20 million players are going to make the switch from PC to console and streaming in the coming years, an analyst firm predicts. Jon Peddie Research, who have a specialty in the PC gaming market, believe that gamers will start moving towards “TV gaming platforms”, which includes consoles, Apple TV and Google Stadia, en masse between now and 2022.
There’s a number of reasons cited for this as different markets fluctuate, but the central issues on the PC side of things, JPR believe, is the slowing down of innovation and growing time-gap between new hardware. One observation reads: “the innovation that took place in the past providing speed ups and clever new things has all but stopped, plus the product introduction times are stretching out to four years.”
The demographics most likely to fuel this migration will be those on the lower end of the PC market spectrum, with cheaper, sub-thousand dollar builds. The dwindling difference between those and the average console, as well as console exclusives and better TV technology, will be major contributing factors.
JPR aren’t looking to start some sort of PC-panic, though. The GPU market is still flourishing, and Steam has recently reached one billion accounts – it’s just PC might not be as much the go-to for top-of-the-line play as it is now.
Read more: Best gaming monitors
Designers are struggling to increase performance to the same degrees at the same speed we’re used to, and that means the average player may start looking elsewhere for their affordable, robust gaming experience.