"If you're a long-time PC gamer, you've heard it all before. Your favorite gaming platform is dying, and it's all about the consoles now. After all, gaming on the PC is too expensive. It's too complicated and unreliable. The sales just aren't there. All the cool games are on consoles. PCs are fine for World of Warcraft, but everything else is better played on a console, unless you're a diehard competitive first-person shooter nut.
Of course, PC enthusiasts know this isn't true. But the rest of the world is eating this FUD up, and it's creating a false impression that if you ignore the PC as a gaming platform, you're not missing anything"- Jason Cross
Above is a quote, i was going to paraphrase to open this thread but i couldn't sat it better myself. I am a console gamer. I am also a PC gamer, and as such i am often privy to much that is held as fact by many of my peers about the PC as a system. This is the first is a series of threads i am going to bring to you (hopefully 10 in all) Giving my take on the Myths and false-hoods held here and in the wider world.
first of some more jason Cross from this article.
"First of all, NPD only tracks retail sales, and only in the U.S.. Yes, the U.S. has the strongest retail games market, but PC games are very popular worldwide. Especially in Europe, and Germany in particular, PC game sales top sales charts. Most importantly, the PC is well ahead of consoles in online game sales—which NPD does not track. Whether it's GameTap, Steam, Direct2Drive, TotalGaming.net, or even the direct download store at the EBgames site, buying games exclusively online is huge on PCs. And that doesn't even include things like recurring payments or digital item sales for online games like World of Warcraft. Research firm Strategy Analytics said that the global online games market generated over $3.8 billion in revenue in 2006, and is growing at over 25% per year. Yes, some of that is buying downloadable content on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, or Wii Virtual Console, but the money pulled in by those are a drop in the bucket, globally, to the online revenue generated by PC game sales"
These are by Mid 2007 figures but this is still as aplicable today as ever. PC games sales aee moving on-line and thus becoming harder to track. NPD does not even stack the reatail sales it can get for PC games up against the consoles so this creats a data hole in which myths can develop. Even in just retail though the PC and still holds its own.
"Sales tracking firm NPD said there were "over $970 million" in PC game sales, and $7.4 billion in total game sales. So, roughly a billion in sales for the PC, and $6.4 billion for consoles. Consoles are slaughtering PCs, right? Actually, it's not that simple.
First of all, it's a stacked deck. The PC is one platform, the Xbox 360 is one platform, the PlayStation 3 is one platform, the Nintendo DS is one platform, etc. If you make a game for the PS3, it doesn't magically run on the 360 any more than it magically runs on the PC. PC game sales as tracked by NPD are being beat over 6:1 by the combination of all console platforms. Of course it is! NPD did not provide a breakdown by platform (except for the PC), though. Divvy up that $6.4 billion in console sales into its respective separate platforms: Xbox, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PSP. There are at least nine major "console" platforms, each as incomparable to each other as the PC is to consoles, contributing to that $6.4 billion in sales. If the distribution were even (and it's not), you'd have about $711 million per console platform.
Unfortunately, nobody is yet providing the kind of apples-to-apples data that lets us get a true picture of PC game sales. Take that "over $970 million" sales of PC games from NPD. That's just retail and just the U.S. Nobody is tracking online game sales for just the U.S. in a reasonably comprehensive way. Or if they are, they're not proving data, breaking it down by platform and by game sales & addons vs. recurring subscription fees. I don't think it's a stretch to say that several hundred million dollars worth of games & addons have happened online in the U.S"
As i more recent example i think none is better than the Sims 3, acording to EA the game sold over 1.4 million units in it's first month; does that sound like a dying platfrom to you?
So that's software sorted but what about hardware? There is an estimate that there may be as many as 1 billion PC users world-wide. And there have been nearly 1 billion downloads of FireFox. This is a STAGGERING Install Base nut not all of these are Gaming PCs right? Well yes but there are also significant numbers of them out there.
"Publicly available data from reports by Jon Peddie Research published in articles such as this one and this one provides us with sufficient information to deduce that sales of add-in graphics cards made by Nvidia and ATI total around 20-24 million units per quarter in 2008. Extrapolating the quarterly figure to an annual one equates to roughly 80-100 million graphics cards sold each year. This is the figure for only one year of sales, so it's a very conservative estimate of the base number of PCs with modern graphics cards. Of course some of these cards will be low-end, however since the data pertains to add-in graphics cards sold by Nvidia and ATI in the past year, not onboard graphics solutions such as Intel chipsets, then virtually all of them would be capable of some level of gaming. For example even low-end and two year-old cards can pump out over 30FPS or more in Call of Duty 4. Furthermore, since even cards released two years ago, such as the 8800GTS/GTX, can still game very effectively, it's still a low-end estimate of the total number of 'gaming' PCs in total. To add to the rough calculations above, this study claims that approximately 196 million gaming PCs were shipped between the third quarter of 2005 and the third quarter of 2008. One last piece of valuable information comes from Roy Taylor of Nvidia who recently stated that: "...there is a very large installed base of GeForce gamers. We estimate that we have over 180 million active GeForce users. That's a much bigger installed base than PS3 or Xbox 360." "-tweak guides
This Gives us infomation that in one quater of 2008 the number of dedicated Graphics cards sold was almost HALF the TOTAL number of Wiis sold to date.
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