Market analyst firm Jon Peddie Research (JPR) has revealed that the PC gaming hardware market is now worth over $21.5bn (£12.6bn). This figure represents a sum which is over twice that of the console gaming market, according to MCV.
Contrary to the declining overall demand for PC hardware, where casual users are migrating to mobile devices, the research report points out that gaming specific hardware is set to continue to grow significantly over the next three years as PC gamers are now investing more in high end machines and components.
"We continue to see a shift in casual console customers moving to mobile," said Ted Pollak, JPR Senior Analyst. "While this is also occurring in the lower-end PC gaming world, more money is being directed to mid- and high-range builds and upgrades by gamers."
Pollak went on to state that PC gamers are not interested in "pure content consumption platforms," i.e. gaming consoles, and committed PC gamers are willing to pay thousands for "the ability to play games at very high settings" whilst being able to do other desktop tasks such as content creation and video editing "with maximum horsepower at their disposal in a desktop ergonomic environment."
Consoles trounced
JPR has also predicted that the current PC gaming hardware market is set to rise to a total value of $23.2bn (£13.6bn) by 2017, and the market will be kept alive by the continual improvements in the performance of gaming PC systems.
"Nvidia, Intel and AMD have enthusiast CPU and GPUs that are so powerful that, when combined with SSDs and fast memory, they absolutely trounce the computing power and gaming capabilities of the newest console generation," Jon Peddie, president of JPR explained.
Expanding the hardware capabilities of gaming PCs will be the main drive for people to invest. Users are starting to look for the best possible gaming experiences with the likes of 2K and 4K content in mind. Such high resolutions and quality settings would simply not be achievable with the current 'next gen' console offerings.
