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Gaming hardware market worth $67 billion in 2014, PCs dominate

by Mark Tyson on 6 March 2015, 11:09

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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According to new data presented by Jon Peddie Research during GDC this week, the global gaming hardware market reached $67 billion in 2014, reports Games Industry. PC gaming hardware sales made up the largest slice of the games hardware industry revenue pie.

The data breakdown claims to show that PCs accounted for 33 per cent of the market, followed by smartphones with 23 per cent, consoles and handhelds accounted for 16 per cent, and tablets came in at 11 per cent. Combined with recent data provided by the Open Gaming Alliance (OGA) which indicates the global gaming software was worth $26 billion in 2014, results in a total gaming market nearing $100 billion, with JPR expecting "robust growth" throughout the years ahead.

Looking at individual market segments, JPR is seeing big upside for Android in the gaming hardware market. The Android games console sector will represent a "paradigm shift" for the market, thinks the research firm, due to the possible leveraging of the billion Android device users. That should be good news to the likes of Nvidia which recently announced the SHIELD Android TV console. A significant rise in dedicated portable Android gaming devices is also projected by JPR, as it anticipates the sector will grow from $33 million in 2014 to around $75 million in 2018, far outpacing traditional handheld consoles.

Even though JPR states that the traditional gaming handhelds market has "taken a big beating in the last three or four years," it is still worth around $2 billion and grew two per cent.

Researchers at JPR dismissed the idea that smartphones will somehow catch or pass consoles in terms of raw graphics and processing power, adding that the idea that phones offer "console quality" graphics tends to refer to older console generations. "There is no such thing as catching up. Moore's law serves all platforms," the firm asserted.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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One thing that never seems to get explained with ‘reports’ like this, is how exactly is PC gaming hardware defined? It's not like you have special gaming versions of CPUs, so how is it possible beyond guessing to know what is actually being used for a gaming system? And beyond that, how much is used as multi-purpose hardware, further skewing the pure ‘gaming’ value of it?

For instance, say someone just buys a PC/laptop. Is that defined as ‘gaming hardware’? Because it's perfectly capable of playing games. Or does that person have to launch Minesweeper for their £250 CPU to count as ‘gaming hardware’? At one end of the spectrum you could count all general purpose computing hardware as capable of playing games and hence ‘gaming hardware’, but looking at it another way, you could only count systems which have actually played games requiring more dedicated hardware (i.e. something we'd probably consider a ‘gaming PC’) via online platforms like Steam/Origin/etc, which is still terribly unreliable.

The whole comparison seems quite nebulous and meaningless TBH.

To me it just sounds a bit like comparing what sort of vehicle people prefer to race, but comparing F1 cars to production car sales and concluding production cars are the more popular racing platform.

Edit: And the smartphone/tablet part speaks volumes TBH. If you add them up (since they're mostly compatible) you get 34% so you could say mobile platforms ‘dominate’. Does someone playing Angry Birds once make it count as this ambiguous gaming platform?
I don't “trust” these predictions. Not long ago PC gaming and PC in general was doomed, the obituary was written….. And now look at where PC hardware is, even without software to push it forward a lot.
I remember a statistical comparison that was done a year ago and to compare how the pc gaming market was growing in comparison to other devices was to look at games sold for devices. It wasn't particularly fair however because a tablet can't buy and play crysis etc.
Surely we should start a public health campaign :)

Seriously, nice numbers, it's nice to watch something like this grow that way
Gabe Newell was like Jesus at the end of a dark tunnel. He said to me “put down the xbox, and slowly step into the PC gaming light.”