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PC Game Sales Dropped In 2005
Gamasutra reports on the not-terribly-surprising news that PC game sales were down in 2005. From the article: "Also doing excellently was EA's The Sims 2 and its two associated expansions, and The Sims franchise collectively took up four of the top ten spots. The rest of the top ten is made up of a mixture of the mass-market accessible games, such as Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, with the more 'hardcore' shooter and MMO titles such as Guild Wars and Battlefield 2."
The number of PC game releases was down in 2005.
The rest of the top ten is made up of a mixture of the mass-market accessible games
Shocker.
Oh noes! Nasty, meany peer to peer! We need to make anti-piracy laws even stronger! Piracy is the only possible explanation for this drop in sales! What? What do you mean "no innovation, sequels and bugs are to blame" ? I bet YOU are a pirate! Show me your ID!
Practically all games coming out are practically just copies of previous versions. Where are the fun games? The Sims?! Gimme a break, that game was fun for like 30 minutes.
The problem with most games nowadays is that they don't really offer anything. Way too many of them are endless time sinks with no tangable result. I mean the MMORPG's are stupid. You can't just play for a few minutes and have some fun. After spending hour upon hour in them what are you left with in the end? Nothing. What's the point?
Right now all I play are old arcade games (quick and fun entertainment for a few minutes, hours, or whatever) and DDR (fun and good aerobic ecersise when it's too cold to run outside). I sometimes fire up Quake3 and play (again, quick, fun and easy) but not as often any more since everyone has moved on to much worse games (like "realistic" slow paced ass games; I mean if I want real life I'll go outside).
I might be able to explain this. I think that most teenage gamers are now constantly finding new ways of getting these games illegally, for free. With the recent explosion of Bit-Torrent sites, pirating just got easier. These "kiddies" can now communicate easily and rate which files work and which don't.
I've interacted with many gamers in my life, and most of them never buy games. And no, there aren't a lot of people who will buy the game to support the company. In fact, some have become very very ignorant of the community and care only for money (Yes, I'm pointing to all these games with shared buggy engines)
As for The Sims 2, I would presume that their main public are girls. They don't exactly know or want to know the computer knowledge required to pirate games.
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There's an obsession lately with better graphics. What I'd rather see is an obsession with interesting gameplay.
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Meanwhile, as reported here four days ago, console game sales set an all-time record in 2005.
The pc game market was a good place for all the crappy visual studio/directx hacks to go to where they can work on their 20k selling RTS or FPS titles.
Now with the pc market accelerating its five year long decline, large numbers of pc developers are looking to the console market to save them. Fucking great.
Now we get more clowns like Carmack and Newell crying about how the PS3 is "hard to program" because they just wasted the last decade on nothing but single threaded x86 directx or opengl code and their engines won't just work.
Who would have thought that PC game sales would drop off after a year seeing hyped up megasellers like Doom 3, Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft? Especially after lacking any major hyped up titles (BF2 and GW weren't hyped nearly as much as those FPSes with flashier graphics)? Sure, there was Civ 4 but that's hardly going to make up for the lack of those hyped FPSes.
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As analyzed here:
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http://www.costik.com/weblog/2006_01_01_blogchive
If you factor in online sales and MMO subscription fees, it's possible PC revenues have actually gone up.
Thanks to the wonder of copy protection. And lets give a hand to Starforce, the wonderful copy protection that installs on the driver level and intercepts all your HD access. Nice! That one won't cause any problems.
I'm really disappointed that Heroes of Might and Magic V is going to use Starforce. I've bought every Heroes game since the first but I guess I'm just going to have to pass on this one.
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I used to buy several games a year, the cool shooters, RPGs that caught my eye, the Sims 2 for my girlfriend. However, since I bought WoW, I haven't played anything else. Oh I BOUGHT Battlefield 2, and Civilization 4, but I still haven't really played them.
Here's the thing though, one of the main reasons keeping me on windows was PC gaming. If the mac version is as good as advertised, my next PC will be a mac. All of the other programs I need are platform agnostic.
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Okay, faster Internet can lead to increased downloading. That in conjunction with the continued use of copy protection can certainly make it more appealing to just download the game rather than purchase it out-right, particularly when downloading a game can take less time than running out and buying it. I do not put the blame for a decrease in sales on these factors, however. I think these are minor, although I'm sure that the developers would love to make faster downloading the scapegoat.
For me, the main reason (besides lack of time due the wife giving birth to another urchin) was that with few exceptions the games in 2005 sucked. Even games like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, F.E.A.R, and Battlefield 2 really had nothing unique to them, but - damn - they're fun and I gladly bought all of them. Unfortunately, they're in the minority. The majority of PC games just were not worth putting down my money. That's all there is to that.
The skyrocketing popularity of games like World of Warcraft certainly would not have helped. Look at how many people are so engrossed by their favorite MMORPGs. Given the choice of playing another game or utilizing the MMORPG that often includes a monthly fee, I'm sure that most people figured that they might as well play the MMORPG that they're paying for rather than buy another game. Hell, I'm paying for it! I might as well just keep playing it!
The simple fact is that 2005 just didn't have a whole hell of a lot of PC games that were worth buying. History shows that if a game has mass appeal, it will sell and sell very well. The number of PC games that were released in 2005 is lackluster at best.
Funny thing about PC games and movies. Release crap and then be shocked when sales are down; so blame anything else other than the quality (or lack thereof) of the games and movies. Damn pirates! They prevented the gaming industry from releasing games worth buying -- apparently.
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I'm guessing it has something to do with when those titles were each released. Something is telling me that the expansion pack came out after the game, perhaps even in a whole different year...
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Because these are the 2005 numbers. The Sims 2 was originally released in 2004, so some of the sales were reported with last year's figures.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060115-5983 .html
PC game sales are listed as being to the tune of $950+ million. Console sales figures are often quoted as being $10.5 billion in sales. But wait, that is not console software sales. That is the total sales volume for the physical consoles themselves, hand-held consoles, peripherals, and software. The home console system and peripheral sales account for $2.5 billion of that total (that's including a launch year numbers for the XBOX 360). The hand-held market accounted for $1.6 billion. Home console software sales accounted for $4.7 billion (a drop of 12% from last year) while portable system software rose 42% to $1.4 billion. Total unit sales of portables and consoles combined were down 6.3% from last year.
So looking at the raw NPD data (some of which appears to be suspect) the best way to sum up PC sales is to say that they fell marginally sharper than console sales. Effectively we are saying the proportion of console to PC sales has remained nearly the same from 2004 to 2005. And that isn't counting revenue generated by subscription services (for either consoles or PC's) or direct digital sales (which consoles are just starting to get into and PC's got into in a big way last year).
On top of that realize that the PC platform is really the equivalent to a single console platform. To really make a 1 to 1 comparisson you have to compare PC game sales figures to PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360, and Gamecube sales figures. By that measuring stick, the PC is the second largest after the Playstation 2.
To sum up, the sky isn't falling, but the market is changing. Cling to the old ways and sales figures from channels becoming increasingly less relevant to your industry and you are going to make the wrong decisions and miss the next wave.
BTW Personal computer sales rose 15.6% by volume (worldwide) over last year to a staggering $202 billion while PC video card/chipset sales (for NVIDIA and ATI only) rose to $4 billion (up 12.9% over last year).
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
Seriously, were there any other compelling games out this year? Sounds to me like EA's RIAA inspired 'do the same damn crap all the time to maximize profit' mantra isn't working. Suprised? I'm not.
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The only interesting game relased in 2005, and the only I bought in last year was Civilization IV.
There is really nothing new in new FPSes, things planned for first Doom (like "not just hit ctrl to shot" or "monsters morphing") are still not implemented in any!
So called "strategy games" (RTSes) are just clones of Dune 2 with new units and multiplayer modes.
The Sims are nice idea (alife-like), they are popular, because girls can play them just like with dolls.
Stop bitching on p2p and start working you dumb game designers.
Interesting gameplay doesn't require better graphics. That would mean that you don't need a new video card or a new console to play these multimillion dollar games that are being shoved out. Without the software, the hardware market crashes, and vice-versa (at least with the current mode of thinking employed by publishers).
I don't expect gameplay to improve until all of the jaggies are off of Lara Crofts' boobs. I'm sure there are plenty of developers who have great ideas when it comes to innovative gameplay, but we all need to remember that EA and Sony are the ones writing the checks.
Personally, I hope that Nintendo comes out on top. Inversely, I don't hope that each of these 'innovative' games requires a $40 custom controller adapter module whosits on top of a $60 price tag for the game. That would really throw the idea of a low priced, accessible console down the crapper.
Snacks!
Perhaps it's because 2005 has been a terrible year for PC games? All we've seen have been either mediocre or terrible console ports.
piracy of the original might have something to do with it.. people must've liked it and said, what the hell, lets buy the expansion..
"Also doing excellently was EA"
Is excellently even a word?
Besides, I read another article not too long ago saying that this was a bumper year for the game industry. I guess it just goes to show how unreliable the game press are.
I bought a couple games based on the required and suggested hardware levels and discovered something shocking. They lied. I'm sticking with the last generation of games (hl2, WC3, civ3, aoe2, wow) because they are fun and run acceptably on my hardware. I don't care how incredible AoE3, Civ4, F.E.A.R, etc are - I have to turn all the graphics and effects down to almost nothing to get acceptable framerates.
This probably also explains how consoles are picking up. People are just plain tired of the upgrade treadmill for PC games. If the graphics and effects levels degraded acceptably it would be one thing, but the vast majority of games do not, these games are designed around graphics and effects that run very poorly with the 'suggested' hardware from the box.
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This article is an example of lousy game journalism. The game journalist simply copy and pastes the NPD numbers without verifying if any of it is true or not.
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Luckily, we have some journalists who DO check out these numbers. Business Week found that PC Gaming sales were solid and growing. If NPD is so far off on this, how far off is it on console sales?
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2
I think there are several factors at work here. One is that publishers are investing more and more on the development of games, just as Hollywood does with movies. Similarly, just as Hollywood is reluctant to try anything too daring or experimental, the game industry would rather produce a "me too" title (i.e., "another" Quake/Doom/Halo title) than something more innovative. Personally, I can only play so many first-person shooters (one?) before I need something with a bit more meat for my brain to chew on. I editorialized on this on my blog the other day. The only strategy/simulation games I saw in 2005 (apart from Civ IV, which is another "sequel" game) were the dumbed-down "Tycoon" games. Those have less intellectual "meat" in them than a chicken nugget.
I downloaded the demo of F.E.A.R., installed it, started it up and... it ran terribly. Doom 3 runs like a dream on this system and F.E.A.R. barely chugs along at 640x480.
Game developers are getting greedy on behalf of the hardware manufacturers. A 1GB minimum RAM requirement is just too much. The solution? I'm going to play Guild Wars on my PC for as long as it'll run (hopefully the expansions won't push the requirements too high), and spend the rest of my gaming budget on my console. I could easily buy all three current-gen consoles for the price of a decent gaming rig, and I only need one to keep myself occupied.
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