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Remember back when people thought PC gaming was dying? Those guys probably feel a bit like the people who built Y2K shelters — silly.
PC gaming is huge and growing, thanks to popular free-to-play games like League of Legends and World of Tanks. The growing e-sports scene is also helping. In fact, game-business group Open Gaming Alliance (OGA) expects both of those factors to help the industry grow from $26 billion in 2014 to $35 billion in 2018, as you can see in the chart above.
OGA got its figures from research firm DFC Intelligence.
“In past years much of the growth in PC games has been due to adoption of the platform in Asia. Now we are estimating a potential 86 million PC gamers outside Asia that we have targeted as market growth drivers,” DFC analyst David Cole noted in an e-mail sent to us along with the projections. “These are the consumers that are driving spending not just on software, but also on PC hardware, as they buy expensive equipment to play, view, and record games.”
Meanwhile, OGA expects console gaming sales to rise through 2018 and then begin to fall, which makes sense since the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will be about five years old at that point. It also expects handheld sales to continue declining as mobile platforms continue to grow.