note, PC takes really small amount of the gaming population even when you don’t count mobile gaming.
googles
That doesn’t appear to be the case. Looking at this article, in 2022, 43.8% of video game revenue was from PCs, and 56.2% from consoles. There’s more revenue from consoles, but it’s not a terribly-drastic difference.
The difference(if the article is trust worthy, see last paragraph) is made up by what some live service games on PC are pretty big money maker.(Valve’s games, LoL, and some live service are really PC focus or PC only.) Fortnite is cross platform and here is a comparison from it’s revenue source, and live service game are aiming more competitive not graphically more advanced. If you compare games like say Assassin’s Creed or Jedi Survivor or say MWIII by pre-orders console vs PC, there will be a big difference. There is a reason why developer are focusing on console quality/performance first, because if you do cross platform, that’s where you make most of your money from. But if you are doing a competitive FPS, then developer will focus on PC build cause that’s where most competitive players are.
Look at best of steam for 2022, notice the lack of big selling console titles? That’s why. Probably not valid source now, but before Psyonix bought by Epic, they released their Rocket League player by platforms, PC takes about 21% on 3rd year(2018) after switch version is released. First, second, third, they don’t release new numbers after year 4. And you can run RL on potato laptops before their mandatory DX11 update. Most cross platform games will bias toward Playstation since Series X/S aren’t as dominant this gen. but usually it falls around 70~75% on consoles and 25%~30% on PC.(if game also release on switch, PC shrinks further.)
Lastly, the article you linked if you read the info or sourcing carefully, they are some sort of report/forecast survey data selling company. They don’t really actually have the numbers in terms of global revenue. Yes, public company have financial reports, but Valve is not public company which will distort the result quite a bit, and use survey means if your sample pool is bad, your extrapolation will also be bad. One of the graphic shows their sample amount. (with about 42k samples, with no mention where or how they get those number)
edit: minor edits for better reading
extra big edit: I went and look for playstation game division revenue for 2022 and found this article with links to actual financial report, 24.4 billions. Where the best I can find for steam(which dominates about 90% pc sales market share) is about 8~9 billions in gross revenue(including game sales/mtx/etc). I don’t feel confident linking the articles as I don’t think they are really reliable, but multiple of those “survey company” probably estimate it from source like steam spy or steam db data. So playstation along make 3x more revenue than steam. Like yeah, I know it also includes PS5/accessory sales etc, but we all know that console are selling almost at cost or slightly below to drive game sales. Sony sold “19.1 million PS5 during fiscal 2022” doing some paper calculation it’s around 9.5b if all consoles sold are at 500USD. Actual number would be much lower as Sony don’t get those sale money directly compare to PSN, they get it after the vendor/shipping split. And I don’t know how much they get from console sales but look at the chart I linked it’s way below 1/3rd. So even with worst case calculation Playstation still make 2x more in terms of software sales.
if you read my response, this “googled” article is not a reliable source, cause they extrapolate their data instead of actually acquire and compare sales data. Below is best of steam 2022, green check means game is published by a public company, cross is PC only, question mark I don’t know if the game dev/publisher is public or not. Also, even if the public publisher does have sales numbers per game, they don’t usually tell you the details like platform revenue percentage, as their goal for public data is “my game make how much”.
googles
That doesn’t appear to be the case. Looking at this article, in 2022, 43.8% of video game revenue was from PCs, and 56.2% from consoles. There’s more revenue from consoles, but it’s not a terribly-drastic difference.
The difference(if the article is trust worthy, see last paragraph) is made up by what some live service games on PC are pretty big money maker.(Valve’s games, LoL, and some live service are really PC focus or PC only.) Fortnite is cross platform and here is a comparison from it’s revenue source, and live service game are aiming more competitive not graphically more advanced. If you compare games like say Assassin’s Creed or Jedi Survivor or say MWIII by pre-orders console vs PC, there will be a big difference. There is a reason why developer are focusing on console quality/performance first, because if you do cross platform, that’s where you make most of your money from. But if you are doing a competitive FPS, then developer will focus on PC build cause that’s where most competitive players are.
Look at best of steam for 2022, notice the lack of big selling console titles? That’s why. Probably not valid source now, but before Psyonix bought by Epic, they released their Rocket League player by platforms, PC takes about 21% on 3rd year(2018) after switch version is released. First, second, third, they don’t release new numbers after year 4. And you can run RL on potato laptops before their mandatory DX11 update. Most cross platform games will bias toward Playstation since Series X/S aren’t as dominant this gen. but usually it falls around 70~75% on consoles and 25%~30% on PC.(if game also release on switch, PC shrinks further.)
Lastly, the article you linked if you read the info or sourcing carefully, they are some sort of report/forecast survey data selling company. They don’t really actually have the numbers in terms of global revenue. Yes, public company have financial reports, but Valve is not public company which will distort the result quite a bit, and use survey means if your sample pool is bad, your extrapolation will also be bad. One of the graphic shows their sample amount. (with about 42k samples, with no mention where or how they get those number)
edit: minor edits for better reading
extra big edit: I went and look for playstation game division revenue for 2022 and found this article with links to actual financial report, 24.4 billions. Where the best I can find for steam(which dominates about 90% pc sales market share) is about 8~9 billions in gross revenue(including game sales/mtx/etc). I don’t feel confident linking the articles as I don’t think they are really reliable, but multiple of those “survey company” probably estimate it from source like steam spy or steam db data. So playstation along make 3x more revenue than steam. Like yeah, I know it also includes PS5/accessory sales etc, but we all know that console are selling almost at cost or slightly below to drive game sales. Sony sold “19.1 million PS5 during fiscal 2022” doing some paper calculation it’s around 9.5b if all consoles sold are at 500USD. Actual number would be much lower as Sony don’t get those sale money directly compare to PSN, they get it after the vendor/shipping split. And I don’t know how much they get from console sales but look at the chart I linked it’s way below 1/3rd. So even with worst case calculation Playstation still make 2x more in terms of software sales.
And that’s across three separate consoles, no? If we exclude Switch (which is nowhere near recent hardware), I wonder if PC then becomes dominant.
if you read my response, this “googled” article is not a reliable source, cause they extrapolate their data instead of actually acquire and compare sales data. Below is best of steam 2022, green check means game is published by a public company, cross is PC only, question mark I don’t know if the game dev/publisher is public or not. Also, even if the public publisher does have sales numbers per game, they don’t usually tell you the details like platform revenue percentage, as their goal for public data is “my game make how much”.