It does appear that plenty of pirates have powerful enough PCs to make piracy of Crysis into a big deal. It's too bad so many PC gamers consider piracy a legitimate option.
NPD March 2008
- Thread starter iceberg187
- Start date
Who cites a different US consumer sales numbers (not shipped) thats 50% higher than NPD?
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I believe he's referring to World of Warcraft which is accounting for several hundred million in revenue not reported by NPD via subscriptions.
aaronspink
Veteran
WOW subscriptions alone in the US account for ~50% of the PC sales number from NPD and aren't included in the NPD number.
WoW subscriptions are not software sales and thus account for 0% of PC software sales. That's why they're not included in the NPD sales numbers. 1 WoW software purchase = 1 WoW software purchase regardless of how many months the subscription runs. They contribute to corporate revenues, but not unit sales. You know, kind of like how Xbox Live subscriptions don't count as unit software sales.
If NPD was tracking game-related subscription totals, Live, WoW, and whatever else would be in that.
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aaronspink
Veteran
If you don't think MMO subscription aren't MMO sales, then you don't understand the MMO market at all. Hell, they really don't even talk about the actual disc sales of MMO except as extra income. Almost all MMOs are designed based off of revenue projections for the subscriptions.
Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.
So you are saying it is perfectly fine for us to add in XBox Live subscription fees to the console market as well because we "understand subscription services"?
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Listen. NA MMO subscription fees are about $600 million annually. It's not much compared to the $5 billion console market. Go to stores and look around and tell me that console game sales don't dwarf PC gaming sales. It's probably 10:1. The fact that the PC market is surviving at all is because of MMOs.
Why do you think Valve is even making console games? Gabe Newell hates consoles. He has to do this if he wants to make decent money. Same goes for Epic, Bioware, etc... All of the major PC players except Blizzard have basically shifted their focus increasingly to console games.
Why do you think Valve is even making console games? Gabe Newell hates consoles. He has to do this if he wants to make decent money. Same goes for Epic, Bioware, etc... All of the major PC players except Blizzard have basically shifted their focus increasingly to console games.
It doesn't matter. NPD is tracking new unit software sales, not overall corporate revenue. That's why they don't include monthly fees. They also don't include arcade revenue, Gametap revenue, rental revenue, used game revenue, or microtransaction revenue, because those aren't sales of new units software.
$600m in subscription fees for MMOs is interesting, but it is not a number NPD somehow "missed," because they're not something included by definition. It has nothing to do with it being PC or Internet-associated. It has to do with monthly fees not being the same as sales of new units. You may think that's just plain stupid, but that's a matter of opinion. NPD reports two things: Unit sales, and revenue associated with those unit sales. Monthly subscription fees are neither of those two things.
Regards the discussion of the size of PC gaming though, subscription and download sales, the things NPD misses, are very important. We can't ignore them because NPD doesn't record them and say 'PC gaming is dead because NPD shows negligable PC game sales'!
I guess it depends. Looking at subscription fees is not useful if you want to know how well your non-subscription game is going to do in terms of making a return on investment. The big question is whether the PC market for traditional "gamer" titles is growing or shrinking. PC makes a ton of money off pop-cap or other casual games, but a company selling a first person shooter isn't going to care about that either.
I think the PC space for traditional games like fps, simulations, racing, rpg etc is probably shrinking. The MMO market is growing and so is the mini-game market. But if the consoles successfully launch some MMOs, then maybe that market will start to shrink on the PC as well.
aaronspink
Veteran
Most of those MMO subscriptions are in lieu of people playing other games. If your game is good enough, they'll play it so it most certainly does have relevance.
Shrinking is probably the wrong word, stagnant would probably be more correct.
That doesn't make any sense. If people are investing in MMO subscriptions instead of (same as "in lieu of") playing other games, then its unlikely your non MMO game is going to have much traction with that crowd. People aren't going to suddenly end their subcription to buy your good non subscription traditional based PC game.
MMOs are literally investments that represents months to years of work and most of the MMO crowd aren't going to replace thier investments on something that might literally last a few weeks. The only real competition for a MMO title is another MMO title. Most non MMO games don't offer all that makes MMOs appealing in one package and thus are poor substitutes.
More than likely you have to hope that your game generates enough demand to warrant buying on top of the monthly subscription fee of their favorite MMO. Furthermore, games like WOW or Sims are heavily populated by non traditional PC gamers, so thats the crowd you unlikely to get for a traditional PC game.
The large amount of revenue generated by subscription revolves around just a handful of games and one genre with half of it going to basically one game. If $600 million figure for annual revenue generated by subscriptions is true that only about 30% of what the console generated in software sales the month of dec 07.
Downloads are but a fraction of traditional retail sales, if they made up a pretty nice chunk of revenue that would have been readily described and talk about by now. Most of the download services news revolve around future impact not present impact and are not hiding billions in revenue from NPD.
Sales of Halo3 and COD4 as of now represent somewhere in the neighborhood of 16-19 million units of software sold in the last 8-9 months include present sales of GTA4 and that number probably jumps to 21-25 million units worth ~ 1.2-1.5 billion in software sales. Yet with those dominating figures existing in the console market, there still plenty of room for dozen of titles to sell a million plus over the same time period.
Remove the top 3 PC titles based on revenue generated over the last 8-9 months and see what you get left over.
aaronspink
Veteran
and 10% of what consoles generate in a year!
Not billions but easily in the multiple hundreds of millions. The issue is that the people running the services have absolutely no incentive to release the numbers and no legal reason to either. But there is a reason that all the publishers are flocking to steam. And Valve at least for their own games does a large percentage of their sales through steam.
I literally don't know anyone left that goes and buys the in store version of a game if they can get it via steam.
Aaron Spink
speaking for myself inc.
Subscription revenue isn't relevant to how many PC games are actually being played. If I buy a copy of WoW and a 6 months' subscription, that's one game and one customer, not 6. NPD appears to be more interested in showing the size of the market, and sales quantity and revenue is a better metric of that than subscription revenue (which is why Live revenue isn't on there, either). However, I suppose they could count WoW revenue without counting subscriptions as "sales."
Download sales are more relevant, because if a large fraction of PC software sales are actually through Steam, then NPD is missing a pretty significant chunk of data that it ought to care about.
NPD has said they are tracking or will start to track subscriptions. I guess they are now but will only report them quarterly.
Who cares about the WoW subscriptions?
If say, its revenue is an order of magnitude greater than console sales, does it mean PC gaming is saved?
I'm not saying PC gaming is dead, but having hard time figuring out what WoW has anything to do with the discussion.
Neither PC gamers who want to play games besides MMORPGs nor most of the game developers would want that kind of "alive" PC market.
If say, its revenue is an order of magnitude greater than console sales, does it mean PC gaming is saved?
I'm not saying PC gaming is dead, but having hard time figuring out what WoW has anything to do with the discussion.
Neither PC gamers who want to play games besides MMORPGs nor most of the game developers would want that kind of "alive" PC market.
