Steam

[Cyan]

https://wccftech.com/steam-achieves-37-2-million-concurrent-players-breaking-all-previous-records/

Insane numbers. PC gaming continues an upward trend.

iirc, I read here that the numbers of the PC are unexpectedly good, like a 20% increase every year during the last 4 or 5 years. That's utterly nuts.

It's even better taking into account other devices seem stagnated. I guess the use of PC for work, programming, etc, and the easier way to install/play games, did skyrocket the PC sales. Also the society we live in, where almost everything is a computer, has shifted the paradigm.

The golden era of PC has cometh.

 

[pcchen]

I think one of the main reason of this is because consoles used to have special designed hardwares, making them better at running games, at least in some aspect. For example, when PlayStation was released, the majority of PC did not have 3D acceleration chips. PlayStation 2 has this crazy embedded RAM which has insane memory bandwidth, and PlayStation 3 has this Cell architecture thing. It's even more profound before that, such as SNES which has a lot of specialized chips such as the sprite engine and audio processor, where PC at that time had to do everything with the poor CPU.

However, it becomes clear probably around the time of PS4 that designing special chips specifically for consoles can no longer compete with the economy of scale of a PC. So consoles gradually went from special machines specifically designed for running games to a medium range PC. They are still cheaper, but when people want better hardwares, they don't have choices other than going for a high end PC.

This problem could go away if you can sell more consoles, achieving some sort of economy of scale. Unfortunately, in recent years it's clear that the market size of consoles is not growing. PC is probably not growing a lot either, but in terms of market size, PC (including all kinds of PC) is many times larger than consoles. Around 200M PC shipped every year for recent years even after a downturn. That's more than the all time sales of the PS2, which is probably the best selling game consoles of all time.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think another reason is games scale down so hardware doesn't become obsolete. You get a new PC, you pass the old one on. Tech doesn't die that readily (ignoring the latest Intel CPUs ) so you now have a new PC and the old one active, but the old one still gets games.

But we also see the same in consoles AFAIK so that...

It's even better taking into account other devices seem stagnated.

...if you look at the total number of active consoles, it's up because people are still happy to use PS4s. If you want to just look at sales of PS5/XBSX and see those sales are down, you'd need to compare sales of high end GPUs to see if that's growing or slowing down also (sales of desktop GPUs are trending downwards).

I think basically the latest, greatest gaming experience is getting too expensive for people to move on en masse, but the improvements are so mediocre that using older tech is fine. Unlike PS1 to PS2 or PS2 to PS3 where the old hardware didn't receive games within a couple of years of the new hardware, PCs are getting games they can scale down and run for 15 years, including the biggest titles like Fortnite on potato laptops, and last-gen consoles are still getting new games ten years in.

The gaming market grows with more users while the software landscape largely slows as devs want simpler games that scale down to simpler hardware and won't push the envelope of a more powerful baseline.

 

[RobertR1]

Generally AAA games that push the presentation envelope do have more initial appeal and staying power.

Cyberpunk, Wukong, Spider-Man pushed the limits and got accolades and longevity out of them. I’m sure Wukong will age as well as others. Whereas something like Starfield and Diablo which stuck to being same ole came and went quickly.

Also in this generation high end PC’s can objectively separate themselves from consoles thanks to ray tracing. In the past generations a high end pc was just playing the same game with some better polish, higher resolution and frame rate.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Lol. Starfield is a AAA game that isn't going anywhere.

 

[see colon]

Cyberpunk, Wukong, Spider-Man pushed the limits and got accolades and longevity out of them. I’m sure Wukong will age as well as others. Whereas something like Starfield and Diablo which stuck to being same ole came and went quickly.

What do you mean by longevity? Are we talking about sales over time, or player engagement over time, or some other metric. I would assume that both Starfield (Gamepass) and Diablo (Battle.net+Gamepass) don't use Steam as their primary sales platform, but Starfield has a 7-10k concurrent daily player base, and Diablo has a 15-26k daily. Spider-man, in comparison, has .9k-1.6k. Your inclusion of Diablo in particular puzzles me. Games usually launch into their highest player numbers and decline from there, getting a bump when new DLC or sales happen. You can see that with Starfield and Spider-Man. But Diablo, of the 11 data points available on Steamcharts, 6 of them are gains, and only 4 of them are declines, with the final number being the launch month. Diablo's highest concurrent player was just a couple of months ago. And this is after the game got released on Gamepass, which should have cannibalized sales, if not player base on Steam.

 

[WhiningKhan]

Steam launched 2003, C64 launched 1982.
Steam is now 50% of age of C64.
We are old.

 

[Davros]

Lol. Starfield is a AAA game that isn't going anywhere.

Mods will probably keep it popular, I'm currently playing Fallout 4 because of the absolutely awesome free Fallout London mod

Fallout: London

www.gog.com