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PC Gaming In Still Not Dead Shocker

I'll start this by saying that, to date, I've not been at all impressed by the PC Gaming Alliance, an organisation which seems to have been charging its members large sums to do God only knows what in near-silence, while PC gaming has busily got on with resurging dramatically all by itself. So I'm not entirely inclined to take their report on the current state of PC gamingland at face value, especially given that Steam famously doesn't share sales figures, but at the same time it's always nice to hear a big, positive number. By their and their analysts' reckoning, PC gaming is now a "$20 billion global market with record revenues of $6.8 billion," up 8% from last year.

At a complete guesstimation, I'd actually be surprised if the growth wasn't higher. But I'm no analyst, I have no sales figures and I'm terrible at keeping tabs on my own money, let alone someone else's.

Another claim is that there are over 1 billion PC gamers planet-wide, some 250 million of which are core gamers - i.e. the sort that would buy a BioShock, rather than the sort that would play FarmVille or perhaps even Minecraft (which is very much its own grey area these days).

The largest market is claimed to be China, but then again China's the largest market for pretty much everything these days. PC gaming audiences in Korea, Japan, the US, Britain and Germany all grew last year too. all showed growth in 2012. Together these markets also increased revenue by percent in 2012, to $8.4 billion. Take all those numbers with a pinch of salt, but right now we don't have a lot else to go on.

The PCGA are still on about trying to improve their PC Gaming Certification and Logo Program, and acknowledge "that much work remains to be done." It's never going to take off, let's be honest, but hopefully not too many organisations are paying the PCGA's eye-watering membership fees in the hope it will.

Meanwhile the console gaming industry is in a right old flap about declining sales. Does that mean we win? Don't be silly, there was never any war.

Read the whole report here, if you like. There are a few more not entirely substantiated numbers in it.

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Alec Meer avatar

Alec Meer

Co-founder

Ancient co-founder of RPS. Long gone. Now mostly writes for rather than about video games.

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