Aardvaarkman said:
Gorrath said:
Given that PCs are used for far more than gaming, your comparison there is hogwash. PC sales have declined because many people who used pcs for light apps like social networking can now do so much more readily on mobile devices. People are buying more PCs than ever, it's just that many of those "PCs" are in the form of a "phone" or "tablet". With the massive boom in PC game sales, which is the actual metric we would use to track pc gaming growth or decline, it can hardly be said that pc gaming is declining.
Speaking of hogwash - a tablet or a phone is
not what people are referring to when they say "PC" - especially in the context of gaming. We're talking about desktop and laptop PCs here - and that's what the industry statistics are referring to.
The simple fact is that the phones and tablets do not run the games that people are talking about when referring to gaming and the "PC Master Race." Do you really believe that the people here proclaiming the superiority of the PC as a gaming platform are referring to Android or iOS devices?
I'm baffled as to why you think I was saying that PC gaming = andorid/IOS games. Your point was that the drop in total PC sales is somehow an indicator of the popularity of PC gaming. My point was that this claim is deeply flawed, not because the people moving from PCs to android/iOS are still to be considered PC gamers, but because they were never PC gamers in the first place (in the context of PC gaming we are talking about). How does a bunch of non-pc gamers moving from PCs to mobile devices demonstrate a drop in the popularity of PC gaming? The fact that people are playing farmville or bejeweled on their phone instead of a PC is not at all a commentary on PC gaming.
A much better way to determine the health of PC gaming is to look at PC gaming retailers and see how much business they are doing (Vavle, GoG, ect.) The latest numbers suggest "astonishingly well".
EDIT: I got a chance to read some more of your replies to others and see that you've addressed a few more things that I'd like to comment on. On your point that kids are growing up with tablets and phones and so may stick with those platforms instead of migrating to apps that are more robust, I'd say we'll have to sit and wait, but I don't think that'll be the case. I see no reason to believe that people growing up with gaming will simply stick with those platforms, unless those platforms themselves become much more powerful (and they may). But if/when we can play Rome 2 on a tablet, I think we'll be past the necessity of splitting those gamers up between "PC gamers" and "mobile users" as the devices will be one and the same.
As for the bump in steam users simply being an incorporation of Mac/Linux users and physical media types switching over to digital distribution, that does certainly account for some of that, but I'd wager that the great sea of people who did buy PC games as physical media with any regularity made that switch long ago and that Linux users do not constitute a significant population to cause such an upsurge. Mac users may account for some, but by and large heavy PC gamers mostly bought PCs for that purpose and shied away from Mac and Linux because of the lack of overall support in games for those platforms.
In any case, gaming on every front has been a business that has gone up and up over the last two decades and is bigger now than ever. I am not in agreement with those that say that consoles are dying nor do I buy into any elitism when it comes to hobby choices, even though I do think PC is the best platform currently available for gaming.
As someone else wrote, I intend to be PC4 this gen.
