Opinion: PC is leading the games industry

April 17th, 2015, 00:12 Posted By: wraggster

Joost van Dreunen, CEO of research firm SuperData, tells us why the PC gaming market is booming, and how it is leading the way for the games industry

Today, industry and consumers alike fall over themselves to tell us about the booming future of mobile gaming and their predictions for the death of the console.
But there is one segment, that has been going mostly unnoticed: PC gaming. Historically, PC games have played a minor role at retail, representing between five and 10 per cent of sales on average compared to console. Moreover, as an open platform PC gaming is much more susceptible to piracy, forcing large publishers to stay wary of PC gaming and often delaying the release of major titles on the platform. The transition to digital gaming has changed all this.

VALUABLE INDUSTRY

First and foremost, last year the market for digital PC-based games was worth £17.3bn, larger than mobile’s £14.5bn and certainly larger than digital console’s £2bn.
How is this possible? Well, there are four digital game segments that live on PCs: social games, free-to-play MMOs, subscription-based MMOs and downloadable PC titles. For the UK, the PC-based games market was worth £741m, compared to £118m for digital console and £548m for mobile. The biggest growth over the past four years in addressable audience has been in social, which has
gone from 13m monthly active users to 31m last month, and free-to-play MMOs, which grew from 8m to 13m.
Now that digital distribution is starting to become a reality, PC gaming is once again worthwhile for risk-averse publishers. With an effective measure to combat piracy, publishers are able to make content available to a wider, more diverse audience and invest in innovation.

"Last year, the UK PC games
market was worth £741m,
more than the £118m digital
console market."

Joost van Dreunen, SuperData

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