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PC Games Sales - Has it really been that bad?Unless you've been living on Mars or you're not a PC gamer, you won't have escaped all the doom 'n' gloom that's been proclaimed about the sales of PC games. Various things have been blamed along the way: piracy, buggy releases, steep system requirements, cost of upgrading and so on. However, all of those factors have been prevalent for at least 3 or 4 years, so has it really been that bad recently? To see how things have been for the big publishers, we took the fiscal reports from Electronics Arts, Ubisoft and Activision - arguably the three biggest in PC game publishing. We picked their net revenue figures for publishing only, and where possible, examined the amount accrued by the following platforms:
It has to be said that this was a tedious task, not helped by the fact that publishers seem to change their reporting habits randomly, and in the case of one particular European company, change the reported figures too. Anyway, the following three graphs represent the revenue for all platforms for each financial quarter for EA & Ubisoft, and financial year for Activision (their quarterly reports were just too much to cope with, at this time of night...):
 Just ignore the PC results for the moment, and look at those console figures - especially the PlayStation 2, as it's the biggest earner for EA and Activision by a huge margin (more so for the latter). Activision have yet to release their Q3 results, hence why their chart's lines seem to dive right down. The PS2 was a big money maker for Ubisoft too, but it's clear that they dropped that particular console quite quickly and have concentrated on the "next gen" machine. For all three publishers, the Xbox 360 is very much their favourite cash-cow. But what about the PC? 2007 had some fantastic releases (as shown in our review of the year) but it was also notable for the amount of games that needed NASA-grade PCs to run them - so let's look at what the claimed revenues have been like:
 The key sections to look at are the Q3 results (sorry for not doing them for Activision but you try looking at their reports!), as fiscal years run from 1st April in one year to 31st March in the next, thus the quarters run as follows:
This means that Q3 = the big Christmas sales! Notice how Q3 2006 wasn't a great year for any of them, but that's because there was a bit of a dearth of decent PC games released around that time. EA have always had The Sims franchise to fall back on when it comes to PC games sales, but it didn't help them this time around. In fact, despite the glut of top releases in Q3 2007, PC revenues have been decidedly flat all round.... So if we return to the starting question - "Has it really been that bad?" - then the answer is a rather depressing yes. The real puzzle is just exactly why and what this bodes for 2008 and beyond. Aside from the issues raised above, there's a good chance that the relatively poor sales are down to the games themselves; look at what each publisher actually released on the PC during the latter part of 2007: Electronic ArtsActivision
Ubisoft...plus a few others. Not a bad list, but not a great one either. The only two outstanding games are Crysis and COD4, but we all know what kind of a PC the former needs. The others bring phrases such as "too short" or "too buggy" to mind, so hopefully 2007 has been a bit of glitch. Perhaps if publishers and developers take more time over their products, we'll see a better end to 2008. Eidos has already decided to do this, so let's see what happens with the others. Can PC gaming afford another year of weak sales?
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