I came across some interesting installed base numbers this week from 3 totally unrelated sites. They seem pretty reliable, so here they are. Playstation 4 - 36 million (Link) Xbox One - 18 million (Link) High end gaming PC - 17 million (Link) Once you remove all of the non-gaming PC's from the mix, the PC master race seems rather puny.
indeed. I want to see their definition of a high end gaming pc. we can probably skin that number down to less than 10 million
That article with the PC totals seemed to be directed at the Oculus Rift. And it's minimum requirements are... NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater 8GB+ RAM Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output 2x USB 3.0 ports Windows 7 SP1 or newer http://www.pcgamer.com/oculus-rift-pc-requirements-revealed/ That seems about right. That's the kind of rig that I've been looking for.
First of all, you don't look for a rig. You build it yourself. Prebuilt gaming PCs are for n00bs. Also that sounds about right for high-end PCs. The total install base for gaming PCs is of course much larger than that, but the majority of people are not using high-end hardware. You don't need a GTX 970 to run CSGO or LoL. More telling would be the 125M unique active users on Steam, or that LoL has 67M active monthly players in 2016, or that CSGO has 10.4M unique players a month, or that PC gaming makes $32B a year, which is far more than console or mobile gaming. PC is by far the most popular gaming platform. It's just that the majority are not using expensive hardware. Console gaming seems rather puny when more people play League of Legends every month than even own the Xbox One and PS4. And name me a console shooter that has anywhere near the level of popularity or longevity of CS: 50M copies sold and 10.4M active players a month.
Well, if you want to bring the casuals into the mix, the Apple installed base was at 1 billion as of last January. https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/ios/64193/apples-active-installed-base-in-now-over-1-billion-strong So I'm part of the Apple Super Race. Yeah, I think that I found myself a new avatar.