[AlphaWolf]

More players online for PC? You're deluded.

[almighty]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

More players online for PC? You're deluded.

That's a bit of a sparse comment, care to expand it?

[RancidLunchmeat]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

More players online for PC? You're deluded.

I think Almighty meant more players online at once in the same gaming instance.

Not total numbers of all players playing across all systems at a single point in time.

[almighty]

Originally Posted by RancidLunchmeat

I think Almighty meant more players online at once in the same gaming instance.

Not total numbers of all players playing across all systems at a single point in time.

It's both to be honest, BF3 is 24 players online on console and 64 players on PC.

Games that are online and multi-platform generally have a higher player count on PC as the machines can handle more.

And I doubt anyone would argue that at any given time on the planet there's more people online gaming on PC then there is console.

I bet more people alone play WoW then most console games.

[AlphaWolf]

Originally Posted by RancidLunchmeat

I think Almighty meant more players online at once in the same gaming instance.

Not total numbers of all players playing across all systems at a single point in time.

Ah, anyway its off topic, we don't want to turn this into a vs thread.

[almighty]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

Ah, anyway its off topic, we don't want to turn this into a vs thread.

True but Google shows ~ 40 million registered Xbox live accounts

World of Warcraft alone pulls 10 million subscribed players, that's 1 PC game totalling for a quarter of the whole of Xbox Live.

[AlphaWolf]

And wow accounts for probably more than 1/4 of all pc gaming. Really just start this topic elsewhere this is all going to get deleted anyway.

[almighty]

Dude it's common fact, more people have PC's then consoles so of course there's to be more online PC gamers then there is console gamers, that is just common sense and in my opinion there was no need to make a new thread abut it.

[ERP]

MW3 sold 26 million units on console > 1/2 that was on 360, even that's bigger than the number of WOW accounts.
Now I will buy that a higher percentage of PC players who buy a game like MW3 play online vs console sales, but there would have to be a lot of console owners buying MW3 to play single player before PC had an advantage.

[almighty]

Originally Posted by ERP

MW3 sold 26 million units on console > 1/2 that was on 360, even that's bigger than the number of WOW accounts.
Now I will buy that a higher percentage of PC players who buy a game like MW3 play online vs console sales, but there would have to be a lot of console owners buying MW3 to play single player before PC had an advantage.

~40 million Xbox live subscriptions in the world as of January 2012 so maybe 45-46 million now?

So it makes no difference how many copies MW3 sold as they limited by the amount of registered accounts which you can is 45-46 million.

WoW is 10 million active players on its own..

League of legends has 32 million registered players!!

The total registered users of those 2 games nearly match the total amount of registered Xbox Live accounts.

[ERP]

You can only do that if there is no overlap between the League of legends player base and the WOW player base, which is clearly no true.
360 Has 40 Million subscribers and there are a similar number of active PS3 online players, again you can't add them up because there is some overlap.

[almighty]

Originally Posted by ERP

You can only do that if there is no overlap between the League of legends player base and the WOW player base, which is clearly no true.
360 Has 40 Million subscribers and there are a similar number of active PS3 online players, again you can't add them up because there is some overlap.

Makes no difference, you talking of 2 games being right up there with the entirety of Xbox live... 2 games...

[AlphaWolf]

The point is that more games doesn't necessarily mean more players. 30million people bought mw3 and 20m bought black ops. That doesn't mean you have more than 30m players playing COD games.

And free to play stuff is an absolutely useless metric of anything, I know people with more than a dozen accounts for some games.

[Prophecy2k]

To be honest if you include MMOs, the entire PC gaming pupulations of Korea and China alone would probably more than double the total number of PS360Wii online gamers since their consoles launches.

If you start to include online PC gamers in the US and EU, including countries like germany (which is the biggest gaming market in EU) and is primary a PC gaming haven, I don't think there's any contest between console vs PC in terms of online gamers.

Of course there's no real data on this. Only opinion and hearsay. But i'd still confidently stand by my view that PC gaming >>> Console gaming online

[Shifty Geezer]

This is another of those crazy topics with arguments not focussed on anything other than disagreeing with people.

If we look purely at number of people on a machine playing games online, PC has the most. There are squillions of people playing MMOs that the consoles don't have.

If we consider number of gamers playing the sorts of core games we think of regards consoles, it's very different. COD and Battlefield sold for smaller numbers on PC than either console, meaning if you're playing these games, PC offers a much smaller number of online gamers to go against. Which is pretty immaterial as long as there's always enough to fill your game, but clearly some people want to argue anyway.

Originally Posted by Prophecy2k

If you start to include online PC gamers in the US and EU, including countries like germany (which is the biggest gaming market in EU) and is primary a PC gaming haven.

Are you sure about that? I can't find any numbers other than a £900 report, but a GI.biz summary says Germany is larger than the UK now, but that's for all revenue including mobile gaming. So the simplification of 'Germany is mostly PC gaming and so their revenue is mostly PC games' is on very shaky ground. It's all about slices of pie for each platform, which are numbers we don't have.

If we look at something like Steam versus Live Gold and PSN accounts, there's no obvious 'most online' answer, especially when those simple account numbers don't tell you how many hours are being player. If, for example, PC had 10x the number of people playing only, but limited to a few games or 30 minutes every few days, whereas Live has less players but gaming more often across more titles, than regarding a given game like COD, you'd find more gamers on the console.

[tunafish]

Originally Posted by Prophecy2k

Of course there's no real data on this. Only opinion and hearsay.

Jon Peddle did a report on gamers recently, too bad it's crazy expensive. Does anyone have access?

A number I've heard discussed recently was 400M online gamers for PC, but I think that also counted casual browser games (like farmville).

Generally, for online gaming the PC market has always been considerably larger than the consoles put together, even back when consoles were more of the total gaming market. Now, PC gaming has grown double-digit per year for 4 years straight when the consoles have been shrinking -- no contest.

[AlphaWolf]

Originally Posted by tunafish

Now, PC gaming has grown double-digit per year for 4 years straight when the consoles have been shrinking -- no contest.

Link? Or is that something you made up because it sounded good?

[fearsomepirate]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

If we look purely at number of people on a machine playing games online, PC has the most. There are squillions of people playing MMOs that the consoles don't have.

And don't forget Words With Friends, which is both a game and online.

I wonder how longevity compares. I know a lot of PC gamers will continue to play the same game for years and years (for example, WoW and TF2), whereas even the hottest console games tend to be pretty dead after the same length of time. How many PC gamers are still playing COD4 online, for example?

[tunafish]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

Link? Or is that something you made up because it sounded good?

That was from an internal briefing, so nothing I can link to. However, I cannot really see how anything about that sentence is in any way controversial. Just google "pc gaming growth {2008,2009,2010,2011}".

It's a normal part of the console cycle -- consoles were at their peak and PC was at it's lowest in 2008ish, since then PC keeps getting stronger and the consoles weaker until the new gen comes around and turns the tide.

[Sonic]

Originally Posted by tunafish

That was from an internal briefing, so nothing I can link to. However, I cannot really see how anything about that sentence is in any way controversial. Just google "pc gaming growth {2008,2009,2010,2011}".

It's a normal part of the console cycle -- consoles were at their peak and PC was at it's lowest in 2008ish, since then PC keeps getting stronger and the consoles weaker until the new gen comes around and turns the tide.

Does this data take into account the Wii and how it completely stagnated a couple years back? Does it also show growth in MS's console since 2008?

[Sonic]

It would genuinely surprise me if there were more console gamers online than PC gamers. 40 million Live members is great, I'm glad that many people have access to a service they can use to play online from their consoles. My son and I use it at least twice a month. But I still pay two monthly fees to Blizzard for me and my son's account for WoW, which we are on far more often than Live and are more enthralled in.

There's 9.1 million subscribers to WoW currently, but not sure how many of those millions have more than one account. That's a lot of people regardless, all paying a monthly or semi/annual fee. That's free profit basically even after all the new content and love and attention Blizz does with maintaining the game. It's the best example I can think of with a company truly devoting itself to making the game overall better (subjective I know) and keeping people around for years. And that's just the highest MMO. How many others have 1 million + subscribers?

And then there's Call of Duty, which is huge especially on 360 and Live. It sells millions the moment and a shit ton of people playing online. This coupled with all the other games that have online play does make the 360 a force to be reckoned with when considering online gamers. MW3 selling 13 million+, as ERP mentioned, beats Wow's peak right there. I wonder what the percentage of people buying the game plays online at least twice a month is. Regardless the game is a cash cow for Activision so the sales of the game more than make up for the cost of running the servers. Activision really lucked out this generation with having the best selling game series, and the Blizzard side with World of Warcraft. The amount of gamers that consume their products is astounding and truly wonder if they account for more online gamers as a company than any other.

In my estimation of PC gamers I do not account for those playing Facebook games like Farmville. One other side of the PC is the rampant piracy. WoW is a good example with all the private servers around. The number of gamers using them may have gone up since the patch to 5.x. And then Steam.

http://mmodata.blogspot.com/

This is a site that has data on millions of subscribers for MMO games. I wonder how accurate it is. If the total combined MMO accounts are around 30 million than the 40 million Live accounts blows it out the water.

[almighty]

Originally Posted by fearsomepirate

How many PC gamers are still playing COD4 online, for example?

Problem with PC is that unlike consoles, COD has Counter Strike to contend with and the old Counter Strike destroys it.

[fearsomepirate]

COD4 was quite popular on the PC, and I know a lot of PC gamers still prefer it over any of the subsequent releases due to being able to set up your own dedicated server and use custom maps, unlike later releases. It's really fallen off on the PS3 because face it, console shooters get stale due to lack of new content. I was just wondering how much it's fallen off on the PC as compared to the console (which is overrun with hackers now). It didn't sell nearly as many units, of course, but these days, there are only a few thousand players on the PS3 on any given night.

[almighty]

Originally Posted by fearsomepirate

COD4 was quite popular on the PC, and I know a lot of PC gamers still prefer it over any of the subsequent releases due to being able to set up your own dedicated server and use custom maps, unlike later releases. It's really fallen off on the PS3 because face it, console shooters get stale due to lack of new content. I was just wondering how much it's fallen off on the PC as compared to the console (which is overrun with hackers now). It didn't sell nearly as many units, of course, but these days, there are only a few thousand players on the PS3 on any given night.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

[AlphaWolf]

Yay another useless stat.