Will the PC reclaim its crown as the ultimate gaming platform in 2011?

The PC always was the the best gaming platform, but 2011 is going to be a special year for the PC.

Recent History

In the last couple of years the general consensus has been that the gaming on the PC is dieing, in 2004 PricewaterhouseCooper’s Global E&M Outlook predicted that there would be a steady decline in the next four years for PC gaming.

PWC noted that while the PC market is still the leader in the online gaming market, the release of high-profile sequels like DOOM 3, Half-Life 2 and The Sims 2 in 2004 didn’t stop the market from dropping 12.3% from the year before.

The end result in 2009 is was gradual decrease to 40 million games sold and a drop of $170 million in sales ($930 million from $1.1 billion) from 2004.

And this report and reports like it fairly much shaped the general outlook on the PC gaming future, which is to say that it was dead or dieing, the consoles sales were going up but PC game sales were going down, this was the outlook and it was not good for the PC.

But there was a flaw in these projections, they totally failed to take into account the sales of direct downloads from sites such as Steam and direct2drive, and it also failed to consider the subscription MMO games like World of Warcraft and LotRO, which are exclusively PC.

Now there is no doubt that the PC gaming scene has been devastated with the high levels of piracy, and this has hurt the PC as a gaming platform, but with better deals from Steam and a more competitive environment emerging, its helping to mitigate the torrent hacker scene, in other words why bother to torrent a game and have to bother with cracks and re-patching when you can buy the game from steam for 9.99 or 19.99, and get full multiplayer support.

2011 destroying the myth that PC gaming is dead.

So why is 2011 special for PC gaming?, firstly the the myth that the PC does not sell is now exactly that a myth, its not true, check out the news from Steam, that they sold over a billion dollars of PC games in 2010, have  a look at the PC gaming top 10 sellers.

Steam’s top ten best-selling titles, by Estimated Gross Revenues in 2010:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision) – $98.2 Million USD
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision) – $39.4 Million USD
3. Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve) – $36.0 Million USD
4. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (Electronic Arts) – $25.4 Million USD
5. Sid Meier’s Civilization V (2K Games) – $21.9 Million USD
6. Portal (Valve) – $20.0 Million USD
7. Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda Softworks) – $17.0 Million USD
8. Metro 2033 (THQ) – $13.4 Million USD
9. Mafia II (2K Games) – $11.9 Million USD
10. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising (THQ) – $10.8 Million USD

PC gaming is entering into 2011 in a strong sales position.

Next, the PC has a very strong games lineup in 2011, with games like Crysis 2, Max Payne 3, Starwars the old republic, Diablo 3 (perhaps), Battlefield 3 (the PC is the lead platform), Hitman 5, Elder Scrolls V, yes many of these games will be also released on the XBox 360 and PS3, but they will look much much better on a PC than the consoles.

The PC always had better controls than the consoles, you cant beat the wsad keyboard / mouse combo for FPS gaming, and if you have played DCU online then you already know the console pad is no substitute for the PC when playing MMOs.

PCs are cheaper and powerful, the average decent Laptop now has the same or better gaming power as an XBox 360, and with the release of the new Nvidia GPU cards, the PC far exceeds the power of the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined, this is not surprising considering both consoles are 4 years old now.

So to summarize why 2011 is the year of PC gaming

• PC is now way more powerful than the consoles (not the case 4 years ago).
• PC has a great selection of games lined up for 2011, many are PC only
• PC games look much better than their console counterpart
• Better controls (PC always had this)
• PC now has the channels to market like Steam and direct2drive  which allow it to sell games, and avoid the pirates
• PC has hundreds of millions of units in the marketplace

 Founder of GamertechTV, and EIC, executive editor of GamertechTV Read more from this author

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