@zombie2011 said:
@big_denim said:
@zombie2011: I've heard this a lot but I'd like to see details behind it. Is this just prebuilt numbers? Does it include the folks that are buying individual parts and assembling their PC because that's what most gamers are doing. Not saying you're wrong just trying to figure out where the disconnect is since many sources also claiming that PC game sales are very healthy right now.
I'm basing mine off of quarterly reports of PC manufacturers, Apple and MSFT. Also what does PC games sales are healthy mean? Healthy compared to what? Healthy to me means quarterly growth. Yes PC games might be selling well, but what types? I like everyone I personally know own a laptop so all my steam games are indie games.
Also no casual gamer is building a PC, they are buying a console, and as we've seen from the moves MSFT, Sony and Nintendo have made over the past 10 years the casual market is where the majority of the money is to be made.
Of the 270 million Windows 10 computers out there, MS says "over 40% of the people running Windows 10 are playing games". That's 100 million gamers on the platform. Even if we assume Spencer was including Xbox One devices (as they do technically run Win10 now), we also know that there are only about 19 million of those about so that's still 80 million Win10 PCs used for games. Although who knows what that really means considering Candy Crush comes preinstalled with a default Win10 installation - let's do a sanity check on that:
In January there were an estimated 55 million Steam users running Windows 10 according to the Valve hw survey data. There were also 100 million active Steam users running other OS (from that one copy of WinXP that comes preinstalled on every PC in China to the many people still on Windows 7). More data, pointing at quite a large pool of customers who don't all buy the same 3 games (Madden, CoD, etc) but do buy and play games.
I have previously said that we can no longer rely on hardware sales, because who knows if you're buying that Intel chip to never play games on or if, like my new laptop, you're running Dota2 1080p+ just fine with the integrated graphics. Like, the Intel drivers are still not good enough but I can easily see someone spending 1000 hours in Civ V on that 15 Watt SoC because it's totally viable to play well beyond 1080p with that SoC and that game. But back when we could count gamers buying PC hardware (and we knew they were gamers because at the time Ultrabooks and cheap laptops didn't get discrete GPUs and who would pay for a GPU when iGPUs could do everything anyone wanted for 2D/desktop?) then there was a healthy pool of tens of millions of purchases happening each year. Now I can run Civ V and Dota 2 on integrated graphics (Intel Iris) so we're well into to murky tea-leaves point of guessing how many people are buying new gaming hardware each year. You're not buying an 8mm thin PC with a portable low-power SoC primarily to game on, but you can totally be a gamer on one playing all sorts of new games. Hell, The Division technically runs despite being not officially supported at all and not running great (but if we want to make comparisons, it runs about as well as JC3 on consoles does :D). But nVidia certainly aren't going bust from lack of demand for gaming GPUs.
PC gaming: if you think consoles are the big players standing next to PC then you need to think of PC as a massive, wide pool of a hundred million people paying for various different games while consoles are the narrow pool that's deeper but contains less water (customers): each spot check (individual game sales) can often be deeper on console (although major landmark sales for games have come from PC in the past from various titles so it's not like no PC games can hit well beyond typical sales and blow up beyond 10 million units sold) but the PC ecosystem generally sells more types of games to more different people - there's a reason why indie was born on PC and continues to focus on that platform (now console groups will bend over backwards to get indie stuff onto their platform to round out their offerings).
Not every Xbox game is going to outsell the console version on PC, but the cost of porting is far lower than the cost of developing a new game so that's not exactly a problem. MS are looking for revenue and probably eye the 20 million PC copies of Diablo 3 as being something they'd love a piece of. Rise of the Tomb Raider sold about 330k units on week one of XBOne availability. Despite being a late port, the Steam version (so ignoring Windows 10 Store sales) was tracked as selling about 315k copies on PC on week one. This is compelling data indicating there is a AAA PC market for MS to go after for their 1st party games (especially if they're looking to advertise their app store where they take a tasty 30% cut of every sale).
Log in to comment