GAMES & GENERAL GEEKERY
WHY ARE PC GAMES SO INFERIOR?
James DYER
Monday, January 23, 2012
There are 48 times more PC owners than Xbox 360 owners, So Why do Xbox 360 titles sell up to 6 times more than PC games? That’s not even adding PS3 sales.
Star Wars The Old Republic is a PC-only MMORPG. It is one of the biggest PC-only releases in years. In its first week of release it sold close 1.7 million copies.
On the other hand, according to vgchartz.com, Activision’s Modern Warfare 3 sold close to 6.2 on Xbox 360 its first week. That’s not to mention that it also sold 4.2 million on the PS3 its first week.
Looking at the numbers, this is astonishing. There are 3.11 billion people that own a PC, granted most of them were not bought for gaming. Still, Star Wars The Old Republic can be played on virtually any PC.
There are 64 million Xbox 360s out there and 60 million PS3s. This shows that systems are where games sell the most. Per system sold, 360 and PS3 owners are more likely to buy the game.
Keeping in mind that a lot of the PCs are simply bought to surf the web, that’s still an insane difference.
So, if you are a game publisher, what do you gain by going PC-only or PC-native? Nothing--they only losing potential sales that they would get on the systems.
In the view of the game makers, the money is in console-based system, thus causing less and less games to go PC-only or PC-native. If you compare all the data, you will see that every game sells considerably more on consoles than its pc counterpart.
That said, this is what has caused PC gaming to slowly die. Simply said, there is just not enough market there to have big exclusives.
Although there are exclusives on the PC, such as World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2, this is because PC components handle the games better than consoles. It has a large keyboard with tons of keys and also a mouse that allow for more accurate gameplay to play games such as the Real-Time Strategy game, StarCraft 2. It also has a better Internet connection that allows for MMOs such as World of Warcraft.
While PC gaming is not as popular as it once was, there are still games that have to remain on the PC due to its requirements. So while PC gaming is dying, it will never be completely dead due to the extra things you can add to a game when it’s on the computer.
