2007: A Year in Review

IGN is offering a large editorial looking back at the past year and its different trends. One that worries them is declining PC sales.

So with all these great games released on PC this year, the question is: what the hell happened to the gamers? What’s most troubling about the PC market is the sales numbers. The best selling game in North America, according to NPD numbers, was the World of Warcraft expansion pack Burning Crusade. That was the only game on the list that sold over a million PC copies this year and its base product World of Warcraft the only other game to pass a half-million sold. The next best seller, The Sims 2: Seasons, was down around 300k. And check this, of the 31 games that managed to sell over 100,000 copies this year, 21 of them were released in previous years and 11 of them were Sims products. Command & Conquer 3, Supreme Commander, Lord of the Rings Online, BioShock were the only games released this year to sell over 100k that weren’t Sims or World of Warcraft related according to NPD.

Now, while we’re saying that, we have to wonder how much of the sales decline from retail stores is due to people downloading the games online since NPD doesn’t track services like Steam and Valve won’t release sales numbers. What we’re talking about here could be much ado about nothing, but it’s concerning, not because we think the PC will die as a gaming platform, but because we may continue to see a decline in PC specific titles. Compared to console sales, these numbers are pretty sad and we have to wonder how much longer bigger companies are going to see the PC as a primary option for making money. I suppose as consoles get more powerful, it becomes a bit easier to make cross-platform titles, but as John Carmack said recently in an interview, the days of PC only titles could very well be winding down. It’s not happy news for us PC gamers.

While we don’t have any sorts of “facts” or “numbers” or “credible sources” to back up our wild claims at this point, we’re also wondering whether World of Warcraft is helping or hurting the PC gaming market. Yes, it’s attracting a lot of players that might not have purchased PC games before, but it’s also sucking them and the previous hardcore players in so intensely that they don’t want to play anything else. When people are actually letting their marriages be ruined by the need to play a game they’re definitely not running out to buy anything new.

Spotted on RPGWatch.