Year after year, PC games have been carefully ignored at the annual E3 show. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and PC Gamer magazine have decided to launch a new one-day show to run concurrently with E3. The PC Gaming Show will take place June 16, from 5:00 to 8:00pm, at the Belasco Theater in downtown Los Angeles. The E3 show runs Jun 16 througth 18, at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
"PC gaming is in a golden age," says the PC Gaming Show web site, "with more powerful and affordable hardware than ever before, thousands of games available through Steam, Origin and other platforms, and millions of viewers regularly watching e-sports online. Now, for the first time, the PC platform will have its own event during E3, where the community will be able to celebrate this era with some of the biggest names in PC gaming and see the innovations that lie ahead."
As of this writing, confirmed participants include AMD, Blizzard (publishers of World of Warcraft), Bohemia Interactive (military sim ArmA 3 and runaway hit zombie-survival game DayZ), Paradox Interactive (city simulation Cities: Skylines), Square Enix (upcoming Just Cause 3), Tripwire Interactive (Killing Floor 2), Humble Bundle (successful charity-oriented games retailer) and more.
The PC Gaming Show will be streamed live, in partnership with Twitch, which is one of the show's official sponsors. Other sponsors include AMD, PC Gamer, Bohemia Interactive, Tripwire and Digital Storm (leading maker of gaming PCs).
Market Growth
The continuing neglect of PC gaming is ironic, given that revenues continue to soar, and by some estimates now considerably surpass those of the proprietary gaming consoles. "I can tell you that PC games passed console in 2012 when revenue hit $21 billion versus $20 billion for console," confirmed Peter Roithmayr, Client Development Executive with DFC Intelligence.
The Open Gaming Alliance (OGA) ran some previous DFC stats back in March. These predicted that gaming software sales on the PC would continue to outstrip the three top consoles put together, and surpass the total for mobile platforms as well. The global PC games market was expected to grow from $26 billion in 2014 to $35 billion by 2018.
DFC is currently finalizing three major reports on the games industry: Video Game Consoles in the Connected Home, Fremium Client PC Games Business Models and PC Game Market: Asia, North America, Europe. However, the company issued a press release this week. "The global video game industry will reach $100 billion by 2019," it predicted. "This revenue is likely to be extremely fragmented among many market segments. This includes revenue from PC games, console games and mobile games but does not include hardware spending."
DFC is optimistic about console markets in the short term, but sees these devices as having a limited future. "The new console game systems are expected to pass over 200 million in units by 2019 with the Sony PlayStation 4 leading the way. The challenge is that the Xbox One and Nintendo Wii U will underperform their predecessors and by 2019 all the major game systems are expected to be in decline."
Free-to-play ( or ‘fremium') revenue models have grown in importance, but don't seem likely to make much headway outside of the Asian market. "The good news is that AAA console and PC games can still command a premium price at launch with the ability to add additional digital content as a secondary source of revenue," said DFC analyst David Cole. "The number of gamers willing to line up at day one and pay top dollar to get the latest hit continues to grow substantially. These are the gamers driving industry growth."
Digital distribution is obviously becoming more of a factor. DFC forecasts that digital delivery to mobile, PC and console devices will account for 85% of electronic game revenues by 2019, with the remaining 15% largely accounted for by physical media for dedicated portable and console game systems. "Retailers are expected to remain a major force in the digital age as long as they can maintain their relationships with consumers," said Cole.
Game or Sport
The rise of ‘e-sport' tournaments is another measure of the success of PC gaming. Originally, e-sports were a craze in the Far East, drawing huge audiences in markets such as South Korea. But that popularity is spreading worldwide. Valve Software reported last August that over 20 million unique viewers tuned in to its 2014 International Dota 2 Championships. The peak number of concurrent viewers hit 2 million, double the previous year's record. Physical seats, at the KeyArena, in Seattle, Washington, sold out in less than an hour.
In March, Valve reported that the first round of tickets for the 2015 Dota 2 Championships, at $99 each, sold out in 6 minutes, and the second wave sold out in 4 minutes. Valve also sponsored a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament in March, at Katowice, Poland, with $250,000 in prizes.
One problem with properly accounting the PC games business is that it is so multifaceted, and so fast-changing. For example, Valve has been promoting the idea of "community content creators" producing extra content for established games, and being pad for their work. In January, the company announced that since the launch of its Steam Workshop in late 2011, creators of add-ons for its games Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive had earned a total of over $50 million dollars.
"In past years much of the growth in PC games has been due to adoption of the platform in Asia," said Cole. "Now we are estimating a potential 86 million PC gamers outside Asia that we have targeted as market growth drivers. These are the consumers that are driving spending not just on software, but also on PC hardware, as they buy expensive equipment to play, view and record games."
"The recipe that keeps PC gaming on top is simple: the platform is accessible to all markets," said OGA board member and Research Subcommittee chair Matt Ployhar. "The hardware continues to evolve with gamers' lifestyles, offering more choice and freedom; and, due to the ubiquity of PCs globally, it's easier to share, communicate and be more sociable with friends and family."
The Future
Today's average gaming PCs are already considerably more powerful than the latest ‘next-generation' game consoles. Upcoming software developments like Microsoft's DirectX 12 and the open-source Vulkan will expand that gap still further. At its Build conference last week, Microsoft did a live demo of an upcoming Square Enix game. It showed a female character rendered near-photographically using around 63 million polygons, running on a DirectX 12 system loaded with 4 top-end Nvidia graphics cards.
This was a bleeding-edge example, to be sure. But it clearly showed that the PC is poised for another quantum leap in capability, that will propel not just gaming but many other types of applications to entirely new levels.