While other market analysts are seeing overall PC sales continue to write, a new report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) shows the global market for PC gaming equipment growing faster than expected in 2016.
All told, the market for PCs that are already gaming-focused and “DIY” (which also includes “upgrades and accessories such as input devices and audio/communication systems”) exceeds $30 billion (£24 billion) for the first time last year ($30.346 billion, to be precise), according to The latest JPR report. That’s good from the estimated $24.6 billion (£19.6 billion) market for gaming PCs JPR saw it back in 2015. At the time, JPR projected that the PC gaming market wouldn’t surpass the $30 billion mark until 2018, meaning the industry was roughly two years ahead of those old predictions.
“Aggregate PC sales are driven by a video game consumption model, which is critical to understanding the stagnation or decline of the overall PC market,” JPR wrote in detailing its findings. “As basic computing functions become more integrated with mobile devices, the PC ultimately becomes a power user device…”
Estimated gaming PC sales for 2016 (in millions of dollars) according to JPR.
While Europe and North America still spend the most on what JPR calls “high-end” PC gaming hardware, the Asia Pacific region is now the largest and fastest growing market for gaming PCs overall. The region’s £9 billion spending on PC gaming hardware is up 9.61 percent annually, thanks to “a growing PC gaming landscape, a large population, and a lack of significant console adoption,” according to JPR.
Overall, JPR sees the gaming PC market shifting slightly towards the “entry-level” level (22% of the market, down from 26% in 2015) and towards more powerful “mid-range” systems (35 % of the market, up from 31%). The most powerful “high end” PCs are still very much 43% of the overall market.
JPR has yet to release similar numbers for console hardware in 2016. In 2015, though, the market for what JPR calls “TV gaming” hardware was about 15 percent larger than for PC gaming hardware. That’s a marked change from 2014, though, when JPR estimated that the PC gaming app sold about twice as well as console game hardware.
The JPR report follows on from a SuperData report from last year which estimated the global market for PC games (including free-to-play and social network-based titles) is larger than either the mobile game or console game markets alone.