When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
It’s never been easier to recommend PC gaming, so it sucks that it’s rarely been harder to build a gaming PC. With consoles struggling and their market long since mature, PC gaming is responsible for a lot of the annual growth in the industry. It regularly surfaces a much more diverse lineup of top games, and more developers (especially in Asia) are investing more in the platform. But what gives PC gaming an edge?
I spoke to Emmanuel Rosier, Newzoo’s director of market intelligence, about the growth of PC gaming. Some of the benefits are obvious. For example, PC gamers have Steam, a central storefront with strong features, they have more input options between M&K and controller support, there’s better mod support, graphics have a higher ceiling, and a PC is useful for more than games and streaming. But there are a lot of other contributing factors.
“I had a look at that, because it’s quite interesting when you look at the business models,” Rosier says of PC and console differences. “When you look at the business model on PC, half of the revenue is coming from microtransactions because a lot of PC games are free-to-play. A lot of PC games are everlasting live services, and on console premium is still the biggest share, the biggest business model.”
Even on console, however, the biggest premium games are iterative sports franchises or similar behemoths like Call of Duty, so they’re still comparable to live services as “more of a continuation” of an experience. “You can consider it recurring revenue coming from within the same franchise,” Rosier says.
This is less pronounced on PC. Sports games are much smaller on PC, for one, but it also “probably has to do with the audience somehow,” Rosier adds. When you look at reports like Newzoo’s and examine the most profitable or most played games each month, PC consistently surfaces more newcomers and indies, even if the top 10 are still stuffed with heavyweights like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox.
Big Walk is a useful example: it got more user traction on PS5 because it was included in PlayStation Plus, but that meant it made way more money on PC. (It skipped Xbox over the BDS boycott, just as indie darling Celeste has now done.)
“PC players have more choice in general,” Rosier says. “For a lot of indie publishers, it’s easier to first release your game on Steam, on PC, and then if it works expand to console. PC players have a bit more choice, which means there is a bit less concentration of the bigger title, just because there is so much more choice around it.”
