Dear system wars poster,
A small summary is available at the end of the thread but I urge you to read the whole thing!
Recent events in the industry, like the disappointing sales of Crysis, and the abysmal reception of UT3, in the US have caused quite a stir in the world of system wars. For years now, the death of the PC as a gaming platform has been foretold by console owners, but now it seems to be getting worse. In fact, it has gone down hill so fast, that the time that PC-gamers rained supreme and were practically untouchable on these forums are nothing more but a distant fading memory. The fact that more and more developers seem to port their PC projects over to the consoles, doesn't help either.
Now that the "overpriced" argument has lost its strength, due to the introduction of the pricey PS3, most PC-bashers have put all their money on the "abysmal sales" argument. Microsoft once touted that there are over 200 milion PC gamers. However, this argument is quite useless as the average poster here will immediately write it off by saying that this number also includes solitaire players. And quite right they would be. It is quite hard to figure out the number of "real" PC-gamers because sales data of high-en video cards are not readily available. It can be however noted that for their 2007 fiscal year Nvidia has reported record revenue:
http://www.iminers.com/render.php?eid=81872811&symbol=NVDA&whichmodule=portal
Still this number doesn't quite clarify how much of this revenue is due to gamers. However, it must be noted, that most companies use Intel Integrated chips for their company computers, so we can assume that a very large part is because of sales of gamer cards. This shows that there is a market for PC-gaming hardware, but there are also games! US sales have disappointed the last couple of years, but US has never been the primary market for PC gaming. However, only sales estimates of sales exist outside the US, so I'm not going to post this, but if you have followed these, you might have noticed that, for example, COD4 PC has outsold the X360 and PS3 version in Germany, which is by NO means a small market.
So due to the lack of real factual data I'm going to take a look at the activity of PC games.
"PC-gamers only play WoW" is an often heard counter argument when some PC gamer posts up the impressive numbers of active WoW-subscribers. Another one thrown around is "PC is only good for MMO's!". My first argument doesn't quite debunk this myth. Read on!
The following chart is taken from http://mmogdata.voig.com/
It shows us an amazing growth in the MMO genre. From the humble player numbers when the first MMO's came out up till the end of 2007. By October 2007 there were more than 35 million active subscriptions. That's 35 million! About the same amount of people actively plays MMO's as there are people who own all three consoles. A more thorough breakdown of the different games can be found on the website. Of course a lot of these players are not the cliche wow-addicts, but also play other games!
There is however more to PC gaming than MMO's. Another popular genre is of course the FPS. For this we first take a look at one of the biggest PC-gaming communities. Let's see what the STEAM-users are up to:
http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats&cc=NL
Game Current Players
Counter-Strike 119,250
Counter-Srike: Source 55,380
Counter-Strike Condition Zero 14,348
Fortress 2 12,439
Day of Defeat: Source 4,582
Day of Defeat 3,422
Half-Life DeathMatch 2,169
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch 2,040
At the moment of posting there are 215,000 people playing. The numbers are update every hour, so keep in mind that this is not the total amount of players. To get an idea of how many active STEAM-users there are, we can take a look at the original Counter-Strike. There are 9.686 billion player minutes per month for this game as can be seen in the link. Let's assume that every CS-player is a hardcore player and plays 5 hours a day. This is very high estimate! Let us also assume that they play 25 days every month, so that's a total of 125 hours a month! 9.686 billion minutes is 0.1614 billion hours. If we divide this 0.1614 bilion hours by the amount our average hardcore cs-player plays we get the estimated number of total players: 0.1614 billion / 125 = 1.3 million players. Again keep in mind that this number is probably much higher because the estimate that cs-players play 125 hours a month is very high!
So there appear to be 1.3 million CS-players online. Furthermore the top 3 STEAM games are all CS. This could of course be used as a counter argument: "PC-gamers only play WoW and CS!". Not necessarily true. A lot of PC-gamers may be stagnant, and are playing the same game for 10 years, but who's to say they don't play other games? It only shows that the community is thriving. As you can see DOD and TF2 are quite popular as well. Not nearly as popular as CS, but who are we to judge the millions of people who have dedicated their lives to it? If anyone can find the number of players for TF2 360, that would be an excellent contribution to this thread and my argument as I'm quite sure they are lower.
So what else is there to do on the PC besides MMO's and STEAM games. A lot according to gamespy:
http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/
1. Half Life 91974 players
2. Half Life 2 40978 players
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 8222 players
4. Battlefield 2 8038 players
5. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory 6934 players
6. Unreal Tournament 2004 3710 players
7. Battlefield 2142 1477 servers
8. Quake 3: Arena 2132 players
9. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 1618 players
10. Call of Duty 1565 players
Impressive numbers if you ask me. Again we see that VALVe games are on top, but this is due to the massive popularity of CS. Also the figures are different that the previous seen chart, as the stats are probably taken on different occasions. You can also see large activity for UT2004. Maybe this is the reason UT3 didn't do so well. Keep in mind that most games can't be played on-line without a legit copy! So most players probably just bought the game. More online games can be found in the link. Keep in mind that Gamespy doesn't track all of them. So there are more!
Reader zipozal had the following to say about the Gamespy numbers:
10k is actually garbage for big name games like COD4, but it's ok because your numbers are complete utter garbage, or I should say Gamespys are which are massively off.
If you goto gametracker.com you would actually see that COD4 is the most popular PC game right now
According to them their are 2750 servers in COD4 right now with players on them, this does not include bots (though does COD4 even have em?)
That doesn't even factor in the fact that only about half, maybe even less of COD4's servers are actually tracked by gametracker because for gametracker to even track your server you have to setup with them.
So in reality their are around 6000 servers in COD 4 right now with people playing and as you probably guessed by now gamespys numbers are completely worthless.
COD4 is in fact more popular the CS right now.
So, what have we learned? The PC-gaming online community is thriving! But this is just the online part! There are of course several offline games available, but sadly they are much harder to track.
In short:
Nvidia reports a record revenue for fiscal 2007
There are 35 million MMO-players around the world.
Surely a large part of this 35 million also plays other games!
There are at LEAST 2 million active STEAM-gamers around the world (A VERY low estimate).
Other online games are very popular as well with several thousands of players at any moment!
Old games are popular, but they still show that the PC community is thriving.
We musn't forget single player games, which can't be estimated that easily. Single player games should double the amount of PC-gamers!
And the last thing I'm going to do, is post a link to the EPIC PC 2008 games thread. Just to show support is not dying!
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=25632718
Arsuz
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