Changing fortunes for PC gaming..??

NZXT30 said:
no chance too many steam haters ( dd haters to be honest) around and thats why steam enjoys double digit growth every year because there are so many pc gamers that still dont use steam. every time a franchise goes steam works the outrage is massive. plus steam is completely unknown in asian countries, mmo gamers etc. when you add steam, battle net, xfire, origin, mmos (especially asian) and retail numbers together an astronomical number comes up that completely dwarfs any console user base.
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Steam haters is in the minority, steam has 40 million accounts, 4-5 peek million logged in at anyone time.

So by Borsch's figure of 200 million gaming PCs and your assessment of steam there are 160 million steam haters who have never used steam or a steamworks game.
 
gregster said:
Piracy has been around since the spectrum days (tape to tape) and even the Snes had it (super magicom). This is sadly the way of the world and the best we can do is hope that the genuines out weigh the pirates.
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Piracy is always part of the equation. It is always the battle of convenience of simple but expensive game purchase vs some inconvenience of piracy: you had to find a friend with th tape of the game you wanted, you had to buy a bootleg from a market stall, you had to find that market stall, for tape-to-tape/floppy-to-floppy you had to rely on chains of friends who would share your games tastes and one of whom would buy the original/bootleg for you to copy. Now, there is centralised hub, you dont need friends and there is little inconvenience - download and copy-paste crack.

Steam is convenient, and its convenience is clawing some customers back - much like iTunes did with mp3s. But its not enough as games are more expensive to make= cost more to the buyer and thus the convenience/inconvenience difference needs to be greater for people to start saying "sod this! I'll just buy it from steam/Asda instead".
 
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Final8y said:
So by Borsch's figure of 200 million gaming PCs and your assessment of steam there are 160 million steam haters who have never used steam or a steamworks game.
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The evidence I quoted converged on 80-200 millino, not 200 million flat.

The main point is that PC does not have an excuse of poor sales due to smaller user base of PC gamers, whatever its number, its plenty big enough for this excuse not to be valid.
 
Borsch said:
The evidence I quoted converged on 80-200 millino, not 200 million flat.

The main point is that PC does not have an excuse of poor sales due to smaller user base of PC gamers, whatever its number, its plenty big enough for this excuse not to be valid.
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80-200 mil in itself means they haven't got a clue, its not as if we are talking in the billions give or take 80-200 mil.

The excuse for poor sales is vast.

Most people have a console as well and buy the game on console as its out first on it plus ease of use because it will run on the console no matter what.
 
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NZXT30 said:
no chance too many steam haters ( dd haters to be honest) around and thats why steam enjoys double digit growth every year because there are so many pc gamers that still dont use steam. every time a franchise goes steam works the outrage is massive. plus steam is completely unknown in asian countries, mmo gamers etc. when you add steam, battle net, xfire, origin, mmos (especially asian) and retail numbers together an astronomical number comes up that completely dwarfs any console user base.
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Good point on Steam growth, I did not think of that...

And I can vouch for steam haters- when IL2 franchise moved to steam last spring, there was an uproar on all IL2 forums- 1C, simhq, ubi, sukhoi and others with threads with tens of pages of angry people swearing at Valve/Ubi/1c, some STILL say that they will only buy the game when it is steam free.
 
Borsch said:
Good point on Steam growth, I did not think of that...

And I can vouch for steam haters- when IL2 franchise moved to steam last spring, there was an uproar on all IL2 forums- 1C, simhq, ubi, sukhoi and others with threads with tens of pages of angry people swearing at Valve/Ubi/1c, some STILL say that they will only buy the game when it is steam free.
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Again flawed as no matter if they don't like it being a steam game they still use steam, just like im not happy that BF3 is a only Origin game, i still use Origin anyway, just because i complain about it does not mean that i don't use it.

Also IL2 is not your average game and there are many members on simulator forums who don't play much else besides sims so don't contributes to games sales in general like the some who only play WOW.

You really do choose bad game examples.
 
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Final8y said:
Again flawed as no matter if they don't like it being a steam game they still use steam, just like im not happy that BF3 is a only Origin game, i still use Origin anyway, just because i complain about it does not mean that i don't use it.
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No, you missed the point- they stayed away from steam for as long as they could before being "forced" to join for IL2. The point was that there ARE gamers who do not have/want to have steam account.
 
Borsch said:
This is great info actually. So there are more then 40 million PC gamers, we can now say that with certainty.
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No that does not mean 40 million regular gamers at all as there are only 4-5m million even logged in and that does not even mean actually playing either as most of that 4-5 mil is auto start and many leave steam running no matter what, and some of them may only be playing one or 2 free games.

Counter-Strike is still number one.
 
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Borsch said:
No, you missed the point- they stayed away from steam for as long as they could before being "forced" to join for IL2. The point was that there ARE gamers who do not have/want to have steam account.
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And the point is that they are in the minority its not as if steam started yesterday and if they had managed to stay away from steam for all that time then they really don't play much else or buy many games because they are mostly likely anti GFWL,Origin as well.
 
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Final8y said:
And the point is that they are in the minority its not as if steam started yesterday and if they had managed to stay away from steam for all that time then they really don't play much else or buy many games because they are mostly likely anti GFWL,Origin as well.
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steam by default does not autostart and most people hate programs that do. What's so hard to understand that steam is huge? the last xbox360 live peak concurrent users record that Microsoft announced was 2 million while steam hits 5m+ every sunday. Just look at the numbers and stop hypothesising.

I can make stupid claims as well like "xbox360 sold 64m but only 40m real users as the rrod rate was 40%" and "most ps3 users bought a ps3 in the first couple of years as a cheap blu ray player". This will get us nowhere. The fact is Battlenet and Steam together have 6.5m+ peak concurrent users during the weekend which is quite astonishing. and they are only two pc services. there is a huge pc gaming userbase and you can not argue that. The real argument is why multiplatform games dont sell as much on pc and there are plenty of reasons up for discussion.
 
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NZXT30 said:
steam by default does not autostart and most people hate programs that do. What's so hard to understand that steam is huge? the last xbox360 peak concurrent users record that Microsoft announced was 2 million while steam hits 5m+ every sunday. Just look at the numbers and stop hypothesising.

I can make stupid claims as well like xbox360 sold 64m but only 40m real users as the rrod rate was 40% and msot ps3 users bought a ps3 in the first couple of years as a cheap blu ray player. This will get us no where. Battlenet and Steam together have 6.5m+ peak concurrent users during the weekend which is quite astonishing.
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By default steam does not auto start as i didn't say that, i said that most of the people who are logged in are because they have it auto start, even if they have no intention of playing games at that time as there is the friends and social aspect. If it was purely a downloader then no one would have it on auto at all, just like when Origin was EA Downloder and even i have Origin Auto start now because of the BF3 clan im in.

There are only about 1.5 miilion playing games right now on steam out of the 4 million logged in divided by 100 games.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

If you look at many online games that the accounts are many times the current users.
Battlenet besides the other games is linked to WOW so cant be used for games stats over all in regards to sales and gamers.
 
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Don't forget the 90 million graphics cards sold in a year includes all the units sold to the likes of Dell etc to put in their PC's & laptops. Then you are also counting them a second time when you harp on about how many actual PC's have been sold that include graphics cards capable of running modern games.
 
no_1_dave said:
Don't forget the 90 million graphics cards sold in a year includes all the units sold to the likes of Dell etc to put in their PC's & laptops. Then you are also counting them a second time when you harp on about how many actual PC's have been sold that include graphics cards capable of running modern games.
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How do you know?

In an email, Peddie said that his research did not explicitly determine which add-on card vendor -- the customers of AMD and Nvidia -- came out on top. But Peddie identified eVGA, PNY, Sapphire, and MSI, in that order, as the top vendors, according to what he called "expert speculation".
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http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2307180,00.asp

I have never seen a Dell with an EVGA card, dell usually puts in oem stuff?

In any case, are we still debating if PC gaming has smaller user base than consoles and if PC gaming is "niche"?
 
The only two downsides to PC gaming are crashes/glitches because of different hardware and piracy. A well tested game can overcome the crashes and glitches, but I'm sure that it takes a lot more time (and thus money) to properly test a game for PC.
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To be honest I have had more lock-ups on my PS3 than I have ever had on my PC.

At the end of the day the consoles will always get priority due to sales. They are a business after all and need to recoup as much profit as possible.

Cross platform games are here to stay but as long as they do a good port to the PC then I'm happy.
 
I cba reading this whole thread, but one thing I'll point out is that the PS3 and Xbox 360 have sold approximately 55million units each worldwide. Why are you guys using 2010 figures when we are now well into 2012? :confused:

The Wii has sold about 90million, for a combined console userbase of 200million. Many of these will go unused (or near unused), or will have broken and not been replaced, so we can reduce that number to about 80-120 million. I would estimate the number of genuine PC gamers to be around 50-100 million worldwide. I'm not expert but that seems to be a more reasonable figure than 200 million.

So the actual active userbase is quite comparable between the consoles and PC.
 
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