Is the spred of console gaming a good thing?
Yeas, it's not like certain "content delivery" platforms refuse to release sales data and everywhere you look estimates for actual sales on the PC are absent...
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Generally-speaking, I think the ESA estimates are pretty close. Valve is probably the only major player in content-delivery (at least outside of Asia) who is a private corporation, and most of the games on their catalogue are owned by public companies anyway. While folks like Apple don't release exact sales by unit data, they do release total sales figures that you can make a reasonably accurate estimate from.
However, one thing I don't believe the ESA numbers cover are subscription model games, which are technically not "unit sales".
WoW makes the whole situation difficult to judge, because according to Activision's last quarterly release, WoW makes around $80-90 million a month in subscriptions at the moment, top line. This means that
subscription revenue, as opposed to
direct sales revenue, is around $1-1.2 Bn every year, which is more than the ESA revenue estimates on PC game
units sold.
So the question is, is it reasonable to believe that Blizzard makes more in revenue from subs than the entire rest of the PC game industry does in one year?
I don't know. It seems possible. Not a lot of $50 PC games break 1 million units sold. And a lot of big earners get most of their numbers from console sales these days.
That said, this year might be a better showing. IF the ESA follows most game companies in starting their fiscal year calculations in the holiday season, this year's financials will be including Fallout 3 and GTA IV being released for the PC.