http://www.game-newswire.com/index.php/the-news/232.html

The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA), a nonprofit corporation dedicated to driving the worldwide growth of PC gaming, today unveiled its Horizons Hardware research report, an exclusive research study encompassing major aspects of the PC gaming hardware industry worldwide.

Among the key findings: Annual shipment volumes for the PC Gaming hardware market in 2009 were over two times larger than the combined Wii^™, PlayStation^® 2, PlayStation^® 3 and Xbox 360^® console units shipped in the same period.  This trend for the PC Gaming hardware market to outpace all console shipments combined is expected to continue through the forecasted period of the research.  In addition, revenues from consumer PCs capable of gaming that shipped with a discrete GPU (excludes Netbooks and integrated graphics-based PCs) totaled approximately $54.6 billion in 2009 and are forecasted to grow to $61.3 billion by 2014. These revenue figures are based on an estimated 61.5 million PCs (Desktop and Laptops) shipped in 2009 that can largely be associated with PC gaming as a key usage scenario.

The report also estimates the worldwide number of consumers gaming with discrete graphics solutions on their PCs (Desktop and Notebooks) to be 212.6 million for 2009 and expects this to grow to about 322 million by 2014. The report also includes detailed breakouts of various PC configurations (e.g. Basic, Mass Market, etc), by form factor and by geographic territory.

The Asia Pacific region continues to be the world’s largest hardware gaming market with approximately 33% market share followed by Western Europe and the United States at 24% and 22% respectively.  The rest of the world follows with 21.5%.  Growth is expected to continue through 2014, largely driven by the Asia Pacific region.

“One of the biggest trends I’m seeing in the 2009 Horizon’s hardware report indicates a strong demand for more capable mobile based systems by PC Gamers.” said Matt Ployhar PCGA Research Committee Chairman. “PC Gamers are playing a central role in fueling healthier margins, and driving innovation in this space worldwide”.

“PC gaming is the highest profile and most mature example of a new era of computing systems based on usage,” said Richard Shim, research manager at IDC covering PCs. “These new usage-based systems are hardware configurations optimized for an improved user experience. Consumers are often willing to pay more for such an experience. In the case of gaming PCs, up to 25% more as compared to a mainstream system.”