PC Gaming is on a transition period - PC gamers are switching from retail to digital! This trend has been happening for years. In 2007, only 30% of PC's revenue was from retail... today that difference should be even bigger. And the most emerging gaming markets are PC-centric: Russia, China, South Korea, India, Eastern European Countries, etc...

Is it that hard to understand? It's funny you quote NPD figures, because an NPD spokesman has said that the retail numbers of PC tells nothing, and that PC is switching from Retail to Digital (I'm not bothering finding the source).

Shio, those emerging markets have a ~95% piracy rate, furthermore they aren't worth anything to marketers because compared to the rest of the west their incomes are incredibly tiny. So the gamers may exist, but from the perspective of a publisher like Ubisoft they may as well be invisible because they aren't yet a viable market to sell software to profitably.

ESA does NOT track sales - ESA is just a company that runs E3 and lobbies the governments for the video games industry's interests.
And anyone can tell you that NPD only tracks retail sales and those numbers mentioned in the article are from retail, ANYONE! NPD has made recent efforts of checking some of PC's online revenue, but they still haven't released anything about digital distribution.

Digital Distribution probably now makes more than retail, but in 2007 PC's retail still only made 30% of PC's revenue(while DD made ~19%).

Piracy isn't stopping PC from growing highly in those countries. China's Online Video Game Revenue grew 76.6% in 2008: http://english.sina.com/technology/2009/0113/211567.html

- China's Online Video Game Revenue grows 76.6% in 2008, $2.7 Billions.
- 49.36 millions online gamers in China, up 23% over 2007.
- Foreign Companies took a third of China's online game market last year.

Ubisoft may not want to capitalize the asian/european eastern markets, but EA sure is:

- Need For Speed World Online
- Battlefield Heroes
- Battleforge
- Star Wars Galaxies
- Warhammer Online

Or THQ:

- Warhammer 40k Online
- Company Of Heroes Online

These publishers are giving vastly better exclusive support to PC than all consoles. They are trying to take advantage of those markets. They have seen what Blizzard is doing, and are seeing how huge the asian PC market is becoming.

Any stats on what these online gamers are playing? MMOs? Poker? Some sort of weird online dating game?

If you didn't know...I work for a PC gaming company.

All our growth isn't in the 'emerging markets'. Argue as you like, but it's a double edged sword: if you claim that all growth is digital, then you must surely know that broadband penetration rates in emerging markets is still pretty bad. That's why in Asia, internet cafes are so popular for gaming.

I'd love to share hard numbers with you, but at least with the company I work for, the vast majority of what we do is in the US, CA and UK.

On the other end, there are so many intangibles with the PC market, it's nearly impossible to get an accurate portrayal. Traditional boxed and downloadable titles are one market, but that doesn't take into consideration sites that are monetized by other means such as a Newgrounds, Kongregate, or our website, InstantAction (it's partially monetized). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most aggregation are totally missing that....Which is a strength of the PC gaming market.

But having said that, the PC market is dying for the ultra-hardcore games. Blockbusters are going far more toward console development, and guess what that tells me? There's not a lot of money in the traditional PC market. MMOs are too costly to develop, and there are few PC companies left such as Blizzard that are focused souly on that market. One must remember: Blizzard got bought out by a console gaming company, Activision. Why must we assume Blizzard is some sort of pinnacle for profits when Activision did buy them out?

@Shio "Jon Peddie Research resulted a report about the graphics chip market in the fourth quarter of 2008. For the first time since 2000 sales of GPUs have dropped from Q3 to Q4, shipments sank 35 percent from 111.26 million units to 72.35 million. Shipments were down 28 percent year-over-year, in the same period a year ago a total of 100.5 million GPUs shipped. "

http://www.dvhardware.net/article32986.html

You need GPUs to run most games and browsers aren't solely a PC domain anymore.

"If you want to sell the games in the U.S. and other parts of Europe, it makes a lot of sense to have it on consoles. If you look at series that started out on PC, like Call of Duty, they now do their primary business on consoles in the U.S."

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18377

And that means there's an even bigger revenue potential in online businesses. People will keep getting and improving their internet connections, and get in touch with PC games.

I always keep saying this but, just look at PC's 2009 exclusive lineup if you think PC is losing support.

PC is THE platform where niches can survive and thrive - the low cost of development and higher profit margins are great benefits of PC. The traditional market still took nearly half of PC's total revenue in 2007, and PC has more games coming out than all consoles combined.

I don't understand this about "ultra-hardcores". There are so many niches PC games coming out, many big games too, I hardly think they would leave PC (because of a reason I don't know).

Consoles are more Blockbusters concentrated because they are losing support from the small developers and have much less games than PC. If you see, PC has almost all blockbusters of X360, while X360 is missing ALOT of PC's great games.

About MMOs, there was an article on Gamasutra that said that Asian companies (continental) are more profitable than Western companies. Blizzard was not bought by Activision! Activision and Vivendi merged, with Vivendi holding the majority of the new company.

Oh I just knew Shio would be in here.

Great thread though :D I don't have anything to contribuit.

Activision is vivendi's bitch not the other way around.

If i may go back to a crucial part in this argument back to the minimum requirements for Mass Effect...

Rpruett, you said that:

Just for example :   I could purchase a 500$ Gateway PC right now on BestBuy.com  with 2.5 Dual Core 4 GB Ram GEForce 7100 (Integrated Graphics Card). Which if you read the specs for Mass Effect,  you will see that this PC will easily run Mass Effect.

But the minimum requirements for the video card are:

NVIDIA GeForce 6 series(6800GT or better)

How is the 7100 better than the 6800GT? So it does infact NOT EVEN reach minimum requirements.
That fact that you said the 7100 was better and FAR SURPASES the minimum requirements shows you know absoloutley nothing.

WTF.  Who the hell would buy a PC for gaming with that rig.  That's not a good example.  That's not a gaming rig.  Even at 500 I could make a PC that could play crysis at high setting.