pricewaterhousecoopers posts

Even in the current economic mess, PC and video gamesare still considered to be a growing industry. Two new studies have predicted massive growth in the gaming market. According to IndustyGamers.com one study announced today by Global Industry Analysts predicts the global gaming market will reach $91.96 billion by 2015.

Another report, released last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers, has another prediction that the world market for games will reach $73.5 billion by 2013. Both studies stated that they saw growth in areas like downloadable games, MMO titles and others as reasons for the increase in revenues. In-game advertising is also expected to have a bigger impact in game in the next few years.

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.