A growing Asia Pacific market helps drive PC gaming high-water mark

Graphics and multimedia research and consulting firm Jon Peddie Research has reported that the PC hardware market is excelling, despite the overall downturn of the PC market. While the PC market has seen its sixth straight year of negative growth overall, the PC gaming market has bucked the overall trend by hitting a high-water mark of US$30 billion in 2016. But what is driving this continued growth?

According to JPR, there are a number of strong sub-trends driving the overall excellent performance of the PC gaming market. Firstly, the Asia-Pacific region shows the most growth, both in value and market size. The majority of the US$11 billion Asia-Pacific market is comprised of entry-level and mid-range computers for gaming. In the largest regional market, China, consoles were actually illegal until July of 2015. The high population of the region, alongside the popularity of ESport titles such as Dota 2, has helped PC gaming sales remain strong. Meanwhile, North America and Western Europe are driving sales in the high-end of the market, where high-quality, premium machines with higher profit margins are able to make up for the lower volume of shipments.

Why is the PC gaming market growing while the PC market is shrinking overall? JPR believes that as basic computing tasks are completed more and more via smartphones or tablets, gaming is one of the last bastions of total PC superiority. The superior performance, input accuracy, and variety of accessories make the PC platform attractive to gamers wanting multiple-monitor setups, dedicated driving or flight controllers, and high framerates. That should be enough to keep the PC gaming market safe from consoles for the time being.