The army of PC users who use their systems for entertainment will be actively losing their adherents in the next few years. It is expected that between now and 2022, about 20 million gamers around the world will abandon the use of PCs. They will all move from computers to game consoles or some other similar devices connected to TVs. Such a bleak forecast for the computer market was issued by the analytical company Jon Peddie Research, known to our readers for calculating sales volumes of graphics cards.
Analysts cite several factors as the reasons for the expected drop in interest in gaming computers. First of all, the emerging slowdown in progress in the development of processors and video cards will have an impact. If previously gaming hardware was updated annually, giving PC owners the opportunity to significantly improve the performance of their systems, now CPU and GPU update cycles are extended over time, which will make consoles competitive with computers for a much longer time.
The second, but no less significant reason, is the increase in the cost of components. The first blow to the market for gaming components was dealt by the mining boom, against the background of which prices for graphics cards increased significantly. But even later, despite the end of the rush for video cards, prices never returned to the old level. Manufacturers of both processors and video cards began to release new products, placing them in higher price categories, as a result of which flagship configurations of gaming PCs became significantly more expensive. NVIDIA played a particularly noticeable role in this process, the new generation of GPUs of which, in the absence of competition, received noticeably increased starting prices.
Thus, the next generation of game consoles may turn out to be a much more rational investment for gamers, especially for those of them who have not traditionally pursued advanced technologies and focused on low-level computers.
At the same time, the Jon Peddie Research report does not consider the current situation potentially dangerous for the future of the gaming equipment market. The total number of active PC gamers is estimated at 1,2 billion people and the defection of several tens of millions of users is unlikely to have a significant impact on the overall picture. What is more important here is the trend itself. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, says, βThe PC market continues to shrink as past innovations that provide speed and new capabilities have largely ceased, and the generation cycle of new products is increasing to four years. It's not a disaster so far, and the GPU market still has enormous capacity. However, there are prerequisites that will force part of the gaming market to reorient towards TVs and related gaming services.β
A considerable number of users will be able to take on a new type of βconsole gamingβ - cloud streaming of games to TVs, which is expected to begin to gain widespread popularity around 2020. In this case, players will not need to purchase any expensive hardware devices at all, but will be able to limit themselves to only purchasing a controller and paying a subscription fee for the service, receiving game content directly to the TV screen via the Internet. A good example of this technology is Google Stadia, which promises to put significant computing and graphics power at players' disposal, allowing them to display games in 4K resolution at a frame rate of 60 Hz.
In other words, gamers in the future will have a very wide choice of alternatives, among which a gaming PC will not be the only and, perhaps, not the best or most profitable option. It is quite obvious that some of them will prefer to abandon the PC and migrate to other devices and technologies. At the same time, the majority of users who decide to leave the βPC worldβ will consist of those who had systems with a price below $1000. However, the exodus of adherents will be felt, including the middle and upper segment of the computer market, the report says.
Source: 3dnews.ru