NVIDIA's Roy Taylor: PC gaming is not dying

YG_Bot · 02-28-2008, 10:10 AM

Remember the recent story about the lackluster revenue generated by PC games? NVIDIA's Roy Taylor pitched in back then, pointing out that piracy was/is a major factor dragging down PC revenues. Others... they were not so sure, as can be seen in the related forum thread.

Roy Taylor dropped by at YouGamers, continuing the discussion of this subject by posting a new blog entry.

Read entire article: http://www.yougamers.com/news/17877_...g_is_not_dying

zed1138 · 02-28-2008, 10:11 AM

I can't possibly imagine him publicly stating anything else.

Jarnis · 02-28-2008, 10:27 AM

Well, earlier he did comment that Piracy was the major culprit for apparent PC gaming woes. It seems that his new blog blames inaccurate statistics instead of piracy, and includes some evidence to back that claim.

Neeyik · 02-28-2008, 11:20 AM

Roy's comments are very good but they don't really explain why the main PC game publishers have all suffered a drop in PC games revenue in this fiscal year (and their figures will, of course, include online sales) (and in a few cases, a sustained drop over several years). What we really need to see our the revenue figures for titles purchased exclusively through digital distribution compared to the total revenue for any one publisher: it will at least show whether that particular companies fortunes have successfully shifted away from retail stores, at the least.

Roy_Taylor · 02-28-2008, 09:31 PM

hi Neeyik, thanks for the comment. I wondered if someone would point to that. I read that with interest too but as Nick wrote, the data was somewhat hard to get at inside of the reports he looked into. For example subscription revenues dont show as PC game sales. The difficulty right now is that 98% of the data needed is unavailable. For example Valve is private and doesnt publish actual numbers and nor can you get the revenues for Direct3Drive.

I am heading a sub-committe for the PCGA to look into this issue and together with representatives from the other members we are going to try and solve it. Please do keep the comments coming.

zed1138, you are quite right I DO have a vested interest in PC gaming but that doesnt mean that anything isnt true, does it? ;-)

Jarnis, piracy IS also a major problem as well. When you add poor reporting and piracy together it helps explain why PC gaming hardware sales (gaming PC, notebooks, components) are in great shape (SLI club membership keeps growing every month).

I believe the industry and users need to get behind making piracy socially unacceptable the same way that drink-driving did. But I'll save that for another post.

02-28-2008, 10:01 PM

I've always been a PC gamer; I once had 30 PC games and no personal computer of my own. First few games that peeked my interest was Diablo (1) and Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall. I presently own over 100+ titles; feel free to browse most of them at www.larrytolman.com (under Computer Games). There was another thread somewhere about the state of PC Gaming too. I pointed out that for the year 2007 I bought at least 20 titles and spent over 500 dollars. I really dont know how people do it but apparently they do; getting full games without the need of a CD Key or rather they even have a program that auto generates a CD Key, how this is done is beyond me. My friend recently got Crysis; hacked however for some odd reason he ended up having to get a real copy. I heard that Crysis sales were low, which was surprising to me but who knows if people spent that much money on public relations. I know one game that got a lot of fame and this is probably due to having major commericials and such everywhere was "Assassins Creed"; plus people said it helped to have a HOT female publisher ROFL; however that wasnt what made me want this game. Ever play Thief: The Dark Project, I always wanted to scale walls in that game and guess what; I got my chance with Assassins Creed, I bought it for PS3 and I cant wait til it comes out for PC so I can see the graphical difference.

Anyways whats also suprising is that since Windows Vista got released and even a few months after; everyone talks about how the PC gaming world is dying. What i dont understand is that I thought Microsoft had one good intention; Vista=Keep PC Gaming Alive. They have that slogan 'Games for Windows" they have a lot of built in features for those into PC Gaming they said retailers would have a section dedicated to "Games for Windows" and while it worked like the first 2 months after Vista was released I have not seen much anymore.

But yeah as you or someone else pointed out; theres a lot of MMORPGs today; stuff from Lord of the Rings Online to EverQuest to World of Warcraft even to EVE and theres a still a decent number coming. That there is a decent way to show how PC sales are going down simply because you take the game price of 49.99 and with online games they hardly release expansions (take for instance World of Warcraft); all they get is the monthly income people put into the game; and we all know that the monthly cost is to keep the servers happy lol

Anyways I once read an article saying that MMMORPGs were taking over the world (sort of speak) and in a sense thats what it seems; as the article points out theres over 10million subscribers to WoW; thats 10million x 15.00

(sorry for my rambling)

NukemNazi · 02-28-2008, 10:16 PM

Wow, thanks for the post Roy.

Didn't NPD just recently acknowledge on the record that they didn't track digital distributions? It was already a well know theory/fact anyway, but I found it interesting that they did infact admit it.

Is Steamworks going to possibly help alleviate this problem some?

When Activision/Blizzard was recently from some of their numbers were released. If I recall correctly wasn't like 1.29 billion or something in revenues and over a 1/2 billion in profit? That alone is a ridiclous amount for one company.

Neeyik that post you made recently though, the downard decline seemed to concide with the quality of games a publisher released for the PC market. Actvision's, for example, quality releases for the PC steadily went down and so did their sales, did it not?

I think the biggest thing right now is Microsoft's own success into the console market has crubbed their own enthusiam into actually worrying about the PC market so much. Developers can potiental make more money on the console market, so people are just excusing theirself from the PC development. Even though they can still make a profit on the PC market; its just possibly less of a profit. I mean look out how many developer's over just the past few years have changed their tune: Peter Molyneux/Loinhead, Mark Rein's out spoken comments as well/Epic, etc.

Priacy is effecting all software not just PC games and any of us that do care won't do it and won't promote it. I am willing to bet though, as most of us probably are, the tracking and analyzing on just how much priacy is happening is being fudged. This is stating the obvious, but its still worth stating.

BTW: Blizzard's profits are not 10 million x $15.00 a pop. In China for example the price of monthly subscriptions may only be more like $2.00 a month. Most of the subscription fees of MMOs are subject to the scales of encomy of the country they are charging prices for.

mondena · 02-28-2008, 11:52 PM

i'm not sure why soo many people don't think piracy is that big of a problem.

i have been to lots of different LANs in my life, most of them smaller scale (less then 20 people), and i would estimate that the people that i have met, and the games of theirs that i have seen that at least 60% of the games are pirated. while i would certainly never say that i think all of those represent lost sales, in fact i would think only a small amount of them are lost sales, they are still in fact lost sales. for every one guy i know that owns 50+ PC games, i know 5-10 others who have that many burned. Now most people seem to have some retail and some pirated, and i would also say that most of the people with pirated copies do not play online games much. as well i have sold computers for years as a hobby, and there are lots of PC gamers out there who have never been on forums like this, and don't have involvement with the online community nor did they directly download a game. so to keep track of the numbers from people like this would be nearly impossible since they don't directly download, and they don't play online or interact with only PC gaming forums.

i have been PC gaming for about 15 years now, and over 10 years ago when i was in high school i would guess half my games were pirated as well. and only at about the age of 18-20 did i mature enough to say, even if i'm not going to be punished i'm not going to steal, and i'm going to support those that make the games i enjoy. since then i have only bought games and it doesn't take too many years to have a good collection of games. however i still work with high school students, and at least here, i would say that the majority of high school PC gamers play with pirated games, and i would estimate that only half of my peers over the last 15 years have also started buying their games.

so i think piracy is a huge issue, because i see it in the PC gamers around me. and i have met quite a few different crowds of PC gamers and these numbers seem fairly common in my experience. obviously not ever pirated copy is a sale, but there is a lot less motivation for people to buy any games if they can get them for "free"

NukemNazi · 02-29-2008, 12:41 AM

Your probably right, speaking of the above post, it just may be that bad. In my case though, I go to a more prestigious university for basically game design more or less, just to keep it simple. The few that do come through the door doing anykind of piracy are heavily pressured into understanding the paradox of exactly what they are doing.

Why in the world would someone work hard enough to make it to a master's level of education, graduate school, wanting to make games and pirate other peoples' games? I guess you see the contridiction in that, so the environment I am in; it just doesn't happen near as often as your environment.

Now, I personally frown upon it towards anybody I meet. Maybe some people don't like that pushy attitude, but people wouldn't like random people stealing money out of their check. Especially if its random people they could do nothing about.

I wish more people could see it that way and probably would if they could see the incredible amount of work that goes into game development.

Lith1um · 02-29-2008, 12:42 AM

I don't condone or participate in piracy, never have and never will. But myself, I find the gaming industry hypocritical. When their income levels drop they suddenly develop great concern for the industry.

But for the last 10 years, I haven't seen them take one friggin' move towards shutting down any of the sites that sell the hax that ruin the online gaming experience of so many players. CoD4 is one recent game that comes to mind. Every idiot can find hacks with a simple google search, where are the gaming industry lawyers?