PC gaming, hardware to grow and grow

GRAPHICS HARDWARE makers and high-end enthusiast companies alike are sure to be salivating over a new research paper put out by DFC Intelligence. In it, the group says that far from being cannibalised by console sales, the PC game market will be up to $13 billion a year by 2012.

That's a fair chunk up from $4.5b illion last year, and includes the "ecosystem" of PC software and online, including the subscription fees for games like World of Warcraft.

In fact, a quick bit of calculation by the INQ suggests something interesting. WoW has around eighht million subscribers at the last count, each of whom pays around $10 a month in their local currency for access. That makes the turnover of WoW alone worth around $960 million a year, or just under one quarter of the entire PC games industry. Is one quarter of our industry really WoW?

Here's the good news for Nvidia, Intel, et al - a growing PC games market means more people buying high-end gamer rigs with expensive, high-margin components, no doubt. However, if most of them are playing WoW, which requires barely a last-gen Pentium and a GeForce FX, they won't be making too much money. µ