"Figures published by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) on the 6th of January showed that last year, its members have sold more DVDs, games and music than ever before. Time for Champagne? Not yet. There's a massive black spot on the chart provided.

PC games in UK have been decreasing by 31 percent in 2008, from 12.2 million to 8.5 million. By contrast, sales of console games has grown from 58.2 million to 74.3 million. To put it simply, the console games market went from being 4.7x bigger than PC games to nearly 9x! Eight in every nine games sold in this country are console games.

While the figures do not include downloads from online services like Steam and direct sales from publishers, it does paint a very bleak picture for PC gaming, especially against the backdrop of the impressive video game growth. GFK also released data which shows that five PC games sold in 2008 accounted for 76 percent of all PC games sold in the UK.

At this rate, UK PC gaming will account for less than one million units by 2014. There are a number of clues as to why this is happening. Research group Nielsen company published the top 10 PC Game titles in the US. None of them were produced in 2008 with three of them (yes three), nine years old, even older than Windows XP!"

More Data:

Sales of Fallout 3 in the U.K.

Fallout 3 360 - 298k

Fallout 3 PS3 - 180k

Fallout 3 PC - 60k

Yes I know its very naughty of them to combine the console sales. Here are the Vgchartz numbers for this market in question. We know that the DS has an extremely low per year attach rate, PSPs is so low that you could ignore them and it wouldn't effect much and the PS2 doesn't sell much in the way of software. If we take the others percentage market shares for software as gospel then home consoles should share roughly 2/3rds of the total console software sold.

Therefore we can rank the systems in order of retail market share roughly. (2/3rds listed software numbers * current market share home consoles)

Wii: 24,636,596 (42%)

Xbox 360: 15,468,907 (27%)

PS3: 8,932,496 (16%)

PC: 8,500,000 (15%)

So according to this, the PS3 as the weakest home console platform has now grown more powerful than the home PC at retail. With significant growth next year for all 3 platforms which is expected to happen, the distance between the two at retail should grow a frightening pace especially if the decline in the PC retail spend continues along the same trend.

I'm gonna copy paste our previous convo here give me a second. I'll edit it in.

Oh welll hell, I'll give the consoles fighting, platformer, sports, and racing games. Those games can't be done well on a PC anyhow. That's why I have a wii (the fact i left it home is a minor detail, we just happen to have one here too). However the other major franchises have yet to see a GOOD game come out. The last great game to come out that I saw was World of Goo, and before it, Portal. Can't remember that far back for any truly great games until we reach Civ IV in '05.....

Also which barriers are you talking about? Development? Because it's by far the easiest and cheapest to develop and distribute on the PC. If you mean by a gamers' standards, then yes, we like good games on the PC. That's why Diablo II and the sims are still selling....

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Another quick point Squilliam:

http://old-wizard.com/top-10-most-addicting-games

Not that another's opinions in support of my own makes mine more validating, but I want you to notice how old the games are. The newest one on there is MKDD. Also let's face it Diablo II was the crack phenomenon not Diablo I, and ANY MK and Civ title are as addicting as those. Where are all those badass leet amazing new games from this gen's HD consoles? Or last gen's for that matter (bar MK, since it goes for any MK that's made).

Moral: consoles are ruining the quality of overall games in some of the deepest rooted genres. I blame the fact so few of them have backwards compatibility.

Wow, that argument is like so old. So yeah you forget about sales numbers and everything else and resort to mud slinging...

vlad - What's ignorant about your statement is you boast that old PC games are selling so well - but totally ignore the fact that new games are tanking, or underperforming against ancient titles.

The biggest PC game this year, Spore, has sold far less than any one of the big console titles for any of the 3 major systems.

Oh hey! Guess what? Old console games sell well too - did you ever notice that Super Mario Bros. on Virtual Console sells thousands of copies a week? How about the 50th remake of Street Fighter 2?

The issue is that we don't have all the PC data available, because it's so fragmented, thus makes an impossible argument. PC owners argue 'oh, game X and Y are still selling years after their debut!' but offer virtually no tangible evidence other than sales rankings at Steam or Gamersgate. Such arguments are about as useless and stupid as VGC-ers posting Amazon data as 'proof' a niche game is doing well since we only have rankings, and not hard-copied sales numbers.

Hey, I'll admit it, spore was good but it wasn't that great. Did you not see me call WoG and Portal the only recent games that were great? And that's exactly my point, with backwards compatibility there would be a whole bunch of older games selling, and maybe then the standards for games wouldn't reset the moment a new generation hits....

As I said, it's been a while since we have seen a "best of" in many major genres, shooters, strategy, and RPGs especially.

As for the mud-slinging, how is that mud-slinging? Why would games form 8 years ago outsell current games if they weren't better to begin with? Would that be possibile without the backwards compatibility of the PC? I HIGHLY doubt it would.... Also look at Halo 3, it's such a mediocre game that it almost borders on sucky, yet look at its sales....

WOW I forgot about this game, shame on me. Look at the Witcher, while not a great game at all, WAAAAY too many bugs and crashes, it had some very solid gameplay and ideas. Lo and behold it sold far better than its publishers could have ever imagined.... By no means is it a face melting amount of sales, but more than they expected and it does go to show you that if you even make a decent game it will sell.

On another note, I can't believe I dind't catch this, there are over 2.4 million accounts for spore. You can make 1 account per serial, hence it has sold for more than 2.4 million. Also it has been pirated over 1.7 million times but that's besides the point. Meanwhile let's look at these big games you speak of:
LBP 1.8 mil
R2 1.2 mil
Prince of Persia 1.35 mil
MGS 4 3.78 mil (almost there.... a little over a mil to go)

And dear god, Spore wasn't even that great either....

Ummm.... I don't know why this is here.... It was just a completely blank post tht appeared when I editted the top one.

I just poked you in your eye. LOL.

Oh and on topic.  But...but...digital distribution accounts for more sales.

vlad -

EA's biggest PC game: 2.4 million units (spore)
EA's biggest Console game: 5.4 million units (Madden)
EA's next-biggest Console game: 3.9 million units (Rock Band 1)

Oh, and those are North American numbers only. And only for 2008's cume (didn't include last-years sales). It wouldn't be hard to list 10 games published by EA that outsold Spore this year (worldwide).