Steam sales reportedly topped $11 billion during H1 2026 due to shifting trends — staggering growth driven by influx of Chinese players and booming legacy catalogues
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/steam-sales-reportedly-topped-usd11-billion-during-h1-2026-due-to-shifting-trends-staggering-growth-driven-by-influx-of-chinese-players-and-booming-legacy-cataloguesOpen linkView original on piefed.ca
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I think more people are going to be driven to PC gaming (and therefore Steam) in the coming years as consoles lose the physical media and pricing advantages they had over PC. I know I'm dropping consoles as my main platform after this gen. Might keep getting Nintendo for the exclusives if the price is decent and the games are good.
I don't think consoles have had a pricing advantage for a looong time. It's been several generations at least. Unless you mean specifically a pricing advantage on physical media, but that mostly went out the window when the disc on many games just became a glorified DRM dongle.
Long term, you're correct. The upfront cost of a PC was always more expensive, but when you factor in games, game sales and lack of subscription requirement to play online and such, it doesn't take long for the cost to balance out before shifting the other way.
All of these price hikes and attacks on consumer rights are just going to make it significantly quicker for the cost shift to happen.
They have until recently. A PC equivalent to a PS5 would have been way more than $400 in 2020. And most discs do not require a download to work.
Ah, I was thinking game cost, not console cost specifically. So fair point.
Digitally, PC wins easily on game cost, but it evens out more when you add in physical media. Of course, a lot of games don't have physical versions. Aaaand the pay to play online thing adds to the cost. Consoles are (were) a "pay less now to pay more later" proposition. Now it's "pay slightly less now and more later".
The Nintendo Switch was just taken offline in Mainland China, not that it was terribly popular anyway, because it only had around 10 games available for it.
The video game market in China has essentially been dominated by a company called Tencent for years, who are known for poor customer experiences and frustrating software. The Chinese were enshittifying online services years before the word "enshittify" was coined.
Tencent is unfortunately buying its way into the western market too
Doesn't Tencent also have a stake in Reddit?
Yes they do and they have a stake in a lot of tech related things. I’d recommend a Wikipedia read on them at some point.
I honestly couldn’t say. But it would explain the rapid enshitifaction and shift in culture there.
And you have all the people defending Tencent, saying that Tencent is a hands off company. Meanwhile they've gutted the co-op plans that Ubisoft had for AC Shadows that fans have been asking for since Unity.