This week an article from the website ExtremeTech titled Five PC Gaming Myths written by one Jason Cross circulated around the net. Cross attempted to ‘expose’ common myths people hold about PC gaming. I, personally, was not aware that PC gaming had afforded itself any kind of mythic status: it’s not like people speak of PC gaming in excited tones, and the news passes from friend to incredulous friend. “Did you hear that PC gaming is really expensive?” is hardly on the same level of “Did you hear about the sniper who shot a guy with an ice bullet? There was no evidence!”

But whatever, I’m sure there are some people out there who have been misinformed about PC gaming. In the forever-raging console-versus-PC war that goes on both in print and on message boards everywhere, there’s bound to be a fair bit of bad info being spread around. And while writing five pages to ‘expose’ these supposed myths isn’t exactly what I would call admirable, it certainly got some attention, so I guess it was a worthwhile venture.

There is a problem with the article, however, and it’s a rather big one: almost everything Cross writes across his five pages of debunking is wrong. By working to expose myths about PC gaming, ExtremeTech has inadvertantly resulted in even more myths getting spread. It’s a bit like deciding you’re going to dress up and fight crime, but then accidentally beating up senior citizens and robbing a liquor store. Your intentions are good but, seriously, how’d you manage to screw up that badly?

Let’s start from the beginning.

The Myths

The article is rather annoyingly spread across five pages, so I’ll sum up the points Cross makes:

• Myth #1: PC Gaming is Expensive. Argument against: It is not really that expensive, considering you can also use your compute to do your taxes and whatever.
• Myth #2: PC Gaming comes with lots of patches and bugs. Argument against: So do some consoles game now!
• Myth #3: PC Games do not sell as well as console games. Argument against: PC Software Sales are almost as good as all console software sales if you divide the all-console number by nine.
• Myth #4: Online Gaming for the PC is a mess compared to Xbox Live. Argument against: But online gaming started on PCs!
• Myth #5: Copy protection on PC games is a major headache. Argument against Yes, it is a major headache but only sometimes.

Rather than take these point-by-point, I’m just going to focus on the one big one. Most of the others range between completely irrelevant (online gaming) or kind of so transparent that they almost argue against themselves (quibbling over the cost of a good gaming PC, while simultaneously ignoring long-term upgrade costs if you want to ‘keep up’). In any case, sales are my interest, and the only section of the article where the author actually uses hard numbers. So let’s take a look at that:

Sales tracking firm NPD said there were “over $970 million” in PC game sales, and $7.4 billion in total game sales. So, roughly a billion in sales for the PC, and $6.4 billion for consoles. Consoles are slaughtering PCs, right? Actually, it’s not that simple.

Cross is right. It’s nowhere near that simple. Using 2006 figures, console & handheld sales were 6.5 billion (off 1.7 billion for portables and 4.8 for consoles, figures here). PC software sales, on the other hand, were 970 million.

That 970 million figure is up slightly from 2005, where sales were 953 million. But it’s down significantly from 2004’s figure of 1.1 billion, which was down from 2003, 1.2 billion. Do you see the trend here? Look, I can even graph it:

PC Software has been in rather drastic decline since at least 2002. It’s leveled off a little bit, but only slightly. The ExtremeTech author’s suggestion that to be fair to PC gaming we have to “divvy up that $6.4 billion in console sales into its respective separate platforms” to get real perspective on where PC game sales sit is not only ridiculous because comparing a multifunction PC platform with a mostly-single-purpose game console is dubious, but also because it does nothing to help his argument. If you look at what actually drives PC game sales on a annual basis, it becomes immediately clear that this is not a particularly active or lucrative market, and looks almost nothing like the equivalent console chart.

Here’s the 2006 breakdown:

Notice anything weird about that chart? I’ll give you a hint. Five of the Top 10 are the same game. And going through NPD’s press release archives, you’ll see just how much The Sims drives PC game sales. 2005 is pretty well the same as 2006, with The Sims taking 4 of the top 10 spots. Go back and forth and you’ll find that 2002, one of the best years for PC game sales, was driven largely by sales of the original Sims.

And there’s nothing wrong with The Sims. They’re cute games, and I’m sure we all had a lot of fun playing it for two weeks way back in 1999 or something. But it’s a budget title, and I’m sure not one espoused by the people behind ExtremeTech. Its long-term success, coupled with the fact that only half the 2006 Top 10 for PCs is made up of titles that came out in 2006, is proof not of a viable marketplace for game software, but rather a very small, closed off market, that isn’t really interested in trying new things.

So for our our author to somehow look at similar sales charts and claim that “[y]ou could certainly characterize the PC as selling games at retail “just as well” as “the average console system” is absurd. Since the only titles really selling are extremely limited, and rarely the same titles gamers who read ExtremeTech would ever play.

The Point

I’ve got nothing against PC games. I do, however, believe that many of the supposed ‘myths’ our ExtremeTech author mean to debunk are patently true. PC gaming is more expensive compared to console games, especially if you want to keep with all the flashy titles. And games have a long history of needing patches and bugfixes, where it is only recently that some console games have started to feature similar fixes. And, as undesirable a move as that is for the console market, it’s still done on a much much smaller scale than it is on the PC side of things.

Is the PC a viable market for games? Sort of. I think most publishers have realized that the trick with PC gamers is to get them into paying a recurring fee for their games. The MMORPG market has been successful because, over time, the games can cost upwards of $1,000. Over time, however, you’ll likely to start to see more and more of these games move toward the console side of things. The mass market has been abandoning the desktop for a while now. People don’t want giant desk-hogging machines. They want slim and light laptops and handheld computers that they can carry with them.

With PC game sales recover? Sure. Especially when The Sims 3 comes out. It won’t, however, ever come close to touching the explosive console market. It will always remain, in the same kind of niche, hardware-pushing realm it does today, but it shortly hardly be thought of as something on par with the ‘other’ world of video games. There is, after all, a reason Microsoft got into console market.