, its just by the 5th year you are running the games on low settings, which is still better than that gen of consoles so its all good.  And you can still play the games so why do you need the highest setting graphics?  I have PCs that I still play games on that were built in 2000.