Non-profit corporation The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) has released a research report of its findings regarding the worldwide PC gaming hardware industry.
In summary, PCGA’s research estimates that $54.6 billion USD in revenue was generated in 2009 from sales of consumer PCs capable of gaming (that excludes Netbooks and integrated graphics-based PCs.) PCGA considered any PC shipped with a discreet graphics processing unit (GPU) to be gaming-capable. The organisation predicts that this revenue will grow to $61.3 billion USD by 2014.
The report also estimates that there were 212.6 million people with “discrete graphics solutions” on their PCs in 2009.
While it’s quite a stretch to assume that everyone with a gaming-capable PC is actually using it for gaming, the numbers are still healthy. Based on PCGA’s findings, annual shipment volumes of PC gaming hardware were over two times larger than the combined console units (Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) shipped in 2009.
