I didn't say they were
. Nevertheless it's still a highly informative number for reasons I address below.
Well you did use "concurrent players" -
Steam hits over 34m concurrent players:
when citing the Wccftech article for "concurrent users."
Steam is a background process for many, no doubt, but if more people are logged into Steam at a given point than there have been total sales of a particular current gen console then that's still very indicative of the relative market sizes. These 34m people need to have their PC's on, and be logged into Steam. Given this is a global metric that covers all time zones, the actual number of Steam users is going to be much, much higher than the concurrent. And not all gamers have Steam active when it's not being actively used. I certainly don't.
We don't need to guess the numbers for players. Steamdb, the orignal source used by the WCCFtech article you used, also tracks active players. Active player count is typically in the ~25% - 33% range of active users.
Also the time zone argument as it relates to potential market is a bit tricky as a China now represents a huge number of Steam players. The actual draw of SP console multiplats, especially in terms of monetary value, relative to the user base there is going to be on the low ratio side due to a variety of factors.
That's relevant if the developer is considering releasing a cross gen game because the 120m figures will include PS4/XBO and likely even some users from the generation before. I'd assume the XBL figure may also include PC gamers given the total XBO+SBS sales wouldn't support it.
For current gen only games though the 120m figure for PSN/XBL is pretty meaningless whereas the Steam MAU number genuinely represents a real target market.
Yes of course I understand that not all of those 120m users have a PC as capable as the current gen consoles, but thanks to the Steam hardware survey, developers can fairy accurately target whatever proportion of that 120m they wish through scaling, bearing in mind of course that the target performance for a "current gen" experience is the Series S. And PC games can scale even below that.
This seems to ignore sub demographics. The PC market is much more fragmented than the console market in terms of why people game on the PC. That 120m MAU has much more users than you might think who simply are not really targetable. Just viewing it through the lens of hardware capability is a bit of a hardware enthuasist centric view point.
But again, thanks to the Steam Hardware Survey we can get a fairly accurate picture of how large the hardware enthusiast demographic is, or at the very least, how large the market is that can re-produce the "next gen experience" with minimal compromises. Taking that performance threshold as Series S or greater, the number is certainly larger than the total sales of any current gen console including the PS5. And that's using the monthly concurrent users as the starting figure vs total sales on the console side.
To put that into real numbers, around 60% of GPU's in the SHS feature 8GB or more memory. So that's GTX 1070 level at the lowest end which is comfortably a match for Series S. That translates to roughly 72m PC's active monthly that would be a reasonable target for a current gen only game with a minimum quality level matching or exceeding the Series S. And of course that market can be increased through settings scaling. And that's just Steam., And that's just the active users in a given month rather than total platform sales.
Compared to 53m PS5's and 27m XBS consoles sold in total, it's clearly a big market for developers to want to target.
I feel again this is a hardware enthuisist centric perception in which they tend to feel people buying console level hardware (for lack of a better term) are primiarly interested in those console multiplatform, especially SP, games that tend to dominant hardware enthuasist coverage (reviews).
A huge chunk of people believe or not buy them just to play "e-sports" type titles that you might not think are demanding. Hence interestingly why Nvidia has been doing a lot of latency based technical marketing over just raw FPS.
Or just other PC centric titles. For example ancedotally when I was playing MMOs a ton of the people I knew in those games (really the majority) didn't play SP AAA games on their PC even though they had high end hardware capable of doing so, a good deal of them just played on their console instead but just the MMO on the PC. They certianly were not running out to buy those multi plat SP games on day one even if they had the hardware to do so.
But I want to focus the discussion a bit so as to not go way off track here. This isn't about the actual size of the PC market (or Steam specifically) but to put better releveance on numbers presented in terms of how it relates to console multiplats.
I also do think it's worth mentioning that while there is a tendency to directly compare PC gaming with consoles I feel the majority of PC gamers don't treat them interchangeably, and don't find them as subsitutes (eg. the if GPUs are too expensive just buy a console, or even the other way around, if you have the money just buy a PC). There is a some overlap, but a huge chunk just look at their PC gaming as their own thing.
wccftech.com
www.vgchartz.com
