Support NeoGAF

[Rolf NB]

Primarily because the gaming media is console focused.

Primarily because the money is console focused.

 

[Archie]

Primarily because the money is console focused.

That explains why Microsoft, Sony and a host of publishers not named Activision or Nintendo hemorrhaged billions this generation.

 

[MrNyarlathotep]

That explains why Microsoft, Sony and a host of publishers not named Activision or Nintendo hemorrhaged billions this generation.

And when you take the Blizzard revenues out of ActiBlizzards financials, Activision looks a lot less healthy financially.

 

[charlequin]

That explains why Microsoft, Sony and a host of publishers not named Activision or Nintendo hemorrhaged billions this generation.

These companies all have huge revenues and/or cash reserves and plenty of credit, though, which is all that's really necessary to throw incredibly large amounts of money at marketing your product.

 

[PooBone]

fanhoi, i respectfully disagree. Games with big budgets and high production values that present the most immersive, and in my opinion, superior experiences go to console, because that's where the developers and publishers can make their money back.

 

[Ulairi]

fanhoi, i respectfully disagree. Games with big budgets and high production values that present the most immersive, and in my opinion, superior experiences go to console, because that's where the developers and publishers can make their money back.

Then why when they release those games designed for the PC, produced well, and cater to PC gamers do they sell just as well if not better? Also, PC games have higher margins for publishers than console games.

 

[poppabk]

fanhoi, i respectfully disagree. Games with big budgets and high production values that present the most immersive, and in my opinion, superior experiences go to console, because that's where the developers and publishers can make their money back.

No they go to 360/PS3/PC and if they can squeeze out a version Wii also. The number of third party exclusives is very low, with some notable exceptions such as RDR, and the money-hatted exclusives early on in the console generation. The money is in multi-plat, a PC version pretty much always makes financial sense.

 

[Dreohboy]

Then why when they release those games designed for the PC, produced well, and cater to PC gamers do they sell just as well if not better? Also, PC games have higher margins for publishers than console games.

Just curious. How would one cater to a PC gamer? How does one define a PC Gamer?

 

[Archie]

Just curious. How would one cater to a PC gamer? How does one define a PC Gamer?

Spreadsheets.

 

[Rolf NB]

No they go to 360/PS3/PC and if they can squeeze out a version Wii also. The number of third party exclusives is very low, with some notable exceptions such as RDR, and the money-hatted exclusives early on in the console generation. The money is in multi-plat, a PC version pretty much always makes financial sense.

It depends on how easy the PC version is to build. PCs are always used one way or another in the dev process, you don't build meshes on a console after all. In cases where the engine is written to be portable it would make sense to use a PC build for checking out/iterating content because it's faster. If that already exists internally, releasing it is very cheap.

OTOH you have to come to terms with how marginal PC game sales have become. PC version retail sales are routinely in the single digits even for day-and-date multiplatform games. There was a study going around on GAF a week or two ago that plotted download platforms at about half of total PC game unit sales, and 35% of revenue, so that's not pushing it very far either. If there was a console platform on the market today with the same level of software sales, it would be proclaimed dead twice every week. Cf the PSP.

edit: thought I'd better provide some references, looked for the study, didn't find it, but found another:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=407896

19.4 million units combined download&retail, 1st half 2010, in NA presumably because it's NPD.

For perspective, worldwide PSP software unit shipments (=physical copies) are around 45M per full year, as per Sony investor reports. Wii and the HD consoles are a lot higher.

edit2: Still can't find the recent, full-year, more comparable study. Should have bookmarked. Sorry.

 

[Kritz]

PC version retail sales are routinely in the single digits even for day-and-date multiplatform games..

PC games only sell 9 copies on release day?

 

[Lagspike_exe]

PC games only sell 9 copies on release day?

Percentage.

 

[djtiesto]

dark fall lost souls
darkness within 2
jekyll and hyde

the coveted award for absolutely worst adventure game of the year goes to 15 days. fuck, that game is obnoxious. awful characters awful story awful dialogues awful mechanics. arghhhhh. I was expecting a masterpiece aswell from the devs that did moment of silence and overclocked heh. shit.


there is a software mirroring toggle in the options of all the infinity engine games I think

That's what I'm doing, unfortunately the game grinds to a halt if there are a lot of enemies/other sprites on screen.

 

[-tetsuo-]

This is yet another reason that Steam is great. Right there when you launch the app you can scroll through the coming soon section. Valve doesn't care how big or small your gamee is, they will list it if it is coming out through their service.

 

[lethial]

I just started to get back into PC gaming (I was big into it around the era of Radeon 9700s and lightbars with case windows). My rig isn't up to date but thanks to Steam sales I've been playing some great games like The Witcher and Machinarium. ALMOST makes me want to upgrade but it's hard enough for me to sit down for a few hours just to play them and consoles.

 

[tiff]

What? :lol

I'm not being manipulated. I'm being served.

My GOTY list: Click

I don't see one shitty game on that list. If by manipulated you mean "being offered a shitton of quality games" then yes, I'm being manipulated.

I'm only cautious when it comes to new IP's. Then I like to "inform myself". And some publishers are better at offering information when it comes to new IP's.

And I don't think I need to "inform myself" before I buy the sequel of my favorite franchise.

You're missing out on some good games either way. Some you might prefer to your current Games of the Year.

 

[Opiate]

It depends on how easy the PC version is to build. PCs are always used one way or another in the dev process, you don't build meshes on a console after all. In cases where the engine is written to be portable it would make sense to use a PC build for checking out/iterating content because it's faster. If that already exists internally, releasing it is very cheap.

OTOH you have to come to terms with how marginal PC game sales have become. PC version retail sales are routinely in the single digits even for day-and-date multiplatform games. There was a study going around on GAF a week or two ago that plotted download platforms at about half of total PC game unit sales, and 35% of revenue, so that's not pushing it very far either. If there was a console platform on the market today with the same level of software sales, it would be proclaimed dead twice every week. Cf the PSP.

edit: thought I'd better provide some references, looked for the study, didn't find it, but found another:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=407896

19.4 million units combined download&retail, 1st half 2010, in NA presumably because it's NPD.

For perspective, worldwide PSP software unit shipments (=physical copies) are around 45M per full year, as per Sony investor reports. Wii and the HD consoles are a lot higher.

edit2: Still can't find the recent, full-year, more comparable study. Should have bookmarked. Sorry.

If you've seen these full year studies, then I'm sure you're aware that PC Gaming is doing better than ever:

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/10/pc-gaming-revenue-grew-in-2009-as-retail-pc-game-sales-shrank/

Obviously, this dwarfs any console's revenue stream, but that's not surprising when you consider the massive "install base" that PC Games have. We don't have the full analysis for 2010 yet (we won't have that until April or May of next year), but here is 2008:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/22878/PCGA_PC_Game_Market_Worth_11_Billion_In_2008.php

A direct quotation from that article:

That $11 billion figure makes the PC the largest single games platform in the world, says the PCGA, and the lead platform in both developed and emerging markets. The North American and Western European market alone had revenues of $6 billion in 2008.

 

[subversus]

If you've seen these full year studies

No use. There will always be some uninformed young man that will post on how dudebro shooters sell badly on PC compared to consoles. And never ever it will come to his mind that dudebro shooters is a relatively niche genre that crystallized this generation.

 

[Mrbob]

Amazing how digital has taken over for the PC. Looking at the joystiq article retail PC is now only taking in about 20 percent of revenue in 2009. I'm sure this number shrunk in 2010. In a couple years it will be non existent.

Looking at my own purchasing, I have no need for retail anymore in the PC space. I might get The Witcher 2 at retail for the extra swag but this is it.

 

[dLMN8R]

I read GAF on a daily basis. But this is the first time I heard of Mount & Blade: Warband, Cities XL 2011, The Ball, Recettear, Cities in Motion, Firefall, and Subversion. What?

You can call me a console gamer; I mainly play on consoles. But I'll never turn down a good PC game. It's just that console publishers actually want to sell games to me. I don't like to search in the deep corners of the internet to find information about a game. I'm not that type of a gamer.

Mount and Blade: Warband
Recettear
Cities in Motion
Firefall

The other games don't have major threads, but Cities XL is a very well-known series with many iterations, The Ball is from Tripwire, one of the most well-known PC devs out there (and is the full retail version of a popular mod), and Subversion is from Introversion, and you should be ashamed to call yourself a PC gamer if you've never heard of them.

For the games with decently-populated threads I've posted, Mount and Blade is a hugely popular series, Cities in Motion just plain looks beautiful, and Firefall is a free-to-play shooter in the vein of Borderlands that looks like it'll kick all kinds of ass.


NeoGAF isn't exactly the best news source of PC games, which is why I suggested sites like Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer's web site.

 

[Saty]

A couple of weeks back there was a total consumer report made by a market research firm by the name of Newzoo that was posted on some sites. I don't think it was posted here, but i don't know how accurate it is. I guess it's another set of data to consider.

Methodology wise the data is based on:

The data is based on extensive industry benchmarking and analyses of data from the 2009 & 2010 National Gamers Surveys involving more than 20,000 respondents in the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium.

The full report should be out this month (January) but they are sharing couple of PDF pages from it regarding money spent on games in the US and other countries, devided by segments.
Again, being based on surveys, i don't know how much weight i should attribute to it (maybe you can help) but it's still pretty inrtriguing.

Site: http://www.newzoo.com/ENG/1575-Total_Consumer_Spend_2010.html

PDF file with pie-charts of U.S, U.K, France, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium: http://www.newzoo.com/press/NewzooTotalConsumerSpend2010.pdf
'Gamer's Per Platform' graphs for each country: http://www.newzoo.com/ENG/1564-National_Surveys_(2010).html

Gamasutra's news article: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32120/Report_Total_US_Game_Spend_To_Hit_247B_In_2010.php

 

[Durante]

Interesting.

Go Germany!

 

[brain_stew]

Yup, pretty disappointed when I found out that my GTS360M has issues running the Infinity Engine games (sprite mirroring issues, the characters start moonwalking all over the place ). I can resort to some obscure Korean D3D Windower program to fix a lot of these bugs... but I digress. No bullshit like that with consoles.

In fairness, an early ~2000 era title wouldn't run on your modern console of choice, no matter how many workarounds you tried. Probably not the best point of comparison.

Edit:

So even in the US, PC gaming "as a whole" generates more revenue than console gaming? Never expected that, I was fairly confident it was true worldwide but in the US? Wow.

Cue x, y and z "don't count" brigade.

 

[charlequin]

So even in the US, PC gaming "as a whole" generates more revenue than console gaming?

Also, just non-massive, non-casual, "regular"-style PC gaming (i.e. boxed and DD sales) is individually larger than MMOs, casual game portals, or mobile gaming in revenue, and almost half as large as the revenue of "consoles" (i.e. PS3, Wii, 360, DS, and PSP combined) which means it must individually be beating at least two or three of them.

 

[Wallach]

Also, just non-massive, non-casual, "regular"-style PC gaming (i.e. boxed and DD sales) is individually larger than MMOs, casual game portals, or mobile gaming in revenue, and almost half as large as the revenue of "consoles" (i.e. PS3, Wii, 360, DS, and PSP combined) which means it must individually be beating at least two or three of them.

That dead platform makes a lot of money. Maybe these console publishers trying to kill their market are on to something.

 

[charlequin]

That dead platform makes a lot of money. Maybe these console publishers trying to kill their market are on to something.

What I would love to see is distribution/tail graphs on this shit. My suspicion is that PC gaming gets that way with fewer monster hits but a much lighter drop-off in sales for long-tail titles (especially in the DD portion of the chart) but there's no way to prove it without a lot more data, sadly.

 

[Drkirby]

Also, just non-massive, non-casual, "regular"-style PC gaming (i.e. boxed and DD sales) is individually larger than MMOs, casual game portals, or mobile gaming in revenue, and almost half as large as the revenue of "consoles" (i.e. PS3, Wii, 360, DS, and PSP combined) which means it must individually be beating at least two or three of them.

And that isn't factoring into the fact that the profit margins of a the Digital PC games are so high that likely even at 10% of the market for that part they are on the heals of the profits from Console games.

 

[Saty]

Even though there's a reasoning behind it, it's always silly to see the only single platform divided into sub-categories while 5 other platformes are lumped together under 'consoles'.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

True, PC and console is all you need to compare then. I guess people like to see the breakdown on the PC side of things with all the choices I suppose.

 

[WillyFive]

I prefer console gaming, but it's a lot easier and cheaper to buy a game on a PC.

 

[Saty]

True, PC and console is all you need to compare then. I guess people like to see the breakdown on the PC side of things with all the choices I suppose.

And just as much, alot of people want to see the breakdown of the consoles. That's the only 'fair' way to compare one platform to the other.

 

[Dreams-Visions]

Gamasutra's news article: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32120/Report_Total_US_Game_Spend_To_Hit_247B_In_2010.php

that chart strikes me as a bit odd.

PC/Mac (download) = PC

PC/Mac (boxed) = PC

MMOs = PC (for the most part)

Social Networks = PC (for the most part)


that means, PC gaming equals roughly 36% of the video games market. give or take AND retains some of the strongest gains being seen over the last year.

or am I not reading that correctly?

 

[The Technomancer]

Wow @ the percentage increase of DD sales on PC.

that chart strikes me as a bit odd.

PC/Mac (download) = PC

PC/Mac (boxed) = PC

MMOs = PC (for the most part)

Social Networks = PC (for the most part)


that means, PC gaming equals roughly 36% of the video games market. give or take AND retains some of the strongest gains being seen over the last year.

or am I not reading that correctly?

Pretty sure casual game portals are exclusively PC, I think that means things like Big Fish Games. Which a.)makes it closer to 51% and b.)means that those outlets are 15% of the market!? Holy hell, I would not have thought that. I don't think I know a single person who owns a game from one, and that's including my rather large circle of acquaintances in their thirties and forties.

 

[charlequin]

that means, PC gaming equals roughly 36% of the video games market.

Correct.

I don't think I know a single person who owns a game from one, and that's including my rather large circle of acquaintances in their thirties and forties.

I bet you don't know anyone who voted for Nixon either!

 

[EviLore]

Very, very interesting chart.

 

[robjoh]

Very, very interesting chart.

What I find really interesting is that consol revenue is dropping faster than the average, total revenue down 2% but consol spending down 29%? I have problem seeing that the insane budgets used for AAA games in the consol arena can continue if the revenue continues to fall.

 

[ghst]

Very, very interesting chart.

non-mmo/casual/social pc gaming's dd growth outpacing its retail decline by 3:1, together amounting to a 45% equivilent cut of all console sales?

a new thread beckons.

 

[Stumpokapow]

Pretty sure casual game portals are exclusively PC, I think that means things like Big Fish Games. Which a.)makes it closer to 51% and b.)means that those outlets are 15% of the market!? Holy hell, I would not have thought that. I don't think I know a single person who owns a game from one, and that's including my rather large circle of acquaintances in their thirties and forties.

But how many 50+ year olds do you hang out with? I really really think that the casual portals tilt much older than most people think!

I mean, I don't know a single person who plays Bridge, but because I'm not geriatric, that's not really a surprise.

 

[EviLore]

a new thread beckons.

Yeah, this is survey data though. NPD results are showing more like 7-8% YOY decline for console software sales in the US. Not sure what conclusions we can draw from the Newzoo data.

 

[dLMN8R]

Even though there's a reasoning behind it, it's always silly to see the only single platform divided into sub-categories while 5 other platformes are lumped together under 'consoles'.

But there isn't a reasoning behind it. There is absolutely no reason behind it at all, in fact. The companies don't share revenue, the platforms aren't cross-compatible at all. There is literally not a single legitimate reason why they're combined, outside of laziness on the part of bloggers, and fanboy wars.


It's even more absurd that NPD's top-10 chart don't include PC games. Even when Civ 5 and Starcraft II come out and easily sell better than most if not all of the games on the chart, they're not there.

 

[fanboi]

Did my thread just turn into a sales age thread? :lol

 

[Minsc]

That's what I'm doing, unfortunately the game grinds to a halt if there are a lot of enemies/other sprites on screen.

D3DWindower will fix that perfectly, it shouldn't be slowing down if you're using it.

Say what you will about needing to sometimes run a program or two to get a game working properly (which takes a relatively small % of time compared to the 60 or 80 hours of the game), but my large library of PC games all run perfectly (spare maybe 1 or 2 with slight issues out of 300+), and about half are from around 2000 or earlier.

I have games that I bought in 1993 that I can still install and play, without the need to re-purchase them. If I didn't dumbly throw out most of my great DOS games in the late 90s I'd have games from even earlier that I could still install and play from, on a modern PC, not the PC I had in the 90s.