State of PC Gaming

[Gman]

It wasn't all that long ago that PC Gaming was declared dead/dying by the media.  They certainly had their reasons, due to consoles, and then when the Iphone/Ipad and other Android devices came out, the simple simon games really took off.


http://www.pcgamer.com/pc-digital-sales-outpace-mobile-reaching-61-billion-in-2015/

Great article regarding the state of affairs now.  PC Games in 2015, the top ten actually brought in more revenue than the top 10 mobile games, which bodes well for the future of the PC platform.  The top 10 PC games brought in 6.3 billion alone, and the total across all digital gaming platforms was a whopping 61 billion for the single year of 2015.

PCs aren't going anywhere, and in fact have gained some ground in the last year of two.  Some good news out of Nvidia and AMD regarding their new GPUs, Polaris and Pascal, performance is likely to double with the top end nVidia card compared to the 980ti WCCFtech is reporting.

[artik]

What is more interesting is the busyness model of virtually all top revenue games

- All top games are free-to-play
- All require additional payments to get "premium features"

[FLOOB]

Basically what the article says is that PC games are still more lucrative than phone games. But the important thing to take away from the article is that phone games are now a multibillion dollar business. That's a lot of growth in the last decade.

Number two on the overall list is the mobile game Clash of Clans, which pulled in a very impressive $1.3 billion over the year

[Gman]

No question that mobile games have come a long way in a short period of time, my "take away" is still that PC gaming is NOT dead, which was predicted and bemoaned by many gaming media sites and magazines specifically because of that mobile growth.  The opposite has happened, PC gaming has gotten stronger.  During the early to mid 2000s, even later, if you googled PC dying, you got the phone book for articles.  It was true in some sense as well, all the data pointed that way.

Remember how many simulation games were made from 1997 to say 2002?  Dozens every year.  It dropped to a fraction of that after those glory years, and sales plummeted for those box game sims too.  Even FPS games were falling in popularity/sales in that time period.

It's coming back strong now, AH3, DCS obviously, IL2, RoF, and many others are all alive and kicking still. 

[Bizman]

As was stated in an entertainment electronics magazine lately, the PC is the highest level gaming platform. That statement was based on the fact that other platform games are restricted to the existing hardware whereas PC games can be coded to meet current or even future high end computers.

[Shuffler]

What is more interesting is the busyness model of virtually all top revenue games

- All top games are free-to-play
- All require additional payments to get "premium features"

That is the bad games. Don't play and get good, just buy yourself to the top. Great for those that never truely played a game but instead used a game code to win.

[Gman]

Agree Shuffler.

Still, SteamSpy and other sources that often show sales of other non top 10 games on Steam, as well as other sources that have estimated DCS sales and such, show that simulation/war PC games are really on the uptick, which bodes well for all of us.  Many other AAA titles that aren't pay to play/ftp are doing great as well.  The new Starcraft for example has cracked 2 million copies now.   

This year is going to have some pretty incredible PC tech come out, lots of VR stuff, AMD and nVidia are coming out with new types of memory and video cards with 16 and even 32gb of vram on board, Broadwell E is coming out with 10 core CPUs soon, AMD has new CPUs on the way - good times.