PC Gaming Trends

The social app gaming trend continues apace. The mobile app gaming trend continues too. 

Remember PC gaming?

Me too.

Steam, from Valve, is a major way that PC gamers buy and manage their games. They release statistics. And, Lauri has visualized some statistics and made them available through an interface called ‘SteamGraph‘.

It’s interesting to look at substitution among successive releases of games. A game in a series will be decaying in terms of active players over time. The next one in the series is released. You see a nice big spike in the new release, and then a slow, tell-tale decay. The previous games in the series resume their cold death, but at a slowing rate.

PC gaming substitution is complicated by the churn in the underlining hardware. It’s complicated by the PC Refresh Cycle. Different segments are on different cycles. Some hold onto their gaming systems for 36 months before extending their life by adding ram. Some only buy a new PC after 48 months.

The tool is well worth exploring.

The console, tablet, and Facebook haven’t killed PC gaming completely. It still exists. Even if it’s no longer really visible in the physical stores.

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I’m Christopher Berry.
Follow me @cjpberry
I blog at christopherberry.ca