Why do console games often sell many more copies than PC?

A lot of the time with multi platform games there are far more console sales than PC sales and in general the PC playerbase is smaller, why is this even though console games are usually more expensive?

Easy. You can't pirate console games atleast this gen easily, have to mod your console voiding warranty.Too much Hassle. On PC, 75% gamers pirate games (its true), while 25% gamers buys lol.

could be there is less variety on consoles, so when a game comes out more people buy them.

there's also a lot of PC gamers who only play a small amount of games and go nuts on stuff like wow/csgo/dota/lol, heck there's millions on chinese steam accounts that dont have other games than PUBG in it

This. although I don't play any of those games, I did play Wolfenstein Enemy Territory pretty much exclusively for almost 10 years. Then got stuck into Planetside 2 for a couple of years.

Also a lot of the new games are just overhyped cut scene, hand holding shite with shiny graphics and shallow gameplay which I doubt interest many PC gamers.

PC has a piracy culture. Less accessible. Less marketing.

lol, so why did The Witcher 3 sell on PC?

also the online console infrastructures of PSN and XBL may affect buyers tendency to purchase certain games for consoles instead of PC.

It's hard to accurately judge PC sales because of the number of distribution options, but a lot of big multi-platform titles evidently do very well. PC games sell in waves too, with people waiting for sales, hence the reason why the likes of GTA V remain top sellers to this day.

Yeah I'm one of them, only Football Manager and Rust have any playtime from me this year

You have proof of this?

games gone up and up on pc too over past 3years or so. Alot are more then consol games especially when new on sale though pc alot cheaper.

Everyone likes to point to piracy, but that's probably the smallest reason.

There are way more casual gamers in the world than "pro gamers" or whatever you want to call people who game a lot. These pros are the ones who, if they want the best of the best and can afford it, get a PC. But casual gamers, which there are droves of, don't go out and buy a PC to play the latest CoD. With a console, you have less things you can do/have to do and is therefor easier for people, who aren't very good with electronics, to understand. I believe that's the main reason.

That, coupled with the insane marketing console games get.

It's always "NOW ON PS AND XBOX **** YEAH!!!

(also on PC..)"

PC gamers play a greater variety of games. A lot sitting around waiting for the next big budget studio game to release. PC community has embraced smaller studios. Also a lot of people build PCs to play a specific game or type of game so they really don't play anything else on it. There are just so many options and a greater variety of gamers on pc that people don't have to buy the latest big studio game from EA or whoever

Your statement is not true. Come back with sources if you want to make a point. Usually PC outsells consoles in many games. PUBG sold 22M copies.Almost all PC exclusives sell over a million copies.

Greater variety of games on PC, the community is spread around the diverse selection. Which you seem to be focusing on the spotlight AAA franchises, that PC players can still play yet aren't as reliant on.

And are you measuring by combined console figures, Xbox and Playstation sales (Nintendo has fewer shared titles) to just the PC copies?

And even factoring in the pirates, the total PC player base is still large enough that games sold across all titles more likely dwarfs the pirated copies, and can easily equal to total game sales of a given console platform from year to year - if not exceeding that.

Got a source to back up that claim?

Consoles are more accessible.

More casuals duh.

Consoles are closed systems with a captive audience. With a smaller selection of available games this audience probably buys more of the bigger name games. That's also probably why console games cost more. MS and Sony can use their captive audiences as leverage.

Oh for sure. He got the figures from the Dept. of Algorithmic Statistics Studies ???

1. PC gamers pirate most games.

2. The games they don’t pirate, they wait for 99 cent steam sales.

3. Most PC gamers will buy a thousand games for 99 cents each, but will only ever play a handful because

4. Most PC gamers only play 1 game for 10 years straight.

5. Online gaming sucks on PC and everyone knows it. Only a handful of games like MMO’s have high player bases. Consoles have more people playing no matter the game.

Funny.

What console game is surpassing 1.8 million concurrent players? I'd like to know.

Well from a retail perspective, how much shelf space do you think is given to PC games? From my experience working at Walmart Canada a few years ago, the answer is almost zero. PC games have gone completely digital (even the copies in stores are just codes). That takes away from some advertising space in stores. The generic retail stores also don't advertise gaming PC's, but consoles. In terms of individual games selling better digitally on console vs. PC, I'd like to think its a combination of three things: (1) larger variety of games available on Steam; (2) the average steam user can't run newer games at a decent setting; (3) disturbing backlogs from years of sales that consoles have only semi-recently been able to take advantage of.

EDIT: I'd have to look at steams hardware survey to see if statement two is remotely true.

Depends on the game, 40% of the Dark Souls franchise sales as of 2015 comes PC and the Dark Souls franchise is on 4 different consoles, Metro 2033 and likely Last Light sold more on PC, Battlefield games on PC sell just as much as their console versions, Overwatch sold the most on PC, XCOM sold more on PC, Cuphead sold more on PC, Hellblade sold just as much on PC, etc etc.

Generally big blockbuster AAA of the season games do better on console because that is where most of their audience is, development and marketing favors consoles and treats PC like the middle child. Just about every big multiplatform game's advertisement campaign will have a best on Xbox or Playstation advertisement latched onto it. It doesn't help that a lot of big multiplatform games generally delay the PC version from several months to even years and/or are sub par ports. So basically anyone that wants to play these big games on PC generally get tempted into buying the console versions (GTA V a prime example) or are so pissed off by how crappy the port is they don't buy it (Batman Arkham Knight and most Ubisoft games).

Consoles don't have as many games and variety and console gamers generally aren't as willing to try out different and obscure games as much as PC gamers which is why smaller and unique games generally do better on PC. There is also the audience's taste, PC and consoles don't share the exact same taste. A good amount of the best selling PC games would/did sell badly on consoles because consoles did not have much of an audience for them. MMOs and RTS are prime examples of this. RTS and MMOs are some/most of the biggest budget games on PC but most people don't acknowledge that. Console gamers are generally more into third person action games which you can tell just by looking at a lot of their exclusives. The taste in shooters greatly varies as well, games like Destiny, Call Of Duty, Star Wars Battlefront, and Halo are the most popular shooters on consoles while the most popular shooters on PC are games like WarFrame, CS:GO, Overwatch, and PUBG.

Console gamer's tend to move from one game to the next... Its why their player base for MP games drops by 50% or more after the first two weeks. And the Player base is not smaller... Just more spread out simply because of the sheer variety of games. where on console like I explained since you are defined to generations your player base moves in herds from one game to the next.

Sales flip flop on PC, if its a well deserved game it will be on par with consoles and some times beat out console sales in the long run due to sales.

My collection of games on PC:

• Steam: 149
• Battlenet: 3
• Origin: 19
• Uplay: 14

Totalling of 185 games.

Games like PUBG prove that PC gamer's will buy games and play them. Your whole argument is pretty much false.

Not only that but PC gamers from a region that is use to playing mostly F2P/subscribtion based games

Because PC gamers spend too much time trying to troubleshoot system or hardware issues. That's their main game.

I generally buy less games as a PC owner because the games I have I play much longer than console games. I probably only buy 3 games a year and put anywhere between 100-500 hours into them. Heck even Skyrim still has an extremely active modding community with new complete overhauls of the game coming out seemingly every month.

Console market is more driven by physical sales than digital, the PC market more driven by digital sales, physical sales are monitored while digital sales information is often kept away from public.

XBO/PS4 consoles market is larger in the USA while China has PC gaming dominance with different distribution stores e.g. Chinese Tencent being the world's largest game company.

Lack of choice on console systems + the junk food of gaming

That's why I always say that to devs, PC is not important.

@lamprey263: well, if you com to steamspy.com you can actually view how many players own any games and there are almost less owners of said game on PC than on consoles.

lol dat necro thread

Multiple reasons, though some multi platform games do sell better on PC than on any single console, like the recently released Kingdom Come Deliverance for example.

• Multi platform games arent advertised for PC like they are consoles. TV adverts often mislead consumers into believing that a certain game is only available for the platform it is being advertised for. It works differently on PC for the most part. If a game is good on PC then someone will tell their friends on Steam, Origin etc and they all go play that. Usually its a game that isnt on consoles and that console gamers would never have heard of unless it becomes popular on Youtube, DayZ is an example though its died off a lot now, as is PUBG which was also an ARMA mod long before it was made into a standalone game and even longer before it came to XBox. This leads me to...

• More variety of games and game genres on PC means PC gamers arent savagely frothing at the mouth for that one "AAA" game every other month. There is much more than that on PC. Along with all the genres on consoles there are also managerial games like Prison Architect, Cities Skylines or Factorio; Tactical games like Arma, Squad or They Are Billions; Flight Sims like DCS, Aerofly or the Il2 series; RTS games, Space games, Isometric RPGs etc, etc.

• Many PC games are good enough and have endless amounts of user made content to keep people playing them for decades. Fed up of playing those same five maps over and over? ...not on popular PC games you arent. Done everything there is to do in Skyrim? ...how about a new single player story driven campaign with another 100+ hours of gameplay and new features.

• Publishers release a game later on PC when hype has died off or game turns out to be shit = less sales on PC. If I am eagerly awaiting the release of a game and lots of people get to play it and tell me its shit then chances are I wont be eagerly awaiting it any more. This can also go the other way when a game is good, but more often than not AAA games tend to be all hype and thats where most of the console sales come from as those people will buy the game in droves, even if it turns out to be crap.

Piracy is a double edged sword, on the one hand pirates that were never going to buy the game in the first place get to "demo" a game, find out its bad and then not buy it. On the other hand a pirate who was never going to buy the game anyway might download a good game, tell lots of people how good it is and then some of those people decide to buy the game. Bottom line, if a game is good and people know about it then people will buy it and the pirates will pirate it. But even the pirate that would never have bought or played it without pirating first might decide to buy it and can convince others to as well.

@stuff238: Spoken like a true Cow.

PC shits all over consoles on any and every level.

A mod please close it, it's a necro that was only pushed because someone is doing a stealth ad

@calvincfb: do not bump old threads