A few years ago, before the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launched, there were a lot of doomsayers who predicted the death of consoles and there were one or two smug PC Master Race types who were enjoying the show. As we now know consoles are selling better than ever but a recent report shows that PC sales are being hit hard.
During Q4 2016 shipments of PCs dropped a massive 10.6% compared to the previous year, with only Apple showing a small improvement in overall sales.
A number of factors have been blamed, including falling commodity prices and fluctuating international currencies, but smartphones and tablets are surely the biggest reason for the slump. Day to day internetting – email, Facebook, online shopping – can all be done from a smartphone now, there really is no need for the traditional ‘Family PC’.
As you can see from the table above, the “Other” line – which will include the smaller companies who ship pro-gaming rigs – took the biggest hit, down a massive 21.9%.
However, looking at the bigger gaming picture things are a little more upbeat. Console sales are up, smartphones and tablets are everywhere and have great games on them, and PC games are still selling like proverbial hotcakes on Steam. Sony are dragging themselves out of financial difficulties, it’s been years since a major publisher closed shop, and we have the new Nintendo console allegedly out this year. For gamers, things have never been better.
Source: GIBiz
The Lone Steven
This is a rather interesting piece of news. I would disagree with mobiles being a cause of it. It is a factor but i think, it’s down to cash issues, a lot of good games coming out on the cheaper platforms. I think, it’s £500 at least, for a decent gaming PC for games like Fallout 4.
Will be interesting to see if shipments will pick up along with sales or if it is only related to Window PCs. I know Apple PCs are called macs but i’m sticking it to the man!
Starman
As I read this I thought that gaming rigs might have taken up some of the sales, but no, they’ve fallen even more! I wonder if a proportion of new ps4 owners (& even xboxone) are PC gaming converts? They now have the simplicity of consoles but with some limited pc-like functions too.
bunimomike
Agreed. Can’t help think the natural ebb & flow of the console generations have an influence over people who like to dive into multiple platforms. Let alone anyone who’s on the fence over which one to by and then might plump for a PS4 instead of a mid-level PC. Now is a great a time to dive into the newer consoles whereas, the first year of launch, not so much. Things like that must surely affect things.
leeroye
A lot of this decline in PC sales could also be down to large companies not needing to upgrade PC’s so often. I work in a College and we have moved form a 4 year cycle to replace PC’s to 7 year. This year to save money we upgraded about 350 6 year old dell PC’s with SSD drives and they are out performing the newer desktops we purchased 2 years ago. We plan on keeping them going for another 3 years at least.
I know of a number of other Educational establishments that have done the same thing due to all the heavy cuts in FE funding. PC hardware on the lower end of the market (basic desktops for word processing) have not seen massive leaps in performance like there was 10 – 15 years ago. There is just no need to upgrade these types of PC so often and i would imagine these are the types of PC that take up a large percent of the market share.
sirmlivesey
I wonder, do these figures include the likes of Chromebooks and Windows 10 Embedded laptops? I solely use a Chromebook know for PC related stuff with most of the heavy stuff I need to do handled by cloud computing.