I remember hearing on a podcast I think about how PC gaming seems to be in decline with the local store only having a couple of shelves of games (might be the video cast, still only gotten around to watching part of the first one - much easier to listen to the podcast at work!).
When I strolled down to the local Game store and took a look in there it was the same story, they had 2 shelf units of PC games and about 26 shelf units of console games. But yet according to this story
Quote:
We take a step to the world stage. 13 Billion dollars is the entire PC games market in 2008. In terms of the split, Chart Track [a UK-based market research firm] believes 24% is retail, 46% online revenue services (i.e. Subscriptions, micro-transactions), 22% is digital distribution and 8% is ad-revenue...All this compares to 32 billion dollars from all console sales.
Original story hereIts pretty big, I'm not sure what the digital distribution is here, I'd not expect it to match the amount paid for retail boxes of the game, yet it appears to do so.
One thing that is missing though is the split between retail stores and online stores with the 24% that is retail, I'm pretty sure that its going to be the lions share sold online, yet its true that
retail sales have really dropped at games stores.
Wondering here if I'm too old fashioned to want to see PC games in stores rather then online? Or will the reduction in the number sold in retail stores eventually cause the PC gaming to dry up due to less new gamers? I get the feeling that SOE should be booking prominent shelf end spots for the new EQ2 expansion if they want some serious success, and concentrating on retail stores and finding a way to get them to share the success could even be a game changer with the way the PC market is right now since it looks a neglected sector to me despite its size.
Still some advertising at all would be good :)
