author: Bart Swiatek
Analysts: 20 million PC Users Will Switch to Consoles Before 2020
Jon Peddie Research analysts argue that by 2022, up to 20 million PC gamers may choose to abandon their platform in favor of a console or a streaming service.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- According to Jon Peddie Research analysts, the number of PC players is expected to decrease by 20 million by 2022;
- According to experts, some PC users will choose consoles and streaming services;
- The exchange will be most tempting for the owners of relatively cheap hardware configurations.
Analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research is convinced that by 2022, 20 million PC gamers will have decided to switch to consoles. Such a decision would be made primarily by the owners of relatively cheap PCs, which the company defines as "sets costing less than a thousand dollars". However, consoles can also be an attractive alternative for players with more powerful hardware - all thanks to the increasing computing power and the growing number of good exclusive games.
“The PC market continues to decline because the innovation that took place in the past providing speed ups and clever new things has all but stopped, plus the product introduction times are stretching out to four years," argues Jon Peddie.
The analyst adds that the graphics card market is still doing well. In his opinion, however, there are reasons to suspect that there will be a turn towards playing on TVs.
"This is not a panic situation and the GPU market still generates incredible volume. However, there are forces at work that we predict will drive some of this business toward TV displays and associated gaming services,” the analyst says.
Ted Pollak from Jon Peddie Research also points to streaming - in his opinion, services such as Google Stadia can also distract players from PCs.
"Gaming services used with TV displays, whether local or cloud-based, will absorb PC defectors and likely flourish with new entrants. In the next five years, we will see potential customers with access to TV gaming swell by hundreds of millions,” the analyst notes.
Everyone who has been following our industry for a long time is aware that the mythical "PC collapse" is predicted by experts once in a few years, on average. There are quite a lot of games sold on PC at the moment - according to Newzoo data, they are responsible for about 25% of the market (for comparison, consoles account for 28%). There is no indication that the situation will change drastically in the near future. It is also worth noting that according to the information collected by the Statista , there are currently over 1.26 billion PC players in the world - from this perspective, 20 million is not a very large number (only 2% of the total). What is more, the number of people playing on PCs is expected to increase even further - experts predict that in 2021 it will exceed 1.4 billion.
This does not mean, however, that there is not a single grain of truth hidden in the words of the analysts. The hardware market is indeed experiencing some slowdown (how many years have we had to wait for the first Nvidia GeForce RTX series GPUs?), although it is difficult to say whether it will continue in the coming years - especially considering Intel's plans for dedicated GPUs, which will certainly make the competition between major market players more fierce.