PC "Far From Declining" Says Blizzard Boss

Here's my impression of the games industry:

"PC games are dead!"

"No they're not!"

"Yes they are!"

I'm clearly the new Rory Bremner. Add another rallying cry to the "No they're not!" column, with Blizzard getting all Gabe Newell about the nonsense while talking to Eurogamer.

EG were speaking to Blizzard's co-founder and chief executive, Mike Morhaime, who gave them this juicy quote in response to their mentioning Gabe Newell's comments.

I think that it is just completely dead wrong to think about the PC gaming market and conclude that it's a declining market. It is far from declining. If you look at the numbers, there are probably more people playing games on the PC than any other platform. More than there ever have been before. If you look at the revenue, it's also growing. It's only not growing if all you're looking at is PC retail, and even then, I think it's just flat, I don't think it's declining very much.

But isn't it that retail decline that causes the fuss, ask Eurogamer.

"Yes, absolutely. Because historically that's how the PC games market has been judged, by looking at retail sales. And so we haven't evolved our metrics yet to look at the entire market for PC games, but if you include online subscriptions and microtransactions and advertising revenue and things like that, and just look at the volume of people, people are playing a lot of games on the PC."

Hurrah! More common sense in the face of the more dubious suggestions from other companies, where their games didn't review and sell as well as they'd hoped... Wait, sorry, I mean were horribly afflicted by piracy. Obviously.

Check out the rest of the interview for Morhaime's comments on supporting old games, Diablo III and WoW, and the nerves it takes to make any game.