If Phil Steinmeyer Says It

...then it must be true.

From his game business faq:  "Note that PC sales have been in a fast-fade from 1999 to 2004 (declined from $1.9 billion to $1.1 billion)."  (He's talking about PC game sales, btw, not sales of personal computers.)

Unless someone shows me more trustworthy data I'm going to believe him.

Don't get me wrong.  Piracy is only part of the damage.  Console war is a huge part, too.   And there are other factors.  But I'm going to keep right on believing that an increase in the ease of piracy (more bandwidth, BitTorrent servers, etc) is part of what's slamming the industry.

In other news, I'm jonesing for videogames something fierce.  Those other activities:  reading, writing, arithmetic...they aren't holding my interest.  Only been 3 weeks.  Feels like more.

Comments

[Soren Johnson]

I've seen those numbers before, and I'd love to know... do they include the monthly fees from MMORPGs? Because if they do, then wow, the PC market is really cratering even worse than I thought. If they don't, then that is a very misleading figure.

[Nathan McKenzie]

On the flip side, I wonder what kind of impact MMOs have on sales of other games generally - I know that most of the MMO players I know seem to buy and play far fewer games outside of their selected heroin. Same thing for very obsessive Counterstrike or Battlefield players... but that's not a very accurate sample set on my part.

[Jamie Fristrom]

I'm 99.9% sure they don't include subscription fees - it's a retail statistic. But I don't think it's a misleading figure unless you happen to be working on an MMO.

That is: nobody's saying that there's fewer PC game players out there. What we're saying is that they're buying fewer games at retail.

And maybe the MMO thing is yet another reason that sales of other PC games are dropping.

[Factory]

"Don't get me wrong. Piracy is only part of the damage. Console war is a huge part, too. And there are other factors. But I'm going to keep right on believing that an increase in the ease of piracy (more bandwidth, BitTorrent servers, etc) is part of what's slamming the industry."

I doubt P2P piracy is the major cause, as the history goes (http://philsteinmeyer.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8) The PC industry basically stalled in 1996 then started falling in 2000. The playstation was released in the US in September of 1995, and the PS2 in late 2000.
Also one should remember that lack of investment is prolly another major part of the fall, when the industry saw that the PC market was essentially flat for 4 years, it almost certainly would have cut investment, which would of course lead to lower sales.
A good way how to measure if the market is really dieing or it just has more piracy would be to see if the fall in sales is also affecting gaming oriented PC hardware. Buggered if I know where to find stats on that though.

[Soren Johnson]

yep, the MMO thing may be a red herring although it makes one wonder if companies like Blizzard will jump off the retail wagon altogether, recognizing that the only way they can get out of piracy is via MMOs. hmmm... I wonder if StarCraft2 could exist with a MMO business plan if Battle.Net got a SIGNIFICANT upgrade.

so, if you are making a PC game where all of the sales are supposed to come at retail, then you should expect about half the sales that you would have gotten 5 years ago... IF there are as many good PC-specific games (shooters, strategy, casual, etc.) being released right now as there were in 2000. The real question might be, are the top 10 PC games selling less now than they did five years ago?

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

Based on my own experiences and the people I talk to, PC gaming is cratering for one reason - the experience is CRAP.

If I want to play a game, I don't want to reinstall my sound driver. I don't want to find out that my wireless card doesn't work with my video card unless they occupy a specific PCI slot. I want to plop the game in and play.

That nonsense was sort of acceptable in the DOS days. It got tedious around Windows 98. By now, it's plain unacceptable.

Consoles are appliances, PCs are not. As games are moving mainstream, people *expect* appliance-like behavior.

[Sean]

But I don't think it's a misleading figure unless you happen to be working on an MMO.

That's a response that entirely has nothing to do with the subject at hand: the claim that piracy has a significant negative effect on the industry, justified by the circumstantial evidence of a drop in retail sales. If that drop due to MMO and electronic sales, then you have an entirely specious argument. (I realize the latter is a drop in the bucket right now, but technically MMO sales are electronic sales so I should really only list the latter.)

If (and I have no idea of the truth) the total money being spent by PC gamers has not in fact cratered, you don't have circumstantial evidence of piracy being a big issue. This is not to say that I'm certain piracy is not a big issue; just that your response on the MMO front is entirely misleading.

[Sean]

Oops, the first sentence of the above is a quote.

[Patrick]

Here, here Groby. I want the total amount of time from when I open a game to when I'm playing it to be less than 10 minutes. PC gaming just can't deliver that anymore.

[Nathan McKenzie]

Could PC games ever deliver the "play within ten minutes" promise? I really don't feel like they're worse now than they've ever been. At least I'm not trying to go from 590k to 610k of conventional memory anymore.

Here's an alternate theory, which I am largely making up. Once upon a time, PC gaming had enough titles that were original, interesting, and unique, particularly in relation to consoles, that putting up with the hassle of making the damn things work at all was okay, because the excitement of trying something really new and interesting was worth it. Now, PC games are for the most part just as intensely genre-fied, publisher-dictated, and predictable, by and large, as console games mostly are, and so putting up with bad installs just feels completely intolerable.

Maybe that's not true, but it's kind of how I'm feeling right now.

[Jamie Fristrom]

Sean, I don't get your point. If MMO sales are kicking ass and retail sales are cratering, doesn't that support the argument that piracy might be partly to blame? Because you can't pirate an MMO but you can pirate retail games?

[ac]

I guess PC sales includes laptops? Are laptop sales also on decline? Afaik they are selling better than DS or PSP for and come with much better iron for games than those two.

[Despayre]

I cant believe nobody has mentioned this...

Shelf space

Walk into a EB or Gamestop...how many PC games do you see for sale? 1 small freestanding rack maybe, and then they also cram the strategy guides and other assorted crap onto that rack as well.

How many console games do they have??

I remember walking into Babbages about 10 years ago (when PC gaming was 'dying' according to popular wisdom) and the PC section was about 25 to 50 percent of the shelf space.

How can we possibly expect PC sales to do anything BUT decline in that environment? Even big box retailers have fallen into the shrinking shelf space problem. Best Buy doesnt seem to stock anything that wasnt released by a major publisher in the last 2 months anymore.

One question, do Phil's stats count online sales or only brick and mortar?

I'd be willing to bet that Steam and other direct purchase outlets have picked up the slack from the traditional outlets.

[Anne]

Retail outlets allocate shelf space based on revenue generated. The reduction in PC game shelf space does create a catch-22 (low sales=less display space=lower sales), but sales had to be down initially for the change to occur.

Take a look at the Dell, Gateway and Hewlette Compaq machines that run around $500 -- that's what the mainstream population is buying. Average memory is usually 128-256kb, on-board video card, etc. To run the cool PC games, these people have to spend another $200-500, and most of them are not going to bother when the consoles are $100-150 and have ports available for many of the same games.

[vince]

Here's another possible factor to throw into the mix: online capability in consoles. In 1999, your only choice for online multiplayer was on the PC, now just about every platform has an online option.

[Despayre]

If you think about it, it is entirely possible that that the downturn in PC game retail sales was also intially started or accelerated by the "Hey, we need to have a really obnoxious, oversize, strangely shaped box!" craze of the early to mid 90's.

Retailers complained (rightfully so) that they took up too much shelf space or in some cases, didnt even FIT on their shelves. Consoles never had this problem as all the packaging was nice and uniform. True you'd have an occasional special release that needed a special space, but those usually could go right on an endcap where they could sell more of them anyway.

When retailers stopped stocking the bizarro-world boxes, they started granting more shelf space to consoles since they always knew what kind of box they would get and could drop it in their existing layout without any alterations.

It's fairly simple as far as the retailers are concerned, they dont know (or care) if a game is good, they want to maximize the total profit out of any given space in their store. If they can put 10 console game boxes in the space 2 PC games take, it's just smarter to stock consoles over PC.

At least now I can usually buy direct and put more money into the developers pockets and take it from the publishers and retailers, so in that case I'm extremely happy with the state of PC gaming. Online distribution can truly help PC game developers if we can utilize it effectively..as a group, we've never been that bright when it comes to business matters, but with Steam as well as smaller niche games being delivered this way, I do retain hope.

If nothing else, hopefully we'll start seeing a lot more of the classic smaller, garage style teams forming and being able to live off of an online-only distribution model. If I only had some seed money or won the lottery...

*steps off soapbox*

[Walter]

Origin died. PC gaming hasn't been the same since.

[Rafael]

Is PC-game piracy really more prevalent now than it used to be? In the 80s, most gamers I knew had hundreds of games -- all pirated. Now, they seem to have fewer games in total, but about half are actually paid for. This is just an anecdote, of course, but I haven't seen any solid statistics for the "increasing piracy" claim either.

[Rob Drimmie]

Have you seen numbers of piracy for Playstation, and are they comparable to numbers of PC piracy?

This is a genuine question; I haven't seen anything accurate though I've heard numbers that suggest a large percent of PS2s are modded. I'm just curious how they compare.

As an anecdotal counterpoint to blaming piracy: My PC game purchases have gone down dramatically since I started playing MMOGs. I've moved from a game every month or so for myself and my wife (so, two games per month), to a City of Heroes subscription, and just recently a WoW subscription. $30/month (technically less since we buy subscriptions in 6-month batches) for both of us, compared to $100 per month AND we get to play the games together, and occasionally with friends who also play these games.

We're currently deciding whether or not to maintain both subscriptions, but even if we do we're still ahead in monthly game expenses by about $40, and have been since November or so.

Additionally, my rate of piracy has reduced because of my MMOG subscriptions. I don't need to cast about for games worth my money, I'm content with what I've got and know that it's going to occupy my entertainment time for at least another year.

So yeah, piracy may contribute a bit, I don't know, but I think attributing the blame primarily to piracy is innacurate.

[GBGames]

First, I'll say that I didn't know that PC game sales were declining, as I was imagining it expanding along with the rest of the game industry. Of course, the stat provided didn't say why it was declining. There are some theories, of course, and piracy is one of them.

I just can't take it seriously when any industry blames piracy for a declining market share. The RIAA is claiming this same thing, ignoring the fact that the economy itself was in a decline, that CDs cost the same as they did when they were first introduced, and new music is just copying old music. People like retro, but there is only so much they can take before old-is-new stops working.

Witness the PSP. The Nintendo DS got some horrible reviews because they release games like Super Mario 64 DS and act like they are new, whereas the PSP has actual new games at launch. The Nintendo DS might hold, but Nintendo will likely lose its handheld market dominance to Sony.

Now look at the PC games. Doom 3. Half-life 2. The Sims 2. These were the big games. All sequels. All got their share of reviews that said, "It's nice, but not nearly as revolutionary as we would have liked."

Also, the RIAA tends to report as if it IS the recording industry. These days, self-publishing is so much easier and less expensive. The RIAA doesn't have figures on sales made by those outside of its membership. So "piracy" may actually mean that they've lost market share and aren't willing to say so.

Similarly with PC games. There are more indie game developers now than ever before. Does the ESA (the source of Phil's stats) include their sales figures? Probably not. Sure, it may still be the case that PC game sales are lower, but it could possibly be not as bad as indicated by the ESA. And I highly doubt that mass piracy is as bad as they would like you to believe. The ESA is made up of the same people who will charge you extra to make up for the those who didn't buy the game.

Also, people are probably more likely to play games on consoles. You don't need a computer with all of the installation and configuration issues to play games like Gran Turismo, Grand Theft Auto, or even Snood. They "just work" on a console. People probably got used to the idea that they use their computer for work and will play games on a system meant for games.

[Loredena]

/quote
Sean, I don't get your point. If MMO sales are kicking ass and retail sales are cratering, doesn't that support the argument that piracy might be partly to blame? Because you can't pirate an MMO but you can pirate retail games?
/endquote

No, you missed his point. I'm a PC Gamer. I don't play console games, I don't like the interface. I don't pirate games either, and it's not unheard of for my husband and I to buy two copies of a game if we both want to play it. However. I've been an avid MMO player for the past 6 years now, and the number of retail boxed games I've purchased has plummeted as a direct result. I took a 9 month break from MMOs, and bought more boxed games in that 9 month period then I had bought in the previous 3 years combined. Why? When an active MMO player, both one's gameplaying time AND dollars are taken by the MMO(s) of choice, there is no time or money left over for other retail games.