PC Game Market 'Becoming A Niche'?

simoniker writes "Gamasutra has quizzed game analysts from Wedbush Morgan, Screen Digest and DFC Intelligence on the state of the PC game biz, with thought-provoking results. From Michael Pachter's comments: 'The PC games market is becoming a niche, substantial in size, but a niche nonetheless.' David Cole also notes: 'When I first started covering the game industry back in 1994, the general consensus was PC games would dominate the market and console systems were doomed.' What changed?" How do you think Microsoft's recent push to treat the PC as the 'fourth console' will affect things?

Pachter Strikes Again

[gorbachev]

I swear every time this clown opens his moouth, I feel the urge to punch things.

As clueless as he always is, I'm sure he is bound to have heard of World of Warcraft, the most successful video game on any platform, ever.

Niche my ass.

Re:Pachter Strikes Again

[AndyG314]

World of Warcraft, the most successful video game on any platform, ever.

By what criteria do you declare WoW to be the most successful video game ever? If you were going by total units sold, wikipedia gives that to the sims for the pc at over 16 million, and original mario borthers sold over 40 million (though it was bundled with the NES so that number is kinda skewed). WoW isn't the top grossing game of all time eather.

Re:Market

[thebdj]

You do know 7 million subscribers is less than the number of copies Blizzard has sold with Diablo2 and with Starcraft right?
I call partial BS. I will give you Starcraft and the 9 million copies. The numbers [wikipedia.org] here may be a bit old, but you will have a hard time, without a valid updated sales number, proving that they managed to sell another 3 million copies of D2. Don't forget this platform also has The Sims at nearly 20 million. I would hardly call this a niche market yet.

The number of dollars saved from having to test and develop for endless combinations of CPU/GPU/OS/etc is enormous. That extra time/money is spent enhancing the game rather than just making it work.
I call BIG BS on this one. I do not think there is nearly as much combination testing as you think. Also, this notion they are spending more time and money to enhance the game is laughable. One of the biggest complaints about the industry has been a repetition of gameplay with only graphics getting better. Don't forget your PC has more storage for a) better graphics, b) more levels, and c) more gameplay/extras. I do not buy this notion that less testing somehow equals more work on the game. Remeber for PC, you have an unlimited beta community. You can do pre-release betas and thanks to the patching (which apparently consoles are slowly catching onto) you can fix the bugs you didn't catch in Betas.