There's been a lot of chat from industry insiders defending the PC game industry, saying that the current way to determine sales via just retail outlets doesn't include things like downloadable game sales or online subscriptions. Well, someone apparently forgot to tell PriceWaterhouseCoopers who has released a new study claiming PC sales will actually go down in the coming years.

According to an article on the Ad Week web site, the article stated that the PC game industry had $3.8 billion in global sales in 2007 but that number will drop to about $3.6 billion in sales in 2012. That same study claims that console games sales will go up from $25 billion in 2007 to $35 billion in 2012. The article also says that online game sales will go up from $6.6 billion to $14.4 billion in 2012 and wireless games will grow from $5.6 billion to a whopping $13.5 billion in 2012.

Of course, the article fails to state that online massively multiplayer games are almost exclusively on the PC at this point and of course the downloadable games market continues to grow. Therefor we have to take this study with a bit of a grain of salt. The PC Gaming Alliance, the non-profit group of companies devoted to promoting PC gaming, plan to release new info on the industry, including their own sales info, later this summer.