http://www.pcgamer.com/pc-gaming-market-worth-36-billion-in-2016/
"Once again, free-to-play leads the way." and "while the free-to-play and esports markets are expected to see continued healthy growth over the next three years, the "premium" PC games market is predicted to decline", where the facebook and f2p games lead the revenue numbers, AAA games decline.
Since you're on that article, I'll quote another line from it.
"Premium game revenues on the PC hit $5.4 billion for the year, not too far off of the $6.6 billion earned across consoles. Overwatch led the way, earning $586 million, followed by CS:GO, Guild Wars 2, Minecraft, and Fallout 4. But the real money remains with free-to-play games: League of Legends once again tops that chart at $1.7 billion, followed by Dungeon Fighter Challenge, Crossfire, World of Tanks, and Dota 2, which brought in a relatively paltry $260 million. "
Two consoles (X1 + PS4) are required to top the sales revenue on PREMIUM games of the PC alone. How does that correlate with your Steam Survey now?
Could it be possible that the Steam Survey is really not worth anything when drawing conclusions on PC gaming? Could it??? Is it possible that the majority of ESPECIALLY triple A games are actually played outside of Steam, because people don't fancy stacking up two layers of DRM like Uplay / Origin + Steam? Boy... I don't know.
You really gotta let go of the tunnel vision buddy.
There is more though. The article also shines light on the relation between sales revenue and *actually played games*. Check this out:
"League of Legends once again tops that chart at $1.7 billion, followed by Dungeon Fighter Challenge, Crossfire, World of Tanks, and Dota 2, which brought in a relatively paltry $260 million. "
The top title of Steam Survey charts is only a sliver of the total revenue of F2P. Conclusion: there is no correlation between revenue and playtime.
Now for another source, to completely throw you off guard.
http://jonpeddie.com/publications/pc_gaming_hardware_market_report
Check that pie.
I'll leave you with one final thing to consider:
- the profit margin on PC gaming is lower than it is for the same game on a console
- consoles are a closely guarded ecosystem where ONE company has a 100% stake in its success, while every console game publisher is effectively also a stakeholder.
The reality is that good press on the success of consoles and the decline of PC gaming, is beneficial to the console ecosystems, while there is no single company behind PC gaming 'wagging the dog' in the media. This matters, as we've seen countless times in the past that news and media are far from neutral. Even game publishers would prefer you play their crappy triple A junk on a crappy console rather than they would have you play it on PC. It helps their profit margin and they won't have to worry as much about keysellers or piracy. Hell, they don't even have to consider DRM because Sony or MS builds the firmware.
On top of that, optimization for PC costs money too, but it simply still is a target audience they CANNOT ignore. Economy forces them to keep porting to PC, and they will only do this because the
PC revenue is too important to lose. Based on last year, it represents more than 40% of the total revenue made on ANY multiplatform game. Another important question: why do you think the absolute AND relative number of console exclusives is so low compared to previous console generations? Yeah. That's right
![Smile :) :)](https://tpucdn.com/forums/data/assets/smilies/smile-v1.gif)