PC games are now outselling console games worldwide

Morag

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/digital-life/item/36658-pc-games-are-now-outselling

In one of the most unlikely shifts in the industry, gamers are now buying more PC copies of games than console versions, according to a new report from DFC Intelligence.

I really don't know why this is so 'unlikely' with all the uncertainty about consoles atm and the fact consoles are not backwards compatible, unlike pc.

Duggy747

Well, if I had a console I know I wouldn't be buying nowhere near the amount of games that I would for the PC...........even if I don't play a large chunk of them and put them on the "list to get to".

Goddamn Steam sales, it's like specials in Lidl where you'd buy stuff you wouldn't necessarily need otherwise :pac:

Years and years ago I used to pirate games but the prices of PC games, including indie titles, and Steam's great service pretty much eradicated the need for me to do that.

I also like that I can go to GoG and get an old game if I have the hankering for it.

Retr0gamer

PC and console sales flip flop. When the console generation is in full swing the PC is dying bull**** starts up. When a new generation begins console game sales bottom out and PC sales increase since it's a more attractive platform.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

it's not hard to sell lots of titles when they're discounted to 75% off 4-5 times a year, this says sweet **** all about the health of the pc gaming market. we already knew there were loads of cheap bastards with 1000 euro machines.

Antar Bolaeisk

PCConsole Gaming is dying!

Pity that it doesn't give details for example the breakdown between normal sales and f2p sales.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

Antar Bolaeisk wrote: »

PCConsole Gaming is dying!

Pity that it doesn't give details for example the breakdown between normal sales and f2p sales.

or even what titles. i wonder how many of these are humble bundles which people are buying for at 3 cent for 78 games.

wyrn

I have to admit that when I see a game that I have on console for sale on Steam, I tend to buy a 2nd copy (Mirror's Edge, GTA, Mass Effect, Skyrim etc..) I can't help it. I can't remember how much Mirror's Edge was for xbox (€45 or so) and I just checked, I bought it for PC for 3.74.

ScumLord

Ugh, does this mean we're like the commoners. *shudder*

marco_polo

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar wrote: »

it's not hard to sell lots of titles when they're discounted to 75% off 4-5 times a year, this says sweet **** all about the health of the pc gaming market. we already knew there were loads of cheap bastards with 1000 euro machines.

Although that is true, (and some definitely take it to ridiculous extremes), I'm not convinced it is quite as bad as you imagine.

Impossible to say without a better breakdown of figures, but I'd suspect that the lower average price of digital PC games means revenue tends to get spread around a bit more evenly, rather that the bulk of it going to probably a dozen or so of the top AAA games every year.

Lone Stone

Well for me the main reason is the price tag, i was considering a ps4 but when i saw the prices on the games i just said to myself time to stick to the pc.

Nody

I think this trend is likely to continue simply because of the hardware. It used to be expensive to get equal/better quality at relase of a console but with the latest gen that's no longer really the case and as the PC continue to improve the consoles will have even harder time to compete. This does not even address the price difference (PC tends to cheaper from what I've seen) or sales (or "you don't really need anything but noodles this month anyway") or Indi games which now make up a much bigger part of time spent on gaming vs. previous decades.

I'm with Duggy, I'm a nightmare for buying games I haven't even played on steam just because there piss cheap.

Not to veer off main topic;
I would love to understand why the digital CD key re-sellers get there stock so cheap and be able to afford to sell Steam keys and still turn a profit. Surely this has an effect on the figures above?

Adamocovic

With Steam selling them at such low prices no surprise! Also it is a lot handier having it without the disc so there is no fear of it scratching and you losing your game. Plus most people already need to use laptops/computers in work or education so don't see the need for a console if they can just use their computer or laptop. Not to mention multi platform gaming too. It doesn't matter what operating system your friends have you can still play together. Console gaming is still decent but atm PC is just cheaper and more practical.

jaykhunter

I realise this article says more PC games have been sold (unspecified parameters) than console games but it's shoddiness irked me.

1. The headline "PC games are now outselling console games worldwide" is NOT the same as what's written in the opening paragraph: "gamers are now buying more PC copies of games than console versions", which from my research, is garbage.

2. "gamers are now buying more PC copies of games than console versions" but the article doesn't cite ONE example.

3. "The recently released report (behind a paywall) would appear to show..." oh, that's not suspicious at all, I can't check your stats without paying.
Here's some numbers from cross-platform games on VGChartz - if you have a more accurate source, post it.

South Park : Stick of Truth
360: 0.45
PS3: 0.43
PC: 0.09

Assassin's Creed IV
360: 2.48
XOne: 0.75
PS3: 2.83
PS4: 1.55
PC: 0.42

I bet Watchdogs follows the same trend. I've no doubt steam etc are doing wonders selling loads, but the article sounds like unweighted garbage. It gives general PC stats but not console stats. I have a gaming rig & consoles, if a title is available on PC, that's the version I buy, but this "report" and this article sounds like "shock headline" BS.

Retr0gamer

VGchartz's figures are total bull**** though. The only reliable source for software sales figures is from NDP and NDP doesn't include digital sales which is why PC sales look low in them.

Kiith

Have Steam ever released sales numbers? Or even given indications as the what sort of ballpark they are in?

ScumLord

I would hazard a guess that there's a lot more games for PC too, loads of cheap indie titles that you just wouldn't get on PC.

the groutch

you have to also bear in mind that there is virtually no pre-owned market for PC games.
one copy of an Xbox/PS game could be traded in and resold or sold privately, several times within it's lifespan, and still only count as one sale for the purpose of these stats.

Mr Bloat

Ars Technica had an interesting article a couple of weeks ago where they put together accumulated data from thousands public Steam profiles. It doesn't give data on how much a particular game may have made but it shows how many people own particular games and how often they are played:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/

If there's one big takeaway from looking at the entirety of our Steam sales and player data, it's that a few huge ultra-hits are driving the majority of Steam usage. The vast majority of titles form a "long tail" of relative crumbs. Out of about 2,750 titles we've tracked using our sampling method, the top 110 sellers represent about half of the individual games registered to Steam accounts. That's about four percent of the distinct titles, each of which has sold 1.38 million copies or more. This represents about 50 percent of the registered sales on the service.

By contrast, the bottom 1,000 games, which have sold less than 30,000 copies each, represent just 1.6 percent of all the registered games on Steam, forming a relatively paltry "long tail" of sales for relative underperformers. The median game on Steam sells just under 50,000 copies on the service, according to our estimates, while a game in the 25th percentile has sold about 215,000 copies. The distribution looks pretty much the same when looking at the number of players rather than the number of owners.

Skerries

I was just going to look for that article as well, very interesting read

Blowfish

I'd argue that PC gaming has never been weak, it's just that all the analysis tended to apply metrics that consoles used for success like 'number of games sold' to PC, despite it being a worthless metric for PC due to how PC gaming actually works.

The obvious behemoth WoW, generated last year solely through subscriptions and microtransactions (i.e. ignoring sales) roughly equivalent to the same as the total sales of GTA across all platforms. This is despite it being probably their worst year in a long time, with an increase expected later this year due to a new expansion.

Then there are games like CrossFire, LoL, Dota2, WoT etc, which technically have a total of zero sales due to no cost, yet in a single year all have revenues roughly equivalent to the sales of one of the Modern Warfare series across all platforms.

That's not even taking into account the whole retail vs digital sales sillyness.

Genghiz Cohen

Blowfish wrote: »

I'd argue that PC gaming has never been weak, it's just that all the analysis tended to apply metrics that consoles used for success like 'number of games sold' to PC, despite it being a worthless metric for PC due to how PC gaming actually works.

Or devices sold. Laptops for light use are losing ground to tablets and phones, so you constantly hear about how the PC is dying and Mobile is taking over.

2Mad2BeMad

not surprised considering you can get a **** ton of pc games for pennys now a days :L they may be outselling but the developers are not getting any profits from the 75-90% sales of steam unless steam are covering the costs which I doubt

gaynorvader

M!Ck^ wrote: »

{...}

Not to veer off main topic;
I would love to understand why the digital CD key re-sellers get there stock so cheap and be able to afford to sell Steam keys and still turn a profit. Surely this has an effect on the figures above?

I'm not sure how they do it, but if it were me I'd buy up a load of games as gifts when they're 75%+ off and resell the codes later when they're full price again at a nice little profit.

Retr0gamer

2Mad2BeMad wrote: »

not surprised considering you can get a **** ton of pc games for pennys now a days :L they may be outselling but the developers are not getting any profits from the 75-90% sales of steam unless steam are covering the costs which I doubt

Publishers are making quite a lot off of those sales. These are games that would never sell at full price. After a sale Valve take 30%, the rest then goes to the publisher after tax is deducted. There's no additional costs since all the money spent developing the game and getting it published have already been paid and there's no manufacturing costs either.

That's the beauty of digital sales, there's no costs to cover.

ScumLord

2Mad2BeMad wrote: »

they may be outselling but the developers are not getting any profits from the 75-90% sales of steam unless steam are covering the costs which I doubt

I'm not sure what the costs of steam are for developers. The main overhead for Steam would likely be servers and bandwidth, but I'm sure the cost per game is pretty low all things considered. They certainly wouldn't have the overheads that a hard copy would undoubtedly have, from the point of view of the developers all they need to do is upload their game to steam servers.

I'm sure steam sales are successful, I'm fairly sure as long as they sell enough stock the sale works out for everyone or no one would be doing it. It would be important for developers to get money in more so than have a lot of sales, so if they need €50,000 each month to cover their costs and make a profit it doesn't matter if they sell 10,000 or 100,000 games, all that matters is that the money comes in.

With many PC games having a life that includes DLC, the more users they get the more money they'll make in over the lifespan of the game too.

Genghiz Cohen

gaynorvader wrote: »

I'm not sure how they do it, but if it were me I'd buy up a load of games as gifts when they're 75%+ off and resell the codes later when they're full price again at a nice little profit.

Some do that, others buy them in Eastern Europe or Russia and sell them here at a gain.

gizmo

As jaykhunter indicated above, the Silicon Republic article is absolutely awful and you'd be better off reading their "source" directly.

The PC games market has now surpassed the console gaming sector in terms of revenues, an analyst has claimed.

So this has nothing to do about traditional game sales.

In terms of the most popular PC games, DFC says that MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) titles and free-to-play games are continuing to perform strongly.

"The MOBA games League of Legends and Dota 2 dominate everything else by an order of magnitude in terms of more usage than other products," added Cole.

I'm not going to cheer this delightful set of stats one bloody bit.

In fact, the figures point to a more worrying trend as the biggest earners aren't even newer titles.

“We can say that our top 20 list for 2013 had no titles released that year and in Q1 2014 we saw three new titles crack the list: DayZ, Rust and Hearthstone,” Cole said.

Blowfish

gizmo wrote: »

In fact, the figures point to a more worrying trend as the biggest earners aren't even newer titles.

That was a bit of an odd statement as Dota2 was officially released in 2013. Granted they could claim it was accessible through the beta before that, but if you count that, then Hearthstone beta was available in 2013, so the statement still wouldn't have been true.

In any case, it's always been the case on PC that older games have a long lifespan, from Quake/Unreal to Starcraft to MMO's etc. the popular ones just run for a long long time.

Magill

Are these numbers compared to the entire console market ? I'd have thought it would be at least on par with one of the consoles, but all three is surprising.

Hard to argue the success moba's have had, the numbers that league of legends and even dota get are incredible... LoL in particular dwarfs anything we've ever seen on console. Even games like TF2 are still doing incredibly ! I seen it made $140m last year or something crazy like that... impressive for a 7 year old game. Will be interesting to see how Dota2 and even CS:GO do this year as I don't think their are any numbers for these games yet (In terms of microtransactions).

Good to see the market is in good shape tho, even if the numbers are a little muddled. And why would you not be happy that most of the top grossing games aren't new ? They're constantly adding new content to these games, its not like they the same game as was released. Infact... i'd argue there is probably more change and content added to these games over the space of a year than some of the big sellers on console (Fifa,madden.. hell even CoD).

ShadowHearth

Blowfish wrote: »

That was a bit of an odd statement as Dota2 was officially released in 2013. Granted they could claim it was accessible through the beta before that, but if you count that, then Hearthstone beta was available in 2013, so the statement still wouldn't have been true.

In any case, it's always been the case on PC that older games have a long lifespan, from Quake/Unreal to Starcraft to MMO's etc. the popular ones just run for a long long time.

I actually was confused about that too. How's that a bad thing. Games on pc generally have a lot more life in them. They are not being recycled as fast as on consoles. Look at that new stalker mod that became standalone. It's being downloaded like hot pancakes!
Free to play games on pc are very good too. No wonder why they stay active for so long. Even when you do a break from them for a good few months or a year, when you come back there is a ton of new content.