14% Down, PC Still a Viable Gaming Platform

The general rush when the numbers offered by the NPD Group come out is to look at the data and try to answer the Most Important Question in Gaming (or MIQG, pronounced like “my cog”). Did the Xbox 360 sell better than the PlayStation 3? How much money did Nintendo make in the last month? Will 2009 be the year of the PlayStation 3? Did Gear of War 2 sell better than Call of Duty: World at War?

Only some time later, do people turn to look at the numbers to see how the good old PC, once the quintessential platform for gaming, is doing. Well, the short version is that it's not doing well at all. The NPD Group is saying that, for the North American market, in 2008, sales of videogames for the PC fell by a robust 14% to a figure of 701 million dollars, compared to 970 million in 2006. Of course, some people will jump to conclusions saying that PC gaming is dead. Well, let's take a look at the long version of this story.

The data offered does not account for the games purchased and downloaded online, subscriptions paid online, or micro transactions. This means that the data has not taken into account all the games bought through Steam (think Valve's recent release Left 4 Dead), Impulse and D2D, only accepting a fraction of what World of Warcraft brings in as revenue on the PC for Blizzard. It's also not taking into account all the free to play MMOs sprouting up all over the place.

It seems that all this is being tracked by NPD and that data will be available soon showing that the PC gaming market is not declining, but rather changing in a big way. Exclusive releases, such as the upcoming Dawn of War II, will likely be rarer but we'll surely see more MMOs, better digital download services and more innovative small games.