While PC software is making headway in the game industry thanks to digital sales, hardware sales continue to decline. Worldwide shipments of PCs saw the greatest decline ever last quarter, also marking consecutive declines of PC shipments for the last four quarters.
According to data from the International Data Corporation, for the quarter ended March 31, 2013, PC shipments were down 13.9 percent year-over-year, far worse than the IDC's 7.7 percent decline forecast.
The U.S. in particular saw a dismal quarter, with quarterly shipments dropping to 14.2 million -- their lowest since the first quarter of 2006. PC shipments in the U.S. have declined during nine of the last ten fiscal quarters.
The organization says that tablets and smartphones are diverting consumer spending, and that the PC industry's efforts to offer touch-capable options have been hampered by high costs and poor component supplies.
The weak reception for Windows 8 also caused part of this decline, says the IDC, and has in fact caused the PC market to slow down, rather than boosting it.
"The PC industry is struggling to identify innovations that differentiate PCs from other products and inspire consumers to buy," reads the report, "and instead is meeting significant resistance to changes perceived as cumbersome or costly."
It's true. I have 2 desktop PC's that are very old (original Intel Core2 Quad, lowest end Core2 Duo), nearly 7-8 years old. They still work fine, though dated. Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, League of Legends run great.
... at least, I had no reason to upgrade, then the Oculus Rift happened. I'm expecting mine later today, but I'm still part of the extremely small minority of early adopters/developers. IMO It's the only interesting thing to happen to PC in a really long time.
This is all because of the console market. Once the new XBOX is out and the industry moves past launch titles, people will have to start upgrading to keep up.
I think that in some way, PCs are finally paying the price for lasting longer (I still play older PC games on my XP system, which runs fine) and tablets and smartphones are benefitting from fickle consumers and rapidly increasing technical specifications that have narrowed the refresh cycle to 24 months or less. I'm not sure how long that kind of refresh cycle can last, even with much lower price points (I just bought a Nexus 7 for under $200, so I guess I'm part of the problem) but then again, the refresh cycle for PCs may grown even longer (until last spring, I was still on an XP-based ThinkPad).
PC's have reached a performance point where there isn't a great need to upgrade as often as phone hardware. Eventually phones / tablets will hit that wall too.
This is exactly my feeling. I think people are extrapolating a little too much on the growth of mobile right now. Honestly most of the mobile technology is using decade old PC hardware with modern approaches to shrinking the transistors and reducing power usage. It's all great and it will help a lot to push low-watt-high-output desktop devices in the future. It will all normalized and mobile will probably always be 1 generation behind desktop but I guess eventually that will be "good enough".
Aye - it's just a case of diminishing meanginful returns to the extra power available for most users, so you'll only see particularly enthusiastic high-end PC gamers continuing to upgrade as regularly - even the benefits to the extra power from gaming is starting to diminish, although it's more clear there.
Phones will get there too (and I'd wager quite quickly) once they get to a point that they do everything users want them to without much trouble. Sure, at the moment they're a bit of a status symbol ("Do you have the latest iPhone/Galaxy?" and so on), but that will pass soon enough.
@Dave
ARM/mobile processing =/= Only smartphones.
We're witnessing the inefficiencies, and inflated costs of x86 architecture being exposed to mainstream consumers.
Conventional PCs are not efficient hardware platform for either computational needs, or---as the PS4 is proving---video game processing.
Steam sales are nice but MARKETS dictate content, not Nvidia's whims in putting out a new $600 GPU. The conventional desktop PC is rapidly turning obsolete and there's not much else to say.
Remember folks, PC GAME SALES are up like never been before:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/11/as-pc-gaming-popularity-keeps-climbin g-hardware-sales-down/
Times may be tough for hardware manufacturers, but it's a great time to be a PC developer.
I read the RPS article, but despite it's sensationalist headline, it couldn't show me the PC game sales were up, only that numbers for DOTA2 and League of Legends were "extraordinary", hardly what I would call "PC GAMES SALES are up".
These numbers are global numbers and on a global scale the PC is big for years now, but unfortunately this is because of it's strength in the asian MMORPG markets in general and the chinese market in particular. In these markets the PC is king, but this doesn't help the western games industry in any way. These markets are closed to them. Because of this, I find the forbes article odd, when it says:
"the mature game markets of Korea, Japan, U.S., U.K., and Germany demonstrated significant growth in 2011"
Japan's and Korea's PC gaming markets are totally different from the british and german market. Besides as always these numbers include social games like the Zynga games, which were clearly part of a bubble economy in 2011 and this bubble had already burst.
So yes on a global scale the PC market may be growing, but mainly in the MMORPG sector in asia and in the f2p social sector in the rest of the world. Numbers for 2012 are showing this:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/43694/PC-games-achieved-record- 20bn-revenue-i n-2012
While the whole global market grew by 8%, the chinese market grew by 17%, because of this I wouldn't say "it's a great time to be a PC developer", but more it's a great time to be a PC developer if you are working on a chinese MMORPG.
But after a moment of thought I must admit, the PC at least has it's growth in certain genres and certain areas of the world, while the consoles are declining globally. So yes, you might be right. (even if I don't trust numbers that include micro transactions, advertising revenues, etc. because they are to much estimated for my taste).
It's hard to get people to upgrade to new machines now, one of the factors being there are so many new devices to be had. When people have a CPT, laptop, tablet and phone, it's challenging enough to make sure all of those devices are talking to each other properly. When you only had to deal with one, it was easier to make sure you maintained that one to last. Now since you have 2-4(or more), you have to make sure that you take care of all of them.
Years ago, games at the lowest settings looked really bad while the very high settings were amazing. Now, there isn't much difference between the lowest settings and ultra, especially if you can at least keep the texture quality to medium or high.
So gamers won't need that most powerful hardware out there to enjoy good looking games and developers shouldn't have to focus on graphics as much as they once did.
Like Lars Doucet said, it's a great time for PC gamers!
PC Hardware sales will spike again after the Gen4 consoles are released. PC hardware hasn't needed to upgrade because everyone is playing ports of 8 year old console games. Once we see these high end consoles games getting ported to PC then we'll find ourselves wanting the 60fps experience, not the 10fps experience on our Core2 Duo's with Intel 3000 video cards in them...
I'm not too worried. I am excited for consoles because they will push the PC market, at least for the gamers looking to play the high end games in 4k resolution at 60fps with all the bells turned to 11. There may still be the group of PC gamers who chug along at 20-30fps on low settings and feel okay with that as well but there isn't much to convince those gamers to upgrade until the game flat out crashes or rejects the hardware.
^ What Ben said. I had the same PC hardware for the longest time, obviously because PC hardware has been held back by static consoles. A mid-range PC (nothing special at all) that I built in early 2007 lasted me to late 2011, when I upgraded the CPU and video card for about $500 total. I could've made it last longer -- it was still playing all of the console ports. (But I nerded out over Battlefield 3 screenshots and bit the bullet.)
But yeah, it's not like people aren't still buying and playing lots and lots of games on old hardware. It's pretty difficult to find stats on digital sales, but all signs point to a lot of traction for PC games.
Not quite that simple. You have to ask, why do you have no reason to upgrade now, when you did at some point. The answer is the software. There's nothing so earth shattering that drives an upgrade in this space.
Software drives hardware sales, and the current crop of PCs will handle what most developers will make.
On the Hardware front - PC's - being what they are - are evolving again. I don't think the PC 'definition' is keeping up with the Form Factor evolutions. If my 'Tablet' 'Phablet' 'SmartPhone' 'Whatever' can do pretty much everything todays Desktop or Laptop PC's can - such as: Games, Social Networking, Email, Productivity Apps (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc).. then where does a PC def'n begin or end? By my definition a PC does not always = Windows based OEM product. With my Intel hat on, or even if I worked at say AMD, or Nvidia, or Qualcomm etc.... you can be rest assured that the race is on to make these new form factors capable enough to play everything you & I as gamers like to kick back with. So....while I like the IDC datasets - there's some ambiguity with the definition. Instead of saying... PC Desktop or Laptop ..and then Tablet. I'd say... Windows based desktop, laptop, tablet (Surface Pro), etc. Then add in Android/Chrome based desktops, laptops, tablets, iOS based ones etc. This would give us a more cleaner look. It's NOT a PC vs. Tablet thing. (e.g. Is a Surface Pro a Tablet?)
Point is.. the sky is not falling. The PC is not dying. It's growing and evolving. The more telling story is.. what OS is inside? Are Game Devs targetting both the OS & the Form Factors appropriately? Better yet... since everyone's 'secret' plans for world domination are centered around 'multi-screen' user scenarios now.. the smart way of approaching this is to try to get your content (Games) to be OS & Form Factor agnostic. Not easy to do - but we're heading in that direction.
On the Software Front: PC Games are killing it. It now takes 3 Consoles added together to get close to the PC revenues. The SmartPhone/Pthablet market isn't doing so hot due to the much lower ARPUs. It's turned into a huge 'Red Ocean'. The key to the PC's success is that 1) The economy of scale is stupidly large. ~1.4 billion consumers big. You'll never get a 100% attach...but it is a strength if you're able to harness even a fraction of it. 2) F2P/Freemium coupled with micro-transactions. This eliminates piracy if it's implemented. You can't pirate a F2P game can you? So the games that do get pirated are those that go out as shrink wrapped products. (So yes... Piracy is still high for that old school business model, but in the grand scheme - retails is a rounding error) Sure.. there's MMO & even Digital Disti games that are also being pirated..but it's a little tougher to do. And no.. it's not just WoT & LoL & DotA making a killing here. Consider the 'margin' aspects. 3) Digital Distribution. Everyone typically thinks of Steam - as they should. But we need to expand our thinking here as well to include SNS based games (FB, Club Penguin, etc), Impulse, EA Origin, BattleNet, GoG, etc. There's a very long list and it's vastly underestimated. Oh... and to the person in another forum that got on my case about not knowing Steam Sales. Actually... I like to think I have a pretty good estimate there. :-) The worst case model for them is still insanely lucrative. Much more so than what it'd be for say Xbox Live, or PSN when you factor in total expenditures.
My Steam sales, for the record, are pretty nuts:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186940/
That's for a small team with only 1 full time employee, with basically zero marketing. Also we get constantly dinged for our cutscene character art.
And here's what an *established* small team that has their marketing act together can do:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/03/02/team-meat-describe-nightmare-xbo x-development- everyone-should-love-on-steam/
And here's what a bigger team making a fancy 3d multiplayer game can accomplish:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-10-natural-selection-2-e arns-USD1-mill ion-in-its-first-week
Those 3 data points aren't representative in and of themselves, but at least in the case of SMB we have a direct comparison to consoles.
PC hardware sales mostly account for the typical consumer. I see no where in this of "gaming hardware" or gamer hardware purchases. So any discussion of this in relation to "gamers" or "gamer market" is complete speculation.
Just because the overall market is shrinking does not mean that the gamer market is affected.
Good point Lance. These numbers probably don't even include us (folks who build pcs from newegg), we are such a tiny part of the market! This number reflects normal people who went from checking their email/facebook on a dell to checking it on a phone. Personally I can't wait for PCs to drop out of the mass market and go back to being hobby toys again (less bloatware/malware, no more relatives begging me to fix their pcs!)
One thing we can be sure of is that the business market will prop up PCs for a long long time after the mass market switches (mostly) over to phones/tablets/chromebooks.
It wouldn't surprise me if the enthusiast/gamer PC hardware spend has remained pretty consistent, despite an overall decrease in general PC hardware shipments.
A PC gamer isn't diverting cash into tablets or smartphones as a replacement for their gaming PC unit.
I agree with most here, software used to push on the boundaries of hardware, then hardware started to far far outpaced software requirements save for a few games. As many mention most mid range computers can handle pretty much anything thrown at them now. While we use to have had to upgrade rigs every 2 years or so, now its every 5 to 8 years or so. Hardware sales of course are going to reflect that.
To be honest I dont miss having to swap out my video card every year, buying more ram, and/or having to buy a new rig every couple years
I like tinkering also and always look for excuses to do so, weather it's just cleaning out my PC, or helping a friend setup their system.
I'm with others also, especially when I considering the PC I built in 2007 wich was a Core2 Quad and 9600 GT could push 50 fps on games like RE5 at max-detail at 1600 x 900, when the 360 was barely making 30 fps on low-detail at 720p.
The only reason I even upgraded since then, was for my 3D work; well, also DCS A-10.
BUT, one good thing about PCs being held back by consoles and software really not taxing them as much, is that I took money that I would normally put towards a newer upgrade and bought more gaming peripherals.
Anyways, here's looking forward to Star Citizen, since it's the post I've set for my next build.
I usually but a new system (either a tower or laptop) once every three years. Personally, I won't buy a PC until Windows 8 goes the way of Vista. I'm running a Dell XPS with Windows 7, had it for 2 1/2 years now. I can hold out.
I used to buy a new system for myself every two-three years. Between my wife, myself, and replacing broken laptops, that typically amounted to a computer purchase each year.
Now I'm on a system I've had since 2009. I've made some minor upgrades to it such as more RAM. When I bought Lori's last computer in 2012, I was surprised to find that "close enough to state of the art" was a system virtually identical to mine. This is the first time I've bought similarly-configured computers three years apart.
Bottom line - Most PC's are now "good enough" for several years. We don't need to replace them as often as we used to. Also, I think people are buying more software for older computers than they once did - It used to be a rule of thumb that PC users only bought new software in the first year after buying a computer. So PC game sales are still strong, people just aren't upgrading their hardware as often.
I've been looking for a SFF PC to use as a general media-box under the TV (Android/Rasp Pi aren't quite up to the job). A quick check on Ebay shows I can pick up a dual-core Athlon 64 machine with 3gb of ram and an ATi X300 GPU for approx. £65 (~$100) - if I was happy to settle for something with an Intel GPU, I could halve that price.
Even the low end of the used market is "good enough" these days for the vast majority of what people do - including gaming.
I know this is an obvious thing to say but it doesn't seem to have been said in the above comments. PC sales are down because people are doing PC-like things on other devices, so of course sales of desktops/laptops are down, people are doing a lot now on their phones/tablets.
You would expect this trend to continue as phones/tablets get more powerful. We are almost getting to the point where the hardware needed to do 99% of what most people want to use a computer for can be put into a device as small as a phone, the only thing left is high-end 3D games, which I presume is what people will mostly use consoles for, leaving the PC for what?
I can see PC's becoming more and more niche, basically (ironically) going back to what they were originally for which is work horses for specific tasks, but I think the days of PC's being mass-market devices have gone.
I'm not saying personally I think that's a good thing or even something I would want, but it just looks to me as inevitable. The one thing which might buck the trend is whatever Valve decide to do, but the time for them to do it is getting shorter and shorter.
I agree that the era of the pc you sit in front of to do gaming or watch movies or entertainment is going away but :
I think it is also the duty of developpers and different software companies to make PC more attractive if they want to continue make software for it, the PC have the strong advantage to be leader in high end technologies, to be one step ahead, there is different fields which have not been yet explored (interactive movies, innovative input devices (Oculus), intelligent home, smart workstations, immersive games...) and the PC still offers the widest flexibility for building new technologies, i personnaly think that in our era, what the PC is missing is clever interface, immersive and challenging... (maybe what i have in mind looks a lot like a console, but i still believe that PC will always rise again just waiting for new tech trends to come...)
Mobile is trendy those days, but interfaces are already changing... the market have a tendancy to orient developers (of course we need to eat, at last...) at technology it made a leading one (if i can say...) mobile is leading only because the devs and harware made it trendy, because the market saw that the public was looking at mobile as innovative, (thanks to Apple marketing?) and truly it is innovative, but i personally think that while we have houses and families the pc market have still a good chance to rise again with nice techs... (consoles are just fancy computers after all with a nice interface?)
I have a hard time trusting statistics like this, does "PC Shipments" include people who build their rigs from the ground up by ordering parts? Does it include smaller specialized businesses that only custom build gaming rigs to spec for individual orders? It almost reads as if they are pulling stats from major manufacturers like Dell. I'll have to read into that linked report some more, but I'd be wary of every taking a statistic like that at face value.
Lastly, as a long standing PC gamer, with PC hardware technologies becoming more streamlined (when compared to just a decade a go) I'd wager that people are slowly upgrading their PC rigs and dramatically increasing their life cycle versus all out buying a new rig.
Is mobile taking a chunk out of the PC market? I don't doubt that it is, but is it the complete reason for these supposed numbers of decline? I doubt it.
I like this group! :-) Therefore I'll divulge a few ballpark #'s for everyone to digest. (Without getting myself fired). It'll help provide I think some much needed context. These #'s are from IDC, PCGA, & Intel. I'll have to do some gross rounding to help simplify things and not overstep boundaries. The #'s are not so drastically different from most of the other reputable research out there either. I'll throw in some of my own analysis as well.
1) About ~370 million PC's sold globally last year. This is both Consumer & Commercial. Around ~200 million of those were strictly for Consumers. This volume sells every year with modest growth.
2) Of that volume. Somewhere between ~10-15 million PC's were DIY. Self Built. There's another volume of Desktop PC's that are upgraded - I'm skewing this # down very conservatively to ~5 million units.
3) Consumer Notebooks with GPUs outsell Desktops with GPU's by a 3:1 margin. Apparently people like to be 'mobile'. I'm in the camp of being able to game on the go - everywhere myself.
4) So... in the consumer space only... around ~60-80 million PC's are sold with a GPU. Most of that is driven by gaming - but not all. This is where Nvidia, & AMD do quite well. Even if you divided that # in half your looking at a volume of PC Gaming systems that outsells all the Consoles combined by roughly 2:1 margin. My personal estimate says that dividing that # in half isn't quite fair. It's probably closer to ~2/3rds of that GPU volume being driven by gamers. The rest is for Consumers that either don't know, care, or want to future-proof their PC purchase, bought it on advice from a friend (who's likely a gamer!).
5) As you can see - the PC Gaming Ecosystem proliferates very rapidly. It's quite easy to get to a TAM (total available market) of over a billion PC's quite rapidly; and this factors in the double, triple, attach & ownership rates, replacements, etc. So again... the real trick isn't for lack of a TAM...it's to capture the mind/rev share back to the platform that truly makes more sense. (Especially for Game Developers)
6) The next game changer is both Intel's (Processor Graphics), and AMD's (Fusion Graphics). So what this accomplishes for Game Developers is to flush out the older fixed function pipeline Integrated Graphics, with a more robust, capable, & programmable flavor of Graphics co-located to the CPU on the same die. So... now... we can bank on practically every PC Chipset (I don't care what the form factor looks like) going out the door with the capabilities of what we all know as Low to even Mid Range GPUs. The effective TAM sold every year on the PC front is ~200+ Million PC's. As more & more Tablets use the AMD & Intel Chips - that grows at at even faster clip. ~250-300+ Million units every year if you include those Tablets using those chipsets.
So yes... it's tough for people to 'trust' statistics of PC shipments and all; but, believe me... it's there. The harder job is discerning who really is gaming & who isn't. There's even a large % of Commercial PC's that people game on. (*gasp*). However; I, & several others in the industry don't typically count those as a type of insurance policy to not overstate things.
Lastly; things get real fun & interesting as we see ARM/Qualcomm-SnapDragon/Tegra/Atom & several others creep up the stack. It's not really an if..but when.. those chipsets can play something insane like BF3 or Crysis 3. It could be in a few years... 5... 10 years down the line. However; where do those chips find a home? Your SmartPhone? In a Car? A SmartTV? They could end up in all sorts of places.
I fear the day when the platform developers use to MAKE games is no longer a platform where gamers can PLAY games (and, if they so choose, change them or learn to make their own). How disempowering that will be.
There will always be games on PC (unless Microsoft shuts us out with Win8/9/10). There may not always be AAA games on PC outside of always-online type of games. Consoles are inherently designed as a complex DRM scheme (not being able to read the disk on your PC, not being able to duplicate the disk, requiring complex soldering to bypass hardware securities, etc) and that is something that PC is struggling with. As long as piracy exists (as an excuse or not) it will prohibit the number of AAA mainstream games on the platform. But indie will always be there, so if you are an indie gamer then you have nothing to fear.
... at least, I had no reason to upgrade, then the Oculus Rift happened. I'm expecting mine later today, but I'm still part of the extremely small minority of early adopters/developers. IMO It's the only interesting thing to happen to PC in a really long time.
Phones will get there too (and I'd wager quite quickly) once they get to a point that they do everything users want them to without much trouble. Sure, at the moment they're a bit of a status symbol ("Do you have the latest iPhone/Galaxy?" and so on), but that will pass soon enough.
ARM/mobile processing =/= Only smartphones.
We're witnessing the inefficiencies, and inflated costs of x86 architecture being exposed to mainstream consumers.
Conventional PCs are not efficient hardware platform for either computational needs, or---as the PS4 is proving---video game processing.
Steam sales are nice but MARKETS dictate content, not Nvidia's whims in putting out a new $600 GPU. The conventional desktop PC is rapidly turning obsolete and there's not much else to say.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/11/as-pc-gaming-popularity-keeps-climbin
g-hardware-sales-down/
Times may be tough for hardware manufacturers, but it's a great time to be a PC developer.
I read the RPS article, but despite it's sensationalist headline, it couldn't show me the PC game sales were up, only that numbers for DOTA2 and League of Legends were "extraordinary", hardly what I would call "PC GAMES SALES are up".
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/03/06/gdc-2012-pc-ga mes-raked-in-1
8-6-billion-in-2011/
Also keep in mind almost no public reports include much data about digital distribution, which the PC market has been the center of.
These numbers are global numbers and on a global scale the PC is big for years now, but unfortunately this is because of it's strength in the asian MMORPG markets in general and the chinese market in particular. In these markets the PC is king, but this doesn't help the western games industry in any way. These markets are closed to them. Because of this, I find the forbes article odd, when it says:
"the mature game markets of Korea, Japan, U.S., U.K., and Germany demonstrated significant growth in 2011"
Japan's and Korea's PC gaming markets are totally different from the british and german market. Besides as always these numbers include social games like the Zynga games, which were clearly part of a bubble economy in 2011 and this bubble had already burst.
So yes on a global scale the PC market may be growing, but mainly in the MMORPG sector in asia and in the f2p social sector in the rest of the world. Numbers for 2012 are showing this:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/43694/PC-games-achieved-record- 20bn-revenue-i
n-2012
While the whole global market grew by 8%, the chinese market grew by 17%, because of this I wouldn't say "it's a great time to be a PC developer", but more it's a great time to be a PC developer if you are working on a chinese MMORPG.
But after a moment of thought I must admit, the PC at least has it's growth in certain genres and certain areas of the world, while the consoles are declining globally. So yes, you might be right. (even if I don't trust numbers that include micro transactions, advertising revenues, etc. because they are to much estimated for my taste).
So gamers won't need that most powerful hardware out there to enjoy good looking games and developers shouldn't have to focus on graphics as much as they once did.
Like Lars Doucet said, it's a great time for PC gamers!
I'm not too worried. I am excited for consoles because they will push the PC market, at least for the gamers looking to play the high end games in 4k resolution at 60fps with all the bells turned to 11. There may still be the group of PC gamers who chug along at 20-30fps on low settings and feel okay with that as well but there isn't much to convince those gamers to upgrade until the game flat out crashes or rejects the hardware.
But yeah, it's not like people aren't still buying and playing lots and lots of games on old hardware. It's pretty difficult to find stats on digital sales, but all signs point to a lot of traction for PC games.
Software drives hardware sales, and the current crop of PCs will handle what most developers will make.
On the Hardware front - PC's - being what they are - are evolving again. I don't think the PC 'definition' is keeping up with the Form Factor evolutions. If my 'Tablet' 'Phablet' 'SmartPhone' 'Whatever' can do pretty much everything todays Desktop or Laptop PC's can - such as: Games, Social Networking, Email, Productivity Apps (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc).. then where does a PC def'n begin or end? By my definition a PC does not always = Windows based OEM product. With my Intel hat on, or even if I worked at say AMD, or Nvidia, or Qualcomm etc.... you can be rest assured that the race is on to make these new form factors capable enough to play everything you & I as gamers like to kick back with. So....while I like the IDC datasets - there's some ambiguity with the definition. Instead of saying... PC Desktop or Laptop ..and then Tablet. I'd say... Windows based desktop, laptop, tablet (Surface Pro), etc. Then add in Android/Chrome based desktops, laptops, tablets, iOS based ones etc. This would give us a more cleaner look. It's NOT a PC vs. Tablet thing. (e.g. Is a Surface Pro a Tablet?)
Point is.. the sky is not falling. The PC is not dying. It's growing and evolving. The more telling story is.. what OS is inside? Are Game Devs targetting both the OS & the Form Factors appropriately? Better yet... since everyone's 'secret' plans for world domination are centered around 'multi-screen' user scenarios now.. the smart way of approaching this is to try to get your content (Games) to be OS & Form Factor agnostic. Not easy to do - but we're heading in that direction.
On the Software Front: PC Games are killing it. It now takes 3 Consoles added together to get close to the PC revenues. The SmartPhone/Pthablet market isn't doing so hot due to the much lower ARPUs. It's turned into a huge 'Red Ocean'. The key to the PC's success is that 1) The economy of scale is stupidly large. ~1.4 billion consumers big. You'll never get a 100% attach...but it is a strength if you're able to harness even a fraction of it. 2) F2P/Freemium coupled with micro-transactions. This eliminates piracy if it's implemented. You can't pirate a F2P game can you? So the games that do get pirated are those that go out as shrink wrapped products. (So yes... Piracy is still high for that old school business model, but in the grand scheme - retails is a rounding error) Sure.. there's MMO & even Digital Disti games that are also being pirated..but it's a little tougher to do. And no.. it's not just WoT & LoL & DotA making a killing here. Consider the 'margin' aspects. 3) Digital Distribution. Everyone typically thinks of Steam - as they should. But we need to expand our thinking here as well to include SNS based games (FB, Club Penguin, etc), Impulse, EA Origin, BattleNet, GoG, etc. There's a very long list and it's vastly underestimated. Oh... and to the person in another forum that got on my case about not knowing Steam Sales. Actually... I like to think I have a pretty good estimate there. :-) The worst case model for them is still insanely lucrative. Much more so than what it'd be for say Xbox Live, or PSN when you factor in total expenditures.
Now how bout some numbers:
My Steam sales, for the record, are pretty nuts:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186940/
That's for a small team with only 1 full time employee, with basically zero marketing. Also we get constantly dinged for our cutscene character art.
And here's what an *established* small team that has their marketing act together can do:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/03/02/team-meat-describe-nightmare-xbo x-development-
everyone-should-love-on-steam/
And here's what a bigger team making a fancy 3d multiplayer game can accomplish:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-10-natural-selection-2-e arns-USD1-mill
ion-in-its-first-week
Those 3 data points aren't representative in and of themselves, but at least in the case of SMB we have a direct comparison to consoles.
Just because the overall market is shrinking does not mean that the gamer market is affected.
One thing we can be sure of is that the business market will prop up PCs for a long long time after the mass market switches (mostly) over to phones/tablets/chromebooks.
A PC gamer isn't diverting cash into tablets or smartphones as a replacement for their gaming PC unit.
To be honest I dont miss having to swap out my video card every year, buying more ram, and/or having to buy a new rig every couple years
I'm with others also, especially when I considering the PC I built in 2007 wich was a Core2 Quad and 9600 GT could push 50 fps on games like RE5 at max-detail at 1600 x 900, when the 360 was barely making 30 fps on low-detail at 720p.
The only reason I even upgraded since then, was for my 3D work; well, also DCS A-10.
BUT, one good thing about PCs being held back by consoles and software really not taxing them as much, is that I took money that I would normally put towards a newer upgrade and bought more gaming peripherals.
Anyways, here's looking forward to Star Citizen, since it's the post I've set for my next build.
Now I'm on a system I've had since 2009. I've made some minor upgrades to it such as more RAM. When I bought Lori's last computer in 2012, I was surprised to find that "close enough to state of the art" was a system virtually identical to mine. This is the first time I've bought similarly-configured computers three years apart.
Bottom line - Most PC's are now "good enough" for several years. We don't need to replace them as often as we used to. Also, I think people are buying more software for older computers than they once did - It used to be a rule of thumb that PC users only bought new software in the first year after buying a computer. So PC game sales are still strong, people just aren't upgrading their hardware as often.
Even the low end of the used market is "good enough" these days for the vast majority of what people do - including gaming.
You would expect this trend to continue as phones/tablets get more powerful. We are almost getting to the point where the hardware needed to do 99% of what most people want to use a computer for can be put into a device as small as a phone, the only thing left is high-end 3D games, which I presume is what people will mostly use consoles for, leaving the PC for what?
I can see PC's becoming more and more niche, basically (ironically) going back to what they were originally for which is work horses for specific tasks, but I think the days of PC's being mass-market devices have gone.
I'm not saying personally I think that's a good thing or even something I would want, but it just looks to me as inevitable. The one thing which might buck the trend is whatever Valve decide to do, but the time for them to do it is getting shorter and shorter.
I think it is also the duty of developpers and different software companies to make PC more attractive if they want to continue make software for it, the PC have the strong advantage to be leader in high end technologies, to be one step ahead, there is different fields which have not been yet explored (interactive movies, innovative input devices (Oculus), intelligent home, smart workstations, immersive games...) and the PC still offers the widest flexibility for building new technologies, i personnaly think that in our era, what the PC is missing is clever interface, immersive and challenging... (maybe what i have in mind looks a lot like a console, but i still believe that PC will always rise again just waiting for new tech trends to come...)
Mobile is trendy those days, but interfaces are already changing... the market have a tendancy to orient developers (of course we need to eat, at last...) at technology it made a leading one (if i can say...) mobile is leading only because the devs and harware made it trendy, because the market saw that the public was looking at mobile as innovative, (thanks to Apple marketing?) and truly it is innovative, but i personally think that while we have houses and families the pc market have still a good chance to rise again with nice techs... (consoles are just fancy computers after all with a nice interface?)
Lastly, as a long standing PC gamer, with PC hardware technologies becoming more streamlined (when compared to just a decade a go) I'd wager that people are slowly upgrading their PC rigs and dramatically increasing their life cycle versus all out buying a new rig.
Is mobile taking a chunk out of the PC market? I don't doubt that it is, but is it the complete reason for these supposed numbers of decline? I doubt it.
1) About ~370 million PC's sold globally last year. This is both Consumer & Commercial. Around ~200 million of those were strictly for Consumers. This volume sells every year with modest growth.
2) Of that volume. Somewhere between ~10-15 million PC's were DIY. Self Built. There's another volume of Desktop PC's that are upgraded - I'm skewing this # down very conservatively to ~5 million units.
3) Consumer Notebooks with GPUs outsell Desktops with GPU's by a 3:1 margin. Apparently people like to be 'mobile'. I'm in the camp of being able to game on the go - everywhere myself.
4) So... in the consumer space only... around ~60-80 million PC's are sold with a GPU. Most of that is driven by gaming - but not all. This is where Nvidia, & AMD do quite well. Even if you divided that # in half your looking at a volume of PC Gaming systems that outsells all the Consoles combined by roughly 2:1 margin. My personal estimate says that dividing that # in half isn't quite fair. It's probably closer to ~2/3rds of that GPU volume being driven by gamers. The rest is for Consumers that either don't know, care, or want to future-proof their PC purchase, bought it on advice from a friend (who's likely a gamer!).
5) As you can see - the PC Gaming Ecosystem proliferates very rapidly. It's quite easy to get to a TAM (total available market) of over a billion PC's quite rapidly; and this factors in the double, triple, attach & ownership rates, replacements, etc. So again... the real trick isn't for lack of a TAM...it's to capture the mind/rev share back to the platform that truly makes more sense. (Especially for Game Developers)
6) The next game changer is both Intel's (Processor Graphics), and AMD's (Fusion Graphics). So what this accomplishes for Game Developers is to flush out the older fixed function pipeline Integrated Graphics, with a more robust, capable, & programmable flavor of Graphics co-located to the CPU on the same die. So... now... we can bank on practically every PC Chipset (I don't care what the form factor looks like) going out the door with the capabilities of what we all know as Low to even Mid Range GPUs. The effective TAM sold every year on the PC front is ~200+ Million PC's. As more & more Tablets use the AMD & Intel Chips - that grows at at even faster clip. ~250-300+ Million units every year if you include those Tablets using those chipsets.
So yes... it's tough for people to 'trust' statistics of PC shipments and all; but, believe me... it's there. The harder job is discerning who really is gaming & who isn't. There's even a large % of Commercial PC's that people game on. (*gasp*). However; I, & several others in the industry don't typically count those as a type of insurance policy to not overstate things.
Lastly; things get real fun & interesting as we see ARM/Qualcomm-SnapDragon/Tegra/Atom & several others creep up the stack. It's not really an if..but when.. those chipsets can play something insane like BF3 or Crysis 3. It could be in a few years... 5... 10 years down the line. However; where do those chips find a home? Your SmartPhone? In a Car? A SmartTV? They could end up in all sorts of places.
>pc games are up
>free to play games
My how times have changed.