Market share

3 January 2008

I have a theory.

It’s fairly well established that Apple’s market share is going up, right? This statistic rather nicely coincides, of course, with the final vestiges of me caring about Mac market share disappearing, but is nevertheless a fact that would have greatly pleased the 13 year old me.

Obviously this increase is down to a million and one different factors; I’m sure the iPod is one of the main factors, OS X being another and the move to Intel being the third. There is though one more thing I think could well have contributed greatly, and it’s probably not too obvious.

Going back to my 13 year old self, one of the key past times I seemed to partake in was arguing profusely about which platform was better. It was an utterly pointless past time, and a waste of my precious youth. Obviously I should have either been playing cops and robbers or some-such (or possibly sailing) but I’m digressing purely because the platform contention argument was one I never really won.

I had at the time a LCII – which looking back was a pretty darn good machine for the time – and it did everything that you’d really need a computer to do in 1995. Except of course the one thing a 13 year old boy would ever want a computer to do: games. All my friends were avid PC gamers – it definitely ruled the roost compared to the still-current SNES (the Playstation having only just launched) and I have vivid memories about sneaking looks at their copies of PC Gamer…

Flash forward to the present day and there is one big difference: the PC gaming market is dying.

This is mostly due to the rise of online multiplayer gaming on the consoles; the PC in recent years had slowly but surely evolved into being primarily about online multiplayer (Quake 3, Unreal Tournament etc) which was one of the only differentiators it had left versus the consoles, the graphics race having essentially come to an end. When it comes down to it, now you can do online multiplayer on a console, and all the games that would have traditionally been PC strongholds (titles like Halo 3 and Bioshock) why would you bother with the relative expense and extreme hassle (coughvistacough) of a PC?

So, with the PC gaming market being reduced to an irrelevance one of the last great bastions of incompatibility is gone.

From: Articles

3 January 2008