It’s like comparing car (PC) vs bicycle (Steam Deck) vs train locomotive (Xbox/PS).
Car can get you almost anywhere in the world, bycicle mostly in the same city, but you can go hard and get into another country. And train locomotive? From point A to B. That’s it.
Ya but that situation doesn’t really fit into this comparison of another issue very well. The closest thing I could think of would be comparing it to, say, oil companies doing something like that to give one of the others summer kind of disadvantage
The point is that differences between PC and Console are exclusively artificially built on the console side. A mere Raspberry PI 5 can fit in the PC sphere (minus hardware modularity as GPU (…even if eGPU…)) in every aspect: anything USB, including printing or complicated CAD hardware are fully compliant with Linux.
The hardware in the console are even X86 (PS4 can run Linux with some tweaks)… but you can’t run a working browser on the PS5: this limitation is artificially built by Sony because otherwise you could play free web videogames. There’s nothing technical in these limitations, the console are just PC hardware capped to the platformed holder (Sony or Microsoft), and the difference is just made by axed functionality and billions spent in advertising propaganda.
as @Spuddlesv2 noted, this is about the market in terms of money made in the US and specifically in the sphere of gaming; not the single units delivered.
Still, we can extend skepticism on this data considering that most of the money is, probably, made in microtransactions: all consoles driven by their own monopolistic entity (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) are in disadvantaged because they demands cuts while on PC, as Epic Store with Fortnite and Steam with CS:GO, those who publish on PC are free to take the 100% of their cuts without have to split with the platform holder (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo). The appeal for GaaS, unfortunately, is vastly huge on both Mobile and PC (as open platforms) than consoles (which are closed).
Right. Just saying that when the size of the PC industry is so much bigger, is it any surprise whatsoever that PC gaming also dominates? I would have expected no other result.
It’s not surprising at all but that’s not why. More people use laptops or office PCs for daily driving and work. Those are not going to work for a ton of games like a console will.
Don’t lose sight of what games in the world are actually the most popular. It’s not high-end stuff. It’s Candy Crush and shit.
You’re right, those games are popular and very profitable and you don’t need a PC to play them. You’re just going to play them on mobile. You know what you’re not going to play on mobile? PC games.
Headline is a smidge misleading. “PC gaming has a larger revenue than console gaming in the US” is more accurate. It’s certainly not true in other parts of the world.
Gaming cafes equipped with gaming PCs is a pretty big market in China. Even if they can’t afford to own one personally, lots of Chinese people game on PC.