Mobile and PC online gaming to dominate consoles

Based off Digi Capital, Newzoo and other sources Mobile, PC gaming hardware and PC gaming online could dominate 3 quarters of the market by 2022. Hard to trust those PC gaming hardware figures since cryptocurrency mining is the main reason why GPUs are flying off shelves soon as they get on them. In fact I see it hurting PC gaming's overall gaming revenue since it will keep more newcomers away as GPU and RAM prices increase. So unless GPU and RAM prices go back to normal this year I'd expect most of PC gamings increasing revenue to be coming from Chinese players that are buying more premium games, other gamers already on PC buying more games and of course revenue from F2P microtransactions. Esports which is also a PC dominated field is another factor. I'm surprised there is still a somewhat big market for physical/boxed PC games (at $3.2 billion dollars).

VR Games also appear to be making more money on PC than PS4 although not by much

Digi Capital charts

Super Data Chart

Gameindustry.biz

Something odd about their digital game sales chart blocks. It looks like they are saying PC digital sales will have zero, or very little, growth over the next 4 years but at the same time both hardware and online games will increase?

Yeah for no reason analyst expect digital/premium PC game sales to stagnate and decline a little which I think is stupid since PC gaming has shown no signs of it, if anything I expect them to grow much more since China is now developing a standalone/premium PC game market. Before the introduction of Steam, standalone PC game sales in China were 0.1% of the market at about a worth of $26 million dollars but since Steam came to China the PC standalone section has been getting 180 percent growth rate year after year so far. Valve has stated they're getting a lot of massive growth in Asian percentages mainly China, Korea and Japan.

I'm starting see more standalone Chinese developed games as well whether they're indie or AAA tier and more effort into online games in general overall. Honestly I think if we ever wanna see several AA-AAA PC exclusives/games that take advantage of high/mid end hardware without having to crowdfund them or be in genres like RTS and MMOs than we'll likely be getting them from China.

I personally think Total War Three Kingdom's is going to be easily the best selling game in the franchise and one of the best selling PC games of all time in the top 10 rank and one of the best selling games this year. A lot of Western fans have already wanted a Total War game set in China but Eastern fans love the Three Kingdom era too as you can see with the Dynasty Warriors games. Chinese Steam users are already flooding Total War Three Kingdom's comment sections and forums asking for a Chinese version some even telling Koei Tecmo to go f* themselves since Romance Of Three Kingdoms series is pretty subpar RTS for PC standards. Hopefully Sega gets smart and finds a Chinese publisher they can partner with so the game can officially be in China at retail and show it off at Chinajoy 2018 for extra marketing. I know Dynasty Warrior 9 was showed off at Chinajoy 2017 but it was at the Sony conference. I hope Koei knows any sales they get from that game from China are going to be on PC so they should put extra effort into making a quality PC port and if they're lucky the PC version might end up outselling the console versions combined. The next Romance Of Three Kingdoms should just be a PC exclusive or at the very least develop it as a PC first title than later dumb it down for cosoles since that is where the money is for strategy games and if make it a quality title it could sell a lot better than the previous games.

Didn't read a single bit of the OP.......

PC and mobile online gaming have been predicted to be 'killing' consoles for the last 2 generations now...... and yet consoles are still here and selling better then ever (Well.....unless your console is made by Microsoft)

We have a new challenger for chart king lol.

In the US not so much in Europe. The rise of hardware prices also affects console hardware. It's just a matter of time the cryptomining boom is gonna crash/settle down, current GPU prices will go dirt cheap, 1080s and beyond will become super affordable.

Even if GPU prices keep going up, I think alot of newer PC gamer would just move to laptops. They've been becoming a much better deal since the Pascal GPUs came out. When I got my laptop it was only about $150 more expensive than building an equivalent desktop (desktop would have much better cooling though). Because of GPU mining and ridiculous ram prices the laptop would be about $400 cheaper now.

@NoodleFighter: I never put too much stock into analyst predictions but thinking that a growing core sector won't improve an ancillary market seems very blinkered. In a nutshell they are saying PC gaming will continue to grow but the primary delivery medium for the games software in that market won't. That just doesn't make any sense at all. The Digi-capital charts also show the console digital market as larger than the PC digital market and growing yet the Newzoo charts show that PC digital market was $7.2 billion larger than console last year. One or the other has something very wrong.

There's no doubting that China is a massive market (largest individual) for PC gaming with a lot of future potential, I just hope that the industry doesn't focus so hard on it that the rest of the world is neglected

@scatteh316: The OP doesn't say anything about consoles being killed off, only blind idiots think that a multi-billion dollar industry is going to be killed off by another sector in the same market.

@scatteh316: While consoles aren't dying their market share isn't as large and growing as fast as mobile and PC online gaming.

@oliversnyders:Yeah at this point if people aren't completely discouraged from wanting to get into PC gaming they'll just get prebuilt desktops and laptops since they aren't affected nearly as much as GPUs and RAM prices go up since OEMs buy in bulks and get deals on hardware from suppliers and since more people build gaming PCs instead of buying them there should be plenty of desktops and prebuilts in stock for them to not skyrocket in price. There is also the GTX 1050 ti it's price hiking isn't as bad as cards above it such as the GTX 1060. I can still find GTX 1050 tis under $200 still in stock and since the GTX 1050 ti has a low TDP and no GPU power connector you can place it in a prebuilt PC you already own if it has a PCIE slot and get your upgrade your PC to PS4 Pro level performance.

Very true. Consoles are running like chickens. RIP consoles.

@GarGx1: Yeah I noticed that too with the analyst reports, someone must be getting something wrong or excluding something. You're right about the industry possibly focusing too much on China. I see in PUBG, Brendan Greene refuses to acknowledge legitimate complaints about Chinese players going onto Western servers and causing severe lag to the point it ruins the experience for everyone and its basically cheating due to the lag not registering shots done to Chinese players in time which allows them to get a chance at killing you before the down/kill on them is registered not to mention all real cheaters from China. He instead calls those people with legitimate complaints racist/xenophobes and it doesn't help that some players are proving his point by shouting out racist slurs and bigotry against the Chinese.

Brendan won't reign down hard on them because China's the region making him the most money almost more than all the other countries combined it's kinda like how Activision half asses the PC versions of CoD games because they know most copies will be coming from the Xbox and Playstation so why cater to a demographic that isn't him as much money. Fortunately at the very least they put in a ping limiter that blocks anyone from joining servers that they have too high of a ping/tick for.

You mean "free" to play shovelware and MOBAs/MMOs to dominte consoles...

yeah, probably... but I dont see how you interpret that as a positive. No gamer would ever see this as a positive

What's wrong with MMOs and MOBAs? And it's not like everything on consoles is Last Of Us quality tons of console gamers go out buy the latest CoD and DLC traps like Destiny.

Nothing wrong, but if thats all the PC will offer branded as "successful" and every game will follow their formulas then thats definitely not positive for the industry

Now speaking personaly, I really dont like MMOs or MOBAs and I've tried them (Both LOL and Dota 2). I seriously dont get the popularity of both these genres, but to each his own I guess. MMOs are repetitive/grindy as hell and MOBAs are ok for the competitive aspect but I was never much of a competitive gamer so it does nothing for me. So, if these types are where the industry is going then gaming is definitely going in the wrong way in my perspective, coming from someone who enjoys single player games and/or co-op more then competition and/or grinding

@NoodleFighter: You can't set up a Nintendo Switch account from your Nintendo Switch, you have to use a computer or a phone.

PC has no games.

PC gaming is dying.

Fair points I like MMOs but I certainly wouldn't want all of gaming to be nothing but MMOs. But if you look at one of the charts in the OP you can see that MOBAs and MMOs are at low point right now when it comes to getting investment money and I can kinda see it. A lot of MMOs and MOBAs have been flopping in recent years mainly due change in market taste, over saturation and competition, especially MMOs on PC. With MMOs all becoming too similar, bringing nothing new to the table, or straight up trying to compete with World Of Warcraft a lot of MMOs aren't doing anything to get gamers to want to invest time and money into them. Most MMOs that come out these days are for mobile because mobile is now the new garbage dump for companies looking to make a quick buck. The MMOs that come out for PC nowadays have to have something makes them stand out or innovate and they are putting in the effort to make themselves stand out more and bring in the interest of gamers to the point it'd be a bit ignorant assume all MMOs are the same completely. For example Star Citizen is technically an MMO but it'd be pretty ignorant to assume it plays like WoW. Planetside 2 is also an MMO buts its nothing like MMORPGs. Firefall was also an MMO that was pretty unique it was like an MMO version of Borderlands with the option of a third person view and Destiny but open world.

An upcoming MMO I'm looking forward to is Lost Ark. That game can be summed up as a cinematic single player ARPG that just so happens to let everyone play together. There is so much innovation in story telling mechanics (especially for an MMO) and so much content in that game that it will hardly feel like a grind or repetitive. I already hate that its taking too long to release in Korea because the game has made just about every other ARPG look like trash to me. Peria Chronicles is another upcoming MMO that I'm looking forward to, nothing else like it. It's like the Pokemon MMO everyone's wanted but with a heavy emphasis player/community created sandbox content.

What the hell ...

Isnt PC gaming dominating all consoles combined the last 3 generations at least ?

Only in China alone we having hunderd of millions of ready to use PCs sold every year. Thats China alone. Means that in a single year China PC sales outpacing the total console sales for an entire generation. Now want to make an argument that many of those PCs are not for gaming ? Maybe but many for sure are for gaming or people gaming on them even even.

Then you have the separate parts people buying, digital games and free online games with hunderd of millions of unique logins monthly than wont count as sales, free mods etc.

Games like Path of Exile, League of Legends, Dota 2, various MMORPGs and online games to name a few ... So again you cant count sales on those games precisely ( i dont get how they making digital numbers of hardware parts or games. What are their sources to do so ? ) yet they making hunderd of millions as profits to their respective companies.

Dont mess with PC gaming ! Master Race for a reason.

@AzatiS: The argument most people would use is that Chinese gamers play in internet cafes so it doesn't count because they don't own the PC they're playing with but that has been changing. Internet cafes have been in decline for a while and despite them being in a decline the revenue for PC games in China continues to go up so it seems clear that more and more Chinese gamers are building/buying gaming PCs and never come back especially since some say the environments in some internet cafes is very toxic. That would also likely explain the increase in single player/standalone style PC games being developed in China. No one could realistically play a single player game in a cafe unless it was very short they had to use cloud saving all the time.

When Bitcoin market collapses miners gonna sell all their hardware for cheap.

For that to happen you need to wait 3-4 years or more

Bitcoin is not the problem, the other cyptos are since like Ethereum they can be GPU mined at an profitable rate. This won't stop unless those cryptos get hit by something like what happened to BTC on 2013.

I think it will take much less time than that. A year or so. They won't disappear, but it will be enough that every average Joe stop mining. Basically imo as any self-issueing currency they gonna devaluate themselves. More miners = faster devaluation. I think the craze will disapear by the end of the year once the miners profits fall out of devaluation.

I believe it.

PC is the spearhead of microtrans "gaming" that bleeds into mobile but mobile will eventually be = pc/mobile.

Console the smallest market.

I don't think the console market would die in the next 2 gens though but may keep getting lower each gen in terms of hw/sw sales.

PC has access to (better versions of) all console multiplats and now all Xbox exclusives as well.

The only games it doesn't get are movie games and JRPGs, he two worst genre of games (although it's been getting more of those lately as well).

It's not going to crash on its own unless governments around the world start regulating it. There is a new cryptocurrency released every day.

Sadly, this is the new reality of PC gaming. Nvidia/AMD can improve matters though by:

- Creating better mining-only GPUs

- Restricting the sale of consumer GPUs to businesses through the license agreement

- Forcing retailers to put in sales limits on GPUs by creating an "authorized retailer" program, and removing any retailers who don't comply from it

- Increasing production

Those are for the updated PCs. Most people are gaming on laptops and some PCs which are weaker than the PS4 or on par.

Only the hardcore PC gamers are willing to spend thousands for 4k 60fps gaming or 1080p 120 fps gaming, and they are the minority.

PC for awhile now has been outselling consoles in games in quantity, profit and number of players

http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/83972-pc-games-sales-eclipse-value-console-games-sales-2016/

PC has one weakness: Japanese games.

Japan still hates PC gaming, and you still have to pre-order games you aren't particularly interested in just to ask the developers for more ports. (Want Valkyria Chronicles 4? Better chuck your dosh at Yakuza Mobile even though it's a mobile port)

PC exclusive from Japan. Being developed by just one guy in unreal engine. Steam page is up.

A japanese-made Superman styled game called Undefeated. You will see PC love from Japanese indie games scene.

PC gaming is dying from mining.

LOL cell phone games.

Consoles are still King.

1) Evidence?

2) Kinda Agree, but we are not everyone.

3) No singular console has ever been in the same realm as PC, even all 3 of a generation combined struggles. keep being delusional though!

Because you are living in the past. Many americans do live in the past. The reason for this is because there internet is god awful. For somebody here with already 15 years of fiber internet with no data limit, anything that is offline isn't worth my time. It's a socially dead game. Physical doesn't even exist anymore for my views. It's a ancient concept like floppy drives.

PC is all about being social and competition. If i can't play a game with a friend the game isn't interesting to me. Why would i play uncharted 4? when i can play with 30 people or 5 people and actually feel like you are part of something and talk socially with other people.

Single player games feel like being the kid that sits in his house locked from the world playing with lego while all his buddy's are making new friends and playing with eachother outside with loads more tools to there disposal and get a lot of fun random experiences out of it that gets created by random social interaction.

This is actually how these games become big.

Consoles in general are just anti social type of platforms because of there limitations.

Only way to communicate is through talking with voice chats. Well most people don't want to use voice chats, but still want to communicate and a keyboard does that perfectly fine. So on consoles a large chunk of people are already always silenced on top of it because there is no other way to communicate. A controller to select text is not going to be used by people on any decent level. And then you actually have to pay to even be able to connect.

Also no solution for alternative communications programs like discord or other ways to communicate outside of games itself. For example i can still sit in my discord for x game while gaming y game, and see what people talk about while i do play something completely else. I still feel connected. ( it's like having your facebook on your mobile while playing games but then game related ).

Mmo's is all about social aspect, many many mmo's i played are nothing more then chat boxes with stuff into it that keeps you busy with your friends. I know people that buy every single loot box that comes out because they like there new hat it has ( which does nothing for there game ) a random chance to generate and pay 100's of bucks for it. They find it totally worth it, while a game like uncharted they wouldn't even spend 20 bucks on.

Single player games are socially dead content and this is what drives people on PC away from them. The only games that sell well and are pure single player games like witcher 3 is because they are litterly thrown away against the wall for free. Every single new 900 gpu at that time was sold with a witcher 3 copy, lots and lots of combinations of witcher 3 where sold here with other games as extra linked towards it.

It's like trying to hype up your mmo at a investor meeting, by saying we have ( aka final fantasy ) we have 10 million accounts created on our paid MMO!!!!!. But forgot to mention you just had a "free week for everybody to test out the game" 2 weeks ago.

Then with the social aspect also comes competition. There is nothing fun about killing a proprogrammed npc its boring. Congratz you got the rotation right !!! yay, oh wait there is nobody to cheer with me because i'm enculved in scripted npc's. killing another person that isn't scripted is far more interesting because every single match can be completely different.

Maybe now you understand why games like dota or mmo's or pugb are so interesting and why people play it.

It's the same why COD was so big on xbox with voice chat, because people actually got a sneak peek towards why online gaming is so appealing.

If you ask me, all of those single player exclusives like mario / god of war / uncharted i wouldn't pay more then 20 bucks each for and then i wouldn't even want to deal with there hardware, make it playable on my PC or else they don't even exist. While i have zero issue's plumping 200 bucks in a coin box for ragnarok online randomly for example. Money isn't the issue it's that the content isn't something i care about.

And with me many many more people are like that. Because single player games are simple to isolated for there function.

Remove all single player exclusives from consoles and what does it have left? nothing. Then why even bother.

Unlike consoles, nobody can push the markets on PC. They can provide or be ignored. That's why you often see snarky comments from PC crowd towards console crowd specially if that PC crowd is western europe based towards US console crowd about why anybody would care about that walking simulator, seems boring.

While that american console user, would say? i don't get why you want to sit on PC it has no cinematic experiences.

If you readed all of this, you just unlocked "mental hospital candidate archievement"

@Gatygun damn some harsh truth bombs in there.

Console gamers bragging about 1-4 million sales on cinematic 10 hour QTE fests. Meanwhile some PC MP games are now pushing that many concurrent players... EACH.

I still love SP RPG's though, and use to love MMO's. Co-OP RPGs are the go to these days... nice middle ground.

But yea... Gears of War, Uncharted, Last of US , Horizon and many more of these generic Shooter Hybrids are just boring as f*ck.

Phil Spencer is right... Gaming evolved past these types of games years ago.

@Gatygun: There is a clear generation gap then. Guess I am too old and you are too young. You go ahead and enjoy your discords/youtubes and boring repetitive online shooters and MMO's.

I am older and I love single player games and hate people. I love isolating myself and getting lost in single player games. Plus I don't have to listen to 12 year old racists telling me they effed my mom last night.

You do you bro. Enjoy being a teenager.

You think this is a new generation thing? it really isn't ... in reality you like what is now (and has been for over a decade) a growing niche corner of gaming. An area of gaming that was the limit 2 decades ago.

In early 2000s there was a massive movement towards online games, back when shooters etc were far better and more creative. Back when MMO's and MOBAS became more popular etc. This is not new... it was just "10 years later" if you were strictly a console only gamer. (even more so as a Sony or Nintendo only gamer.)

oh and there is something called a "mute button".. and you know, having friends play games with you... of any age. Because funnily enough, as a 30 year old, its far easier for a group of friends all around the country to have a laugh infront of a computer than meeting up... with the reality of responsibilities.

So yea, don't target "Teenagers" as a if that is the "way it is."

Bleh, tried looking at your recent posting history to find a game you ACTUALLY like, but instead it's full of bashing all platforms other than Sony... you are far FAR gone.... if you are happy to live in that tiny world more power to you.

While that's true, certain consoles games thrive more on consoles than PC.

COD and BF come to mind, these used to be PC titans, now the PC population dies down after a few months, meanwhile the consoles dominate.

Heck even Titanfall 2, that game is dead on PC, you can find lots of matches on Ps4/Xbox.

BF1 the PC version has less players than the Xbox One version (just by 5-7k) but the PS4 version crushes the PC version with DOUBLE the playerbase.

@FLOPPAGE_50

Your right, but that works both ways.

Battlefield and CoD lost their edge YEARS ago, they became console centric games.. in that magic period where "PC Gaming was dying" back in the mid/late 2000s where the media bought into that crap.

Battlefield evolved in the complete wrong direction for PC Gamers, as did CoD.

Meanwhile Counterstrike boasted more concurrent players than CoD on 3 systems at peak times... and dwarved BAttlefield .. of which PS4 only has 3x the players.. we are talking 10-15k vs 25-30k ... BF is "done".

13 year old Team Fortress 2 has outlived all the major console shooters in population to this day.

MOBA's and MMO's also provided far more competition for MP focused gamers, than anything available on consoles 10 years ago, and still today. No console big branded developers have created new MP genres with any sort of high success.

Wut? Jesus... I cant even... no, I'll definitely wont read all that

I only read the 1st paragraph to know this rambling makes no sense whatsoever. First, I'm not American, and second, not liking MMO or MOBA has sh*t to do with "living in the past". If you're going to say something at least make some sense

oh, and try to be more contained in your vocabulary next time cause the vast majority wont even bother reading some wall of text in a internet forum

Don't forget the upcoming Yume Nikki -Dream Diary- its a 3D remake of the RPGMaker game.

We may not have to rely on Japan soon if we want games similar to Japanese centric genres/gameplay styles/franchises too as the Chinese are slowly starting to develop their own standalone game scene on PC. The Chinese actually like a lot of Japanese made games, on some Chinese game stores I even see sections for Japanese games. If you look on Steamspy, China ranks second and sometimes first in owning the most copies of Japanese games such as Nier: Automata, Bayonetta, Dark Souls 3, Toukiden 2, Blazblue series, Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, Hyper Dimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed, Akiba's Trip, Danganronpa 2 and etc. I wouldn't be surprised if China is a huge part in why more Japanese games are coming to PC. None of these games are even marketed in China yet they come close to the USA in owning the most copies and sometimes surpass it. If they were marketed they could potentially sell in the millions or at the very least much more than what their console counterparts sold. For example Nier Automata would have sold the most in China and the most on PC if Square Enix didn't double the price of the PC version right after its launch in Asia actually making the PC version more expensive than physical copies of the PS4 version and more expensive than the PSN version too. Well that and the poor support and condition of the PC version doesn't help either.

The standalone/premium games China makes aren't that much different gameplay/visual wise from what you'd get from Japanese games. Some of the games I see on Steam and other places I thought were Japanese or even Western but turns out to be Chinese. For example The Vagrant I thought was Japanese but it turned out to be a Chinese indie game, its clearly inspired by Dragon's Crown and Odin Sphere.

Another one I found was Disappearing of Genosokyo, this game can easily be mistaken for Japanese because of its Touhou theme and characters having Japanese names but its actually Chinese too.

Then there are games that are clearly Chinese but have some influence from Japanese games. I found this upcoming action RPG for PC called Bloody Spell. The game clearly takes inspiration from Devil May Cry and Bayonetta with its hack & slash combat and counter system.

I also found this game Fantasy Three Kingdoms 5. Apparently its a long running RPG series on PC and it clearly has turn based JRPG like combat.

Now if only we could get an indie/standalone PC game scene from South Korea. South Korea's government is too restrictive on games, all games having to go through a type of ESRB system even if they're completely free and the system cost money and can take even months. So South Korea's game development scene is ran 99% by stakeholders/publishers whom all pretty much want just mobile and online games. I think its a crime because South Korea has so many developers and artist that could easily go toe to toe with Japan and the West.

Yup PC gamers have long moved past franchises such as CoD and Battlefield. Battlefield is a console franchise at this point now since Battlefield 1 is the first Battlefield game on PC to not have as many players as on consoles. Yup that magic period where "PC gaming is dying" made it seem like a big deal that games like CoD were poorly supported on PC and didn't sell as much but now no one gives of a crap because PC gaming is doing better than ever with it being the platform many new game trends are originating from. If COD games were to stop coming to PC in this day an age I don't think any would care but compared to last gen if they did, people would cry the death of PC.

Battlefield and CoD have gotten too stale, its the same crap almost every year just in a different setting with slightly better graphics. PC gamers have moved on to shooters such as Counterstrike Global Offensive, WarFrame, PayDay 2, PUBG, Insurgency, ArmA 3, Killing Floor 2, Overwatch, Dirty Bomb and etc. Funny thing is when some of these games get big on PC like PUBG, you start seeing all these AAA companies that usually cater to the console crowd now trying to imitate them because the console crowd has realized what type of experiences they're missing out on. It's pretty sad how these companies that develop games with millions and even hundreds of millions dollar budgets don't even try to experiment a little with something as small as a game mode for their already established huge franchises because taking risk is that dangerous to them. Battlefield could have done something like PUBG a long time ago but they simply chose not to and kept throwing the same stuff at us with just prettier graphics and different settings.

Don't forget Crossfire which is the biggest FPS game in the world with over 8 million concurrent users and makes more money than most top 5 Western games combined making between $1 and $4 billion dollars a year. That game came out in 2007 and now its getting a sequel with a single player campaign developed by Remedy Entertainment and a coop spinoff from StarBreeze both only for PC.

Because most PC gamers by now realize that these games, their design philosophies and the marketing strategies they promote are the antithesis of consumerism.

As far as the console crowd "missing out," I think this is critical. We'll start to see more engines being designed with user created content in mind. If you want to extend the life of your product without looking like a complete shill, then that's the way to go.

It's not that these companies won't innovate despite multimillion dollar design / advertisement budgets. It's that these companies won't innovate because these investment figures are so high. If the investment isn't low risk then they won't get their production budget.

While most of PC gamers have realized that CoD is an anti consumer game another large factor is that we have so many alternative shooters now. There is a shooter for almost every demographic and niche on PC now.

Would there really have been that much risk adding a battle royale mode to an already established game franchise like Battlefield? It would cost them hardly anything to make a game mode like that since all the assets will be used for all the other parts of the game and if no one played then they could just simply not include it in the next Battlefield title. Same thing with GTA Online they had all the assets and tools but chose not to do it until they saw it trending.

It's not really a PC vs console thing, but has more to do with the online free-to-play model dominating the traditional sales model. The physical and digital sales on PC and consoles are both stagnating, whereas the online free-to-play revenue on PC and mobiles is growing fast. It looks like free-to-play may very well be the future direction that the game industry is heading towards.

Market B doing well doesn't mean that Market A is doomed.

Yeah, I haven't seen any signs of premium game sales on PC declining, same for consoles. Even China which is a mostly F2P market is rapidly building up a premium PC game market. For example I just found this new Chinese battle royale game and its going to be a buy to play title with no in game cash shop. A few years ago doing something like this would be financial suicide. I think F2P and premium will coexist with F2P being the bigger market for obvious reasons.

Stagnation =/= Doom

There's no real decline, but there's no real growth either. The premium market is just stagnant. The only region where the premium market is actually growing would be China.

There probably is some truth to that, I've been looking around on Steamspy and China is starting to rank second in owning the most copies in a lot of games and in the top 5 for the a lot of others they don't rank 1 or two in. Makes you realize how much lower PC game sales could have been if this region did not starting buying games. I'm wonder what are the sales of games on Tencent's WeGame and other Chinese game distributors.

Definitely not an age thing, PC gamers are on average older than console gamers. At 47 I think we're of a similar age group and for me PC offers far more than any console ever has.

I play single player games (Total War, Civ, Wolfenstein, Homefront to name a few recent ones) as well as online multiplayer. Regardless of what I'm playing I sit on Discord with my mates and never go near in game voice chat with online games. To be honest the entire concept of an in game voice chat is completely foreign to me as they have always been a lesser service than Teamspeak, Ventrillo, Skype and now Discord.

Also 12 year old racists tend not to be a thing in PC gaming communities, you know money and all that for expensive rigs. There are plenty of other idiots to fill the void left by them though.