It’s arguing desktop gaming is dying not PC gaming. Q4 2024 shipped 13.6 million desktops (down 1.8%) vs 53.2 million laptops up (6.8%).
That trend of declining Desktops vs increasing laptops has been steady since 2010. There’s still plenty of desktops to justify major investments by gaming companies, but that’s not guaranteed long term.
That's just overall desktop and laptop sales though, right? So home multimedia desktop PCs could be falling off a cliff, business desktop PCs could be dropping, and gaming PCs could be growing a bit and the overall market of desktops could still be net down, right?
The overall market doesn't give us enough resolution to determine the health of gaming PC sales IMO. There's too many other possible ways we get to that same number.
You see a similar trend in gaming desktops vs gaming laptops, but that’s just a sideshow. People game on the hardware they have, gaming specific PC’s are a subset of the overall player base.
It used to be much easier to justify adding a dedicated GPU to the desktop's people where already getting, but when everyone is buying laptops that’s dying. As shown by end of generation mid range cards like the 4060 (2 years old, nothing newer) being relatively less common than they used to be on Steam.
#1 Laptop 4060 4.99%, #3 desktop 4060 4.41%. Overall gaming desktop PC’s are still more common than gaming laptops, but the trend is very much down. #2 is the 4 year old 3060.
That's a strange movement of a goal post, not to mention that using percentages conveniently hides whether PC Gaming as a whole is growing or shrinking.
That trend of declining Desktops vs increasing laptops has been steady since 2010. There’s still plenty of desktops to justify major investments by gaming companies, but that’s not guaranteed long term.