Someone recently told me that people just don’t play PC games as much as they used to. But I sat in on the PC Gaming Associations State of PC Gaming talk at GCDC in Leipzig, Germany last week and I beg to differ.

According to the PCGA about 70% of all developers are working on PC titles at present. The PC is used more than and single console and have a far deeper market penetration than any of the others. At present there are roughly 1 BILLION PCs in use around the world and they expect that number to double by 2015.

So is PC gaming dead? Well if you look solely at Asia, mostly China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea you see that there are around $2.6B in what amounts to mostly online games that are being played.

In EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) There’s about $3.5B in games.

The PCGA expects there will be about $30B in Gaming PCs sold this year in the US alone. A gaming PC was designated as one that was capable of handling DirectX 9.0c and that the consumer specifically bought because of that fact.


These are numbers that have been collected from various sources including NPD, PCGA external studies and member market research. Members of the PCGA include AMD, NVidia, Intel, Dell, Activision, Epic, Acer, Microsoft and more.

One of the major initiatives that the PCGA is doing is to make a ’baseline gaming experience’ recommendation. What this is meant to be is a minimum rig configuration that will deliver a good gaming experience. It will not be 1400x1050 res with 60 frames-per-second but it will still be an enjoyable experience with say, 13 frames-per-second. It’s meant to be the minimum configuration that all game developers should shoot for if they want the widest audience for their upcoming titles. They also are hoping that it will show computer manufacturers who are marketing a ’gaming rig’ the lowest common denominator and anyone advertising a computer with lower specs shouldn’t call it a gaming PC.

This will be done by taking a basket of games and running them on hardware and finding what hardware configuration gives that minimum enjoyable gaming experience.

So is PC gaming dead? Hell no. It’s alive and well and living and breathing. PCs can still be more powerful than consoles and are still a viable solution for gaming. They are easy to connect to networks for multiplayer gaming and have a full range of gaming peripherals including Surround sound, controllers, displays and more.

PC-based titles I saw at GC Leipzig this year include: Ceville, Imperium Romanum II, Raven Squad: Operation Hidden Dagger, X-Blades, Dawn of War 2, Hotel Giant, King’s Bounty, Blood Bowl, Saints Row 2, Postal III, DC Universe Online, Free Realms, The Agency, Red Faction: Guerilla, Champions Online, Borderlands, The Wall, White Gold and the list goes on and on and on.

So now you tell me that PC gaming is dead...