Gamernode: News - PC gaming sales continue to slide

Digital downloads are the way forwards for PC, not only do they give the consumer instant access to the games they want, they also give the developer the opportunity to almost enitrely stop pirated copies of their games, as shown by Valve with Steam.

Oh dear.

Last Year, my PC retail game purchases were 8 (WoW:TBC, C&C 3, WiC, HGL, CoH, SC, Titan Quest and NWN 2). My Steam game purchases were 37 and too numerous to name them all, my Stardock purchases were 3 and I bought some other games from publisher websites.
Digital Downloads really is the way of the future of PC Gaming., its also great for me in Australia having juts bought Sins of a Solar Empire for $49.88 AU, when it'll retail here for $80 AU in shops.

digital downloads are the future with consoles too. As shown by M$.

Well so far, besides Warhawk, what has Digital Downloads shown on the consoles? Besides XBLA, Virtual Console and PSN; all offering small, simple games, there hasn't been a full-version, new release digital download on a console besides Warhawk as far as I'm aware.
I honestly can't see console gaming offering full, new release versions of their games as digital downloads until the next generation of consoles. There are too many SKUs, no-HDD X360s, 20, 40, 60, 80 GB PS3s, and infact those no-HDD X360s are the reason why XBLA games are limited to 150MB downloads.

Yea well some steam games sure get pirated and cracked and all that but its a lot less than other games... if steam had a bigger amount of games and to away the damn tax/fee you pay for every bought article or let you buy several at one and only get one fee i would buy a lot more games and thats for sure

sre the box is nice to have sometimes but digital download versions is the way to go

I don't buy pcs games that much as my computer isn't powerful enough.... That might be it, peoples crappy computers obviously discourage them from buying pc games so they get the nice frame rate problem free goodlooking console verson instead, when new pc parts become easily availible to the consumer again (geforce 4 mx was £50 at release, lowest 8000 series card is what £100 and something?) we may see a rise in sales.

I'm not taking that number (14%) seriously at all. Most of the games I have were brought through steam.

It's hard to tell just HOW successful Steam is, since sales figures for Steam aren't released by Valve, so we can't talk about digital downloads one way or t he other. I will, however, say, that digital downloading will limit customers to those in huge cities. Besides, while piracy is a problem, Dr. Aaron hit the nail on the head with hardware. When people have to make a choice between substandard performance and spending more for a graphics card than for the PS3, people are going to move to consoles. It's just economic sense.

PC still has better games.

Some dude did step back and think a moment about it, here's what he came up with:
http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2008/02/02/the_sky_is_falling/1

Very insightful article calling bullshit on all this "it's dead, dead I tells you" moaning.

Any "study" on PC sales that doesn't factor in digital downloads or European sales (which I believe are significantly better than American sales, see: The Witcher's 1 million sales, which is unequalled by any non-WoW title in NA) should not be taken seriously.

"casual" or flash games are insanely popular for PC and are slowly making their insane impression in the PC genre, also that's a market that MANY gaming companies are going completely ape for lately. Also I think if digital sales were revealed, they would probably have an impact on future retail sales.

The question is whether flash games make that money off sales, or off advertising (many sites offer a whole lot of free flash games). We see already with the Wii that, if it's not Nintendo first-party, these types of games don't sell well. It's a possibility that PC gaming could also persue, free games with advertising between loads.

PC's will always have better specs and better functionality than consoles. Theres a reason why consoles are so cheap. Its because PC's have better parts. Compare the Xbox 360's specs to a gaming PC. PC games = higher framerates, better graphics, better controls (mouse and keyboard), much bigger online matches, less lag (Xbox Live is peer to peer connection).

Consoles are toys. PC's can do everything.

LOL you dont want to see my list. Here are the PC Games I bought in the year 2007:

Batman: Vengence ~20.77
***BioShock ~71.18
Call of Juarez ~49.99
***Crysis ~59.99
Fantastic Four ~?
Game of Life ~?
***Half Life 2: Orange Box ~?
IceWind Dale All Packs
Jericho (Clive Barkers) ~?
***Kane and Lynch: Dead Men ~49.99
King Kong (Official Game of the Movie) ~14.99
***Lord of the Rings Online (MMORPG) ~59.99
Marvel Ultimate Alliance ~?
Monopoly 3
***Need for Speed Pro Street ~39.99
***Oblivion: Shivering Isles Expansion
Scrabble Complete
Sorry!
Spiderman 3: The Game
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Shadow of Chernobyl)
Stranglehold ~44.89
Test Drive Unlimited
Timeshift
TMNT (Official Game of the Movie; 2007)
***Tomb Raider: Anniversary
Transformers: The Game ~19.99
***Two Worlds ~72.98
***Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (MMORPG) ~
X-Men (Official Game of the Movie)

The ones with Astericks are the ones that were offiically released in 2007

And if you add up all the prices I have for the PC in 2007 I spent: 504.75

As another poster said; PCs can do everything However I would also like to point out that PCs are a lot easier to upgrade than a console is. When a new graphics card comes out to improve the graphics (obviously) one can buy it for fairly cheap; no scratch this sentence

Upgrading to improve your gaming experience on the PC is more common than it is finding a new console to buy. For example: Playstation 3 is out, not too sure the exact date of original release; 2006??? Right well Playstation 3 has a certain limitation of what it can handle, within 365 days you will not see a Playstation 4 with better capabilities whereas with PCs newer CPUs are released, newer hard drives, newer graphics cards with better capabilities are released almost monthly :) Which is why I'd rather stick to PC than consoles.

Also with PCs you can have almost a guarantee that all older games will play. An example is Drakan: Order of the Flame for PC; it was released in 1999, nearly 10 years ago was probably designed for Windows 98/ME but here I am able to play it with Windows Vista.

I cannot play Drakan: The Ancient Gates on my Playstation 3 because the PS3 cannot guarantee that all PS2 and PS1 games will play 100%

On the flip side, Itolman, with a PC if you want to keep getting the best possible experience in terms of new CPUs, new graphic cards, etc. you're going to be spending a FORTUNE. If you're a smart buyer and know what you're doing, you can get an awesome gaming PC for slightly more than a launch PS3. If you upgrade your rig whenever the newest shiniest thing comes along, though, you're going to be paying way more to play games at a slightly better performance.

Personally, I've just preferred console gaming since the PS2 and on. Before that, I had always done computers first, consoles second. (Except for when there was no real easy to obtain gaming PCs, of course.) After I got the PS2 though, I've played WAY less PC games. Hell, I can't even remember the last PC game I bought myself. Just something about holding the controller and plopping down on the couch in the living room with a couple of friends that makes gaming more fun these day s.

PC gaming won't die, though, if for no other reason than the PC gaming fanboys are too crazy to let it fade.

Oh, I've no doubt that the PC gaming genre will never fade. If anything, one can hope that the lower margins of sales for the PC would lead to a revival of more intelligent games instead of all these graphic powerhouses that offer little else. We need more STALKERs and less Crysises

Digital downloads are probably a HUGE part of sales that are not taken into account in this study. It's practically the ONLY way I buy PC games nowadays!

These things also happen in cycles, it might be likely that once 360/PS3 graphics start falling behind the curve that PCs can keep up with, sales might increase. But i know this is a very small reason the general public might buy PC over Console

All I know is I have a healthy amount of Xbox 360 games, and even more PC games. In my eyes, if a game is good I'll buy it, which ever it's for. For instance I got Bioshock on the xbox, even though my PC laughs at it's required specs, simply because it was in a sale for the 360 and not the PC.

Had it been any other way I would have probably bought it for the PC. Simply put PC gaming isn't dying. The entire market is just watering down as we have more choices of which platform to buy our game on.

"...also give the developer the opportunity to almost enitrely stop pirated copies of their games, as shown by Valve with Steam."a

not really, almost anyone who knows how to update games manually will be able to use cracked versions of steam for multiplayer, and almost no more work than just a download for multiplayer.

Hmm, PC has always been the best platform, IMO.

Well, Brendon, considering the difference between console and PC-game end-usability and the fact that you'd have to upgrade your PC all the time to play games, don't you think the inevitable trend will be that the graphic hogs will move to consoles while the more well-optimized or less graphically attuned games will be stronger on the PC? There's no reason to think PC gaming will "die" or even "slink down" just because nobody can run Crysis. It's the industry that should adapt there, not the consumers.

And amusingly enough, I left the console world after Sega left exactly because I didn't feel console offered me anything that PC gaming did not.

Brendon: The way I usually do it is I get top of the line stuff at one point. PUt it in my computer, and use it for 4 to 5 years. More often than not this works out just fine, I can still run most of the newest games, on at least meduim graphics, and I save a ton of money.

sig220: doesn't that depend on the optimization, though?

Some developers stink at optimization. My last rig (recently updated) could run BioShock just fine, as long as I turned down the graphic options. Oblivion? No chance, no matter how I tweaked or turned. That's a sign of bad optimization, right there.

sig: That sounds like a good strategy, but doesn't that mean that your games' settings will go from highest to lowest as those 5 years wear on, while on a console, each year bears witness to better and better games?
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I used to be a console-only kind of guy, up until last gen. Now, I very much enjoy having a PC that can run games well. If something comes out for both a console and the PC, I prefer it on the PC because it is (for the most part) a higher quality experience there. If the game is something like Psychonauts, and I desperately need a controller, then I have my 360 usb controller. The PC is a more powerful, flexible, and capable machine.

As for the sales figures...that sh** is so bogus without Steam and D2D numbers. More and more games are available as direct downloads nowadays, and let's be honest here, anyone who is playing videogames on a PC is probably the type of person who would much prefer the instant gratification of a game download, as opposed to making a trek to the store to buy some silly box and archaic data storage medium.

I say PC gaming is just NOW about to come into its own, and that's why it has been labeled as "dying" in the past. It just has yet to be born.