PC Game Sales Trending Downwards

Thanks to GameDaily for it article discussing a perceived struggling in the PC videogame business. According to the article: "The overall PC game category, from January through May of 2003, was $471.0 million in the U.S. according to NPD estimates. 2004 is well off of that figure already, according to The NPD Group's industry analyst Richard Ow, who put a dollar figure of $360.0 million for the January to May 2004 period." However, Ow also notes: "There's still lots of sales ahead and major releases are pending, so there's still a wait and see factor", and comments on the recently-gold Doom 3: "It is the most well-known among the core gaming group, which is a smaller market, but a group that can still drive sales."

Comments

Re:lack of good PC titles so far in '04

[fowlerserpent]

Not to mention, titles should start rolling out based on the HL2 and Doom 3 engines next year.

Re:Hmmm

[bigman2003]

Maybe you don't follow the videogame industry very closely.

But Microsoft announced, and will be releasing XNA which will give parallel paths of development between the Xbox (next one probably) and the PC.

They do have a plan for convergence.

Re:You can't support this many titles forever.

[KDR_11k]

Where is the console "Perimeter"?
Pikmin. Okay, not exactly the same game, but they shouldn't be identical when we're talking about innovation, right?

Are there open source games for consoles?
Yes, you're just looking for the wrong consoles. The GP32, for example, is a completely open handheld device. The GBA gets lots of coding competitions and even the Dreamcast is getting its share of homebrew games. There are a few people working on homebrew games for the three major home consoles, but they're few.

I understand a certain James Bond game has bugs so wide you can install Linux with it. Is that quality control?

Nope, that is a bad game. Many bad PC games never get patched completely, either. The average PC game ships with a lot more problems than the average console game. Even top PC games still get bugs ironed out after release, top console games are almost completely free of bugs and have no game killing ones.

Ever increasing hardware requirements? I want to play the latest Mario Bros on my Nintendo Master System. What do you mean it won't run? I'll just put a new video card in it. What do you mean I can't do that? I have to buy an *entire* new system at over 100% of the cost of the original rig? Now tell me about "hardware requirements".

Yeah, sure, just plunk a new graphics card into that 486 so it will run Doom 3... Compare two console generations, the specs are increased by a few orders of magnitude. To make those changes to a PC you'd have to rebuy everything, too. Besides, a nVidia GeForce 6800 currently goes for around and over 500 Euros, the Playstation 2 cost 300 at launch, the Gamecube 200. You're getting a complete new system for less than the price of a graphics card.

Consoles don't offer modability unless you mod the hardware itself, that's true, but how many PC games really get noteworthy mods? There's maybe one per year that accumulates a good mod community, the rest either gets ignored (and has maybe three mods, two of which are abandoned) or doesn't allow mods.

The only major innovation to come to the PC comes from the indy scene. The stuff you won't see in a store and that won't add to the numbers for the PC market. I.e. if everybody bought indy games (or played only the freeware ones) the market for PC games would be "dead" to the publishers.