Asia is key in forecast for PC/Mac gaming to grow to $24b by 2017

Market analyst International Data Corporation (IDC) has just released an interesting forecast. The 50-year-old company predicts that PC and Mac gamer spending and direct banner or video ad outlays across all digital channels will grow to over $24 billion worldwide by 2017, with revenue expected to grow 4% per year until then.

Interestingly enough, this spending is not going to come from the traditional North American PC/Mac market. In fact, North American digital PC/Mac gaming revenue is forecasted to slip, due to ultra-popular casual browser games like Farmville 2 losing out to smartphones and tablets.

A drop in hardcore subscription revenue, exemplified by World of Warcraft and its declining subscriber rates, is also contributing to that. This is happening in spite of the Steam Machine looking set to dominate North American living rooms.

So where is all the money going to come from? Don’t be surprised now: game revenue is going to come from Brazil, Russia, India and China (also known as BRIC nations). Even though consoles are now available in China, it’s going to be hard for the relatively costly console platform to establish itself in developing countries that have some of the lowest gross domestic product per capita in the world. This is in spite of rising living standards in these countries. But PC gaming in Asia and the other BRIC nations is alive and well. Driven by these countries alone, gaming revenue outside of North America is expected to expand by more than 5% per year through to 2017.

According to Lewis Ward, research director of gaming at IDC, “most of the growth is coming from hardcore-oriented freemium titles such as Tencent’s and Riot Games’ League of Legends, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, Wargaming.net’s World of Tanks, and a handful of Chinese MMORPGs. Case in point: World of Tanks logged a total of 1,114,000 concurrent users on its Russian servers on January 19, 2014. And Tencent’s CrossFire and League of Legends were number one and number two respectively on the list of 2013’s highest-earning free-to-play games.

If this doesn’t prove PC is the master race then I don’t know what will. Good luck, Microsoft.

(h/t IDC)

(Base cover photos: Eagereyes.org, Operationworld)

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