Retail Sales of PC Games Dropped 14% in 2008

Sales of PC games at U.S. retailers were once again down in 2008, dropping 14% over the previous year, sales-tracking firm NPD Group has informed GameDaily.

For 2008, U.S. retailers brought in a total of $701 million from PC games, down from the $910.7 million that retailers saw across 2007. And that 2007 total was a 6% drop from 2006, when retail PC games accounted for roughly $960.7 million.

Meanwhile, console software sales grew 26% in 2008, totaling $10.96 billion.

However, those figures don't account for digital distribution or subscriptions. Last year, NPD claimed that falling retail sales of PC games were no cause for concern, as the decline was seen as "a reflection of a shifting of distribution channels."

Shortly thereafter, NPD announced that it would soon begin tracking subscriptions. The PC Gaming Alliance later said that PC gaming was "far stronger than anyone has reported," with worldwide digital distribution sales for 2007 around $2 billion.

NPD is expected to provide more details on the 2008 PC market next week.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56794

Nothing too unexpected. I would love it if distributors would release some hard numbers on downloads so we could better gauge real trends in the industry.

Only $2 billion of worldwide DD sales for the PC is kinda weak.
If retail amounts to just $700mill in the US, that would mean $2.5-3 billion in worldwide retail ----> $4.5-5 billion.

Add a billion or two for subscriptions and u arrrive at $6.5-7 billion for all PC game sales worldwide.

That's a lot less than the $25 billion or so for consoles. I believe piracy is a big reason for the discrepancy.

No wonder there aren't any PC big budget exclusives made anymore (xcept Blizzard).

Actually, don't be surprised if Blizzard games are only timed exclusive. StarCraft went to the N64; it kinda bombed, but now that consoles actually have online play maybe SCII/DIII will get another shot (next gen port, maybe).

P.S. The above is of course total speculation, but I think it's reasonable speculation.

Diablo III will be on the Wii

There are 3 consoles though plus a couple of handhelds if they're also counted in that $25 billion. I'm also pretty sure that the PCGA gave figures of something like $10 billion across the board for PC revenue in 2008. Also there are pretty few exclusives made for any single platform these days- the costs are too prohibitive.

In 2007 the PC gaming market was estimated to be $10.7 billions by DFC: $3.2bn from retail, $2bn from Digital Distribution, $4.8bn from Online and $800 millions from Advertisement.

Anyway, where did you get the $25bn figure from?

And PC games don't usually have huge budgets because they're cheaper to develop and spend little on advertisement. See Crysis, which only cost $22 millions, and is far, far more technically advanced than any console game.

That's because much of the cost of console games is in squeezing more performance out of the available hardware, whereas in the case of Crysis it seems as if they said, "Fuck it, juice the graphics/physics and raise the requirements!"

That's not true though. Crysis is extremely well optimized, and the minimum requirements show that. Of course you still need a beast to max the game, but that's understandable.

I don't think piracy is harming PC sales as much as people go on about. If PC game sales are falling off dramatically (I personally think most game sales on the PC have stated to shift to online or people buying subscription services), I think the real reason is consoles are finally offering most of the advantages the PC had in the past. For example:

1) Consoles now offer an onlinge gaming experience that is similar to the PC.

2) The HD consoles now offer graphics at a level which isn't miles behind PCs. Sure the resolution isn't as good as you can get on PC, but all the other effects are at comparible levels and most people don't have high end gfx cards for their PC anyway, so the different is much smaller.

3) Online services. Live and PSN offer more than just gaming. While Live is available for Windows, I don't think it is at the same level as the 360. So is there any other unified service for PC which offers the same as these networks?

4) Add-ons and Mods. This is still an area where the PC is king (since user mods are free), but the consoles are making heavy tracks into it.

5) All this is simpler on console than on PC. Even the negatives which consoles now have like installations and patches are far easier on a console. You put your game in, go to play and it tells you it needs to install or there is a patch available, and it asks the user would like like to proceed. All done.

On topic of the number though, I don't think it is fair to compare the 2007 downloads to 2006. As it says, the 2007 PC retails sales dropped 6%, while there were $2 billion woth of online sales. While I've no idea what the sales are for 2008, but if a drop of 14% in retail is people moving over to digital downloads, then I'd expect that number to be much higer.