Headline is a smidge misleading. “PC gaming has a larger revenue than console gaming in the US” is more accurate. It’s certainly not true in other parts of the world.
It would be interesting to see an overall data, considered many part of the world (like China) consoles like Playstation and Xbox aren’t even a thing.
Places like China even gaming PCs aren’t really a thing. They mostly play on mobile, because that’s pretty much all they can realistically afford.
I am from China. I think your opinion is not true.
Chinese people is not rich, but take a month income to buy a console , it is affordable.
The fact is the strict scrutiny from the CCP and pervasive plundering of people’s privacy and the cognitive manipulation of people through the data algorithms of technology companies causing this.
In China, all the legal games need being approved by the CCP’s government, and the legal consoles just have about one hundred games approved .
The technology companies like tencent have almost all the internet portals or other Internet information channels. And almost all the Chinese internet companies must structure their CCP branch, serving for the CCP’s power, and must provide the authority delete, block, and review any information to the CCP.
In China, any information the Chinese people have received must serve the benefits of the Chinese Communist Party, let alone go against it.
That’s why Chinese people are addicted in the mobile games. Almost every console game is legally banned and the console games have only a small amount of exposure and traffic.
the console gamer in China face tough technical difficulties from the CCP to buy and download/transport. Mobile games have huge propaganda. Even the former Shanghai Municipal Party Committee Secretary/Current Prime Minister of the State Council of China Li Qiang stand up for mobile games “genshin impact“.
To be brief, in China, console game cannot bring benefits to the CCP, it provided the culture anti CCP’s values. That’s what the CCP opposes.
Thanks for the context here! This was super interesting.
My pleasure.
Gaming cafes equipped with gaming PCs is a pretty big market in China. Even if they can’t afford to own one personally, lots of Chinese people game on PC.
It’s not exact.
In fact, gaming cafe is relatively rare in China, especially the blockade and control during the COVID-19 struck it hard.
The Chinese people mostly use the PC at home. It’s cheaper than go to the gaming cafe. It’s because the house prices and rent in China is very high, cause by the CCP monopolized all the land trade in the market. They called that “socialist public ownership”, it means all resources in China legally belong to the CCP, includes the lands.
The very important reason Chinese people game on the PC is that the CCP needs the PCs to “help building a great country”. So it can’t be banned. Then lots of people pretend to buy it for work, but actually use it for gaming or other entertainment most of the time…
That’s why the Biden government banned the AI using by China. The CCP will definitely use it to enhance its military capabilities and international influence.
Yes but theyre nowhere near the prevalence of mobile phones. They might game a bit on PC but the money they might be spending on PC is dwarfed by mobile phone. Thats not to mention the time limits they have on gaming due to law. Additionally, most cafe PCs have preinstalled games and people in general don’t buy games to install on cafe PCs.
You forget how big the Chinese population is. Even if only a fifth of their population is able to get a gaming PC, then that’s pretty much all of US population.
But now compare it to places where consoles literally don’t exist or are in such minor numbers? Fuck it. Take China alone.
Maybe the better sauce https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/
… almost everyone already has a computer, often for school/work. A console is a separate instrument though.
This is kinda like saying there’s more tablespoons than ladles in American kitchens.
It’s not the PC industry, it’s the PC gaming industry.
ie: almost exclusively games sold for PC platform/Windows.
Right. Just saying that when the size of the PC industry is so much bigger, is it any surprise whatsoever that PC gaming also dominates? I would have expected no other result.
It’s not surprising at all but that’s not why. More people use laptops or office PCs for daily driving and work. Those are not going to work for a ton of games like a console will.
To the contrary, the vast majority of all games that exist do not require a robust system. Especially given the rise of microtransactions.
Don’t lose sight of what games in the world are actually the most popular. It’s not high-end stuff. It’s Candy Crush and shit.
Don’t lose sight of what games in the world are actually the most popular. It’s not high-end stuff. It’s Candy Crush and shit.
You’re right, those games are popular and very profitable and you don’t need a PC to play them. You’re just going to play them on mobile. You know what you’re not going to play on mobile? PC games.
Liiiike, League of Legends? Point stands.
You’re just cherry-picking an example. No, I mean like the thousands of games that are released every year that won’t run or aren’t available on the most powerful of mobile devices. Not to mention the ones that just suck on a small display.
What are you even doing? Are you really trying to make the point that there’s zero delineation between mobile and PC games?
as @Spuddlesv2 noted, this is about the market in terms of money made in the US and specifically in the sphere of gaming; not the single units delivered.
Still, we can extend skepticism on this data considering that most of the money is, probably, made in microtransactions: all consoles driven by their own monopolistic entity (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) are in disadvantaged because they demands cuts while on PC, as Epic Store with Fortnite and Steam with CS:GO, those who publish on PC are free to take the 100% of their cuts without have to split with the platform holder (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo). The appeal for GaaS, unfortunately, is vastly huge on both Mobile and PC (as open platforms) than consoles (which are closed).
What is a tablespoon in the US then? In the UK a tablespoon is probably not that much more common than a ladle, it’s much bigger than anything you’d use to eat with and generally is used as a serving spoon or a measurement when cooking/baking.
Our “common” spoon which is mouth sized is called a dessert spoon.
Gaming is dead to me since multiplayer is a dick measuring contest of who’s mom can afford the best Russian hacks
Thanks for the update Gary.
It’s like comparing car (PC) vs bicycle (Steam Deck) vs train locomotive (Xbox/PS).
Car can get you almost anywhere in the world, bycicle mostly in the same city, but you can go hard and get into another country. And train locomotive? From point A to B. That’s it.
It’s like comparing car (PC) vs bicycle (Steam Deck) vs train locomotive (Xbox/PS).
Following this logic, where do you place Sony paying Rockstar for GTA VI not be available on PC?
There’s no technical reason why GTAVI can’t be on PC, only “Sony corp.” reasons.
Isn’t this the usual Rockstar strategy? GTA V and RDR2 both came on consoles first and later on PC.
Ya but that situation doesn’t really fit into this comparison of another issue very well. The closest thing I could think of would be comparing it to, say, oil companies doing something like that to give one of the others summer kind of disadvantage
The point is that differences between PC and Console are exclusively artificially built on the console side. A mere Raspberry PI 5 can fit in the PC sphere (minus hardware modularity as GPU (…even if eGPU…)) in every aspect: anything USB, including printing or complicated CAD hardware are fully compliant with Linux.
The hardware in the console are even X86 (PS4 can run Linux with some tweaks)… but you can’t run a working browser on the PS5: this limitation is artificially built by Sony because otherwise you could play free web videogames. There’s nothing technical in these limitations, the console are just PC hardware capped to the platformed holder (Sony or Microsoft), and the difference is just made by axed functionality and billions spent in advertising propaganda.
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Everything is going to converge on mobile device gaming. Power of mobile devices goes up, internet becomes more stable…
Ah yes small screen and bad controls. Truly the future of gaming
Why would it need to stay that way though? Once a phone has similar processing power there’s no reason you couldn’t hook it up to any screen and Bluetooth a controller.
We’re a few decades from that if I had to guess (based on very little, I’m not an expert at all), but seems totally plausible to me.
I imagine chess players laughed in a similar way when pong came out.
The current mobile form will improve, the ubiquitous nature of it will dominate.
Form into what? High powered CPUs with giant monitors on a desk with great resolution and a myriad of tried and tested input controls?
We got that already, and it’s not a phone.
Yes that, but one that can be lifted up and taken with you in your pocket:) x
High powered computers, and desktop setups, are today’s current gold standard. But maybe not the futures.
We’re at the point where a phone could power a desktop computer, with a suitable dock.
Phone input methods certainly are adaptable, you could get switch style connectors for a phone, or some human-based motion tracking.
Projectors, foldable phones, display glasses, are ways to make the screen bigger for gaming.
Phones are in everybody’s pockets, they’re getting fast enough, most of them are fast enough, to run games from 5 to 10 years ago no problem. I routinely watch people play games on their phones for over an hour on the train. The gaming’s here already
I don’t think mobile gaming will ever be the pinnacle of current gaming, but it will be the ubiquitous platform that is targeted in the future.
We’re at the point where a phone could power a desktop computer, with a suitable dock.
No we aren’t, the hardware is light-years behind. Maybe that will happen eventually but that’s certainly a different thing than today’s mobile phones. Kind of weird to insist it’s just the same thing.
https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LrLDKYFyLMM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36963200
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17
The hardware is on par. Especially when you look at the apple chips. The m1 is a direct successor to the iPhone chips. Yeah they make a couple different power trade-offs. But the same chip in the MacBooks is being used in the iPads.
I’m not saying it’s a daily driver for people today. But it’s so close
Dude there is not a reference in the world that will convince me a current phone can remotely touch my desktop. The apple m1 barely rivals it at all but that’s not what we are talking about. Laptop does not equal phone
Saying you could plug in a phone in place of a desktop is like saying you don’t need a car because you can just walk. Technically, they fill the sale role, but its a night and day difference in capability and just due to laws of physics, that isn’t going to change.
How? I’ve emulated games on phones before and it’s ok at best for the types of games they can handle. You’re never going to get something like fallout or borderlands or Baldurs Gate running well on phones compared to consoles and PCs without a dock and external controller as well as enough processing power to be beyond overkill as a mobile device. Fuck metroidvanias suck on mobile and games like stardew are playable but much worse.
Connection stability, performance, and controller support all have a had a lot of time to get better, why would we expect it to happen now but not before? Mobile gaming is popular with kids but it also sucks. I think kids are just playing what they have, when they have a choice they won’t necessarily stick with mobile.
I think that the mobile share will for sure continue to grow before it plateaus, but I have a hard time believing that all markets will converge to mobile within any relevant time frame. Just by virtue of not being mobile, desktop builds will always have options for larger hardware with better performance and cooling compared to their mobile competitors
True. But right now even Apple iPhones are the same power or the same chip architecture as their desktop counterparts. So the convergence is already happened. The interface of desktops will always be better. My thesis is that desktops, uneven consoles are going to become niche for their markets.
Using Mac as an example of gaming when they compose a smaller percent than even Linux users, is ridiculous. You make some interesting points elsewhere, but you completely lost me with this one.
You might be right (I don’t know enough about Apple proprietary hardware to know otherwise), but that’s not the same for PC or console. There’s no reason that I can think of to assume that those platforms will stop development. For any generation, I can’t see PC hardware being less powerful or less efficient than its mobile counterpart, it just makes no sense to me. Therefore, there will always be a group of users with no mobile needs who want the best performance who will keep the platform alive.
It’s also worth noting that mobile’s market share growth hasn’t come mostly from people switching from console/PC to mobile, but from new gamers starting off on the mobile platform.
(FWIW I don’t think you deserve nearly the amount of downvotes you’re getting)
We will never have the same power in a mobile device that we do in a desktop computer.
It’s the same issue with vr. Everything is converging on the quest because it’s easier and cheaper
What? VR has been almost completely stagnant and frankly dying since Alyx. There’s no convergence when there is zero progress overall.
Depends on your POV. My phone is more powerful than the first computers I’ve had.
Thanks to Apple everyone has to take arm processors seriously, since M1 it’s not the “efficient, but shitty” processor, everyone needs to support it.
Phones are slowly getting there. Sure, we’re not seeing 4070 GPU equivalent in the near future. But most people’s computers are really shitty as well, including the low-end gaming computers.
Depends on your POV.
No it sure doesn’t.
My phone is more powerful than the first computers I’ve had
You mean your present day phone vs your presumably decades old desktop PC? Yeah. Of course. That’s completely meaningless in the real world where time machines don’t exist.
No it sure doesn’t.
It really does…
Phones have already replaced PCs for lots of people. 20 years ago almost every household had a desktop but 95% of what was completed on it can now be achieved with a phone, to the extent that plenty of houses don’t even bother with a computer any more.
Eventually the technology gets to a point where it can fill that slot for gaming too, it’ll never replace all of it and specialist equipment will always exist obviously. Most people don’t need to be at the peak of tech though (or even near it) and we already see lots of gaming households who just play switch, which is far below modern capabilities of games.
A phone doesn’t need to be competitive with modern PCs to become a strong option for gaming, the overall technology just needs to get far enough that most don’t notice the improvements you get from specialist equipment like gaming rigs.
It’s the gaming equivalent of earbuds vs a proper sound system. People will always exist that are enthusiasts and can hear the difference, but most of us are happy with a convenient pair of buds to listen to music and podcasts with.
It really does…
It really doesn’t.
plenty of houses don’t even bother with a computer any more.
You realize you’re making the opposite point of the person you’re trying to defend?
Eventually the technology gets to a point where it can fill that slot for gaming too
No it won’t. There will be a mobile gaming market. And there will be a PC gaming market. And there will be very little overlap between them.
Most people don’t need to be at the peka of tech (or even near it) and we already see lots of gaming households who just play switch, which is far below modern capabilities of games.
And we already see that the PC market greatly surpasses the Switch market, as well as the entirety of the combined console market.
It’s simple physics. A device that fits in your hand will never be as powerful as one that sits on your desk. Regardless of how much technology advanced.
I’m not trying to defend anyone bud I’m just making the points as I see them. How does my comment go against their argument though? PCs have been getting phased out for decades and that’ll continue.
Of course PCs will always be more powerful, but mobiles only need to be powerful ENOUGH (just like the very successful Switch console). I’m saying that eventually both mobiles and PCs will be powerful enough to play games at a quality most will accept, and only the hardcore will feel the need to get the absolute top tier experience, just like audiophiles do already.
Board games once outperformed the entire video games market too, things do change though.
Perfectly happy to admit the worlds best PC will always outstrip the worlds best phone, just like the world best earbuds will never outperform the world’s best speakers, but that’s not relevant to my point at all :) x
I’m not talking about the next 5 or 10 years either mate, I’m talking about 20 or 50 years, assuming society still exists.
And FYI, mobile gaming outstrips PC gaming by revenue already (PC and console combined in fact), you can expect to see it grow (whether for the right or wrong reasons) down the years as the tech allows for more actual “true gaming” options on phones that can be exploited by the corps.
How does my comment go against their argument though? PCs have been getting phased out for decades and that’ll continue.
LOL their entire point was that PCs were popular because “everyone has one”.
Perfectly happy to admit the worlds best PC will always outstrip the worlds best phone
The world’s best phone will be “outstripped” by a basic desktop costing half the price. Always. Simple physics.
And FYI, mobile gaming outstrips PC gaming by revenue already
Yes I’m fully aware.
You need to scroll back up and read the comment thread you’re replying to because I think you’re lost:
We will never have the same power in a mobile device that we do in a desktop computer.
No it sure doesn’t.
Yeah, it sure does.
Nice comeback
I mean, after your “comeback”, did you really expect more effort from me?
Didn’t expect anything. Wasn’t disappointed.
I think the last time I heard anyone say this sincerely was in school.
Your lack of comprehension is making a little more sense. Thanks mate :) x
I consider personal insults an admission of failure so thanks for that.
