Digital Distribution Numbers Speak To Health of PC Game Industry 192
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority:
"Over the years many voices have declared PC gaming dead. We have seen developers abandon the platform for consoles, citing piracy as the cause. Game stores have slowly relegated PC games from prime shelf position to one tucked away in the back corner — even Microsoft dumped AAA PC game developers from the company. It seems, though, that the demise of the PC as a games platform has been exaggerated, because until very recently sales data ignored digital distribution, with the latest data released by US company NPD revealing that 48% of PC unit sales in the US in 2009 were digital. That translates to 21.3 million games downloaded in the US. Interestingly, although 48% of games were sold online, it only worked out as 36% of the revenue. This highlights the fact that it isn't just convenience that has PC gamers shopping online; it is also that games are generally cheaper than in stores."
pc games from the 1990s (Score:2, Interesting)
Old games can still be played on today's pc's (starcraft comes to mind). If you bought an older game for the previous generations of gaming consoles, it will not probably play on the latest generation of consoles.
I still buy pc games that I don't have time to play today in the expectation that I will be able to play them in the future when I have more time. That said, I am buying almost exclusively stand-alone games that don't need to connect to a server with thousands of other players.
BenJCarter (Score:0, Interesting)
the PC will never really die as a games platform (Score:3, Interesting)
There was another story on Slashdot recently about centralizing graphics processing into a single graphics server per household, with the output from that server being displayed on client devices. Once you reach that point, consoles and PCs, monitors and TVs, all become the same devices.
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Re:Low(er) Prices + Convenience = no-brainer (Score:4, Interesting)
Piracy
1) Hunt for suitable p2p client that isn't taken down or adware infested yet
2) Hunt for suitable download that is not a translated version or fake and has a proper crack
3) Wait hours to leech from people with unreliable connections
4) Start over again when an important patch appears
5) Get trojans off the PC that came with the crack
Digital sale
1) Shell out $$$
2) Download at line speed
3) Play (if Steam is not overloaded)
I admit, this is hearsay experience. I've obviously never pirated a game, that would be illegal.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Low(er) Prices + Convenience = no-brainer (Score:1, Interesting)
Piracy is more like...
1) Find torrent tracker, preferably reputable with an invite only system.
2) Find game
3) Download
4)???
5) Profit
If you aren't stupid you shouldn't have to worry about any sort of Trojan or virus of another kind. And if you look for a game, say, one week after it is released. Then you'll have no trouble getting it at the same speed that steam would download at. Sometimes even faster.
Piracy can easily be a problem but, in my experience, A good number of people only pirate things to see if its worth a damn, if so then they shell out the money to buy the game from steam or another store.
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Interesting)
Steam makes it possible to buy 3-5 year old games for cheap. Best Buy doesn't designate any shelf space to games more than a couple years old. Some of us older gamers (cough, 40, cough) have lives, so we can't always get to the latest/greatest game until it has been out a couple of years. I just finished HL2, for example, and I'm halfway through Dragon Age. No rush to finish it before Dragon Age II, because I won't have time to play that one for a couple of years. By then, it'll be $19 on Steam.
Re:Of course. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't access steamcommunity.com here, but I know I have more than 100 games on my Steam account [steamcommunity.com]. A lot were bought through various sales, some in packs with other games. Quite a few I wouldn't have bought otherwise.
Heck I can think of one game I've bought twice: Overlord... once standalone, once as part of the Overlord Complete Pack [steampowered.com] after the Raising Hell expansion was released on Steam. After I priced it out, it was cheaper to buy the complete pack than to buy Overlord: Raising Hell and Overlord II separately.
The kicker here is: I've never finished Overlord. I've never even started Overlord II.
I've probably played half the games on my Steam list once or never.
Re:History repeats itself (Score:3, Interesting)
How about this one: on its opening month, Modern Warfare 2 moved an impressive 6 million combined on 360 and PS3 in North America, but only 170,000 [kotaku.com] on PC. If we presume that there is an additional %50 for digital sales, the PC is still seeing less than 10% of the sales of the 360 and PS3 averaged together.
As someone who deals with publishers regularly, you expect a PC title to sell about %10 of what an identical console title will move. Breaking 150k on a PC is a strong achievement. 150k on a console would be beyond a failure.
There are some complicating factors in PC, though. For one, per-unit sales do not map nearly as cleanly with money spent or profitability. There are a lot of titles in the $5 clearance aisle that move on impulse, and buffer up the raw number sold without actually helping developers to eat. There are titles that move better on PC than on console due to interface and other questions. Flight Simulators, RTS, and MMO's, while the floor fell out of all of them a while back, they still do better on PC's than consoles. Sadly, though, the upper end a PC-only game can realistically expect to move these days is about 500k units, which is a break-even point for a moderately conservatively budgeted title.
World of Warcraft also sucks up a genuinely stupid amount of user dollars every year. It is in and of itself 1 Billion dollars per year. But it's really not fair to assess the income potential of future games on that particularly freakishly large nugget (many companies have gone broke trying). And when you're talking about the overall "health" of the PC gaming industry, it is hindering development rather than helping.
Also, PC as a gaming platform is permeated by flash and other downloadable mini titles, many ad-or-microtransaction supported. These do not bridge over to consoles well, which is where developers actually pay the rent. It takes a very different title, development methodology, and mindset to even survive on the PC side of things.
Overall though, it's difficult to make a giant blockbuster-sized game on the PC and expect to make your money back. Blizzard is one of the last developers trying it, with Starcraft and Diablo rehashes coming out soon. But, again, Blizzard is raking in 1 BILLION dollars a year from WoW. They can afford to take risks like that. Other than them, there is an updated Civilization soon, and then nothing but console ports as far as the eye can see. And even those are becoming thinner, as chasing the last 100k in sales might not offset the additional development and supply chain costs.
Poke around http://www.vgchartz.com/ [vgchartz.com] for a while and see how a PC release generally does against a console release. Their numbers aren't thorough, and sometimes they're off by a lot, but they're usually in the right ballpark. I don't see anything released in the past few years that broke 2 million units on the PC.