Considering that the PC is the platform that birthed both the first-person shooter and the MMO, many PC game fans are a bit perturbed that Activision and Bungie have yet to confirm a PC version of its recently unveiled FPS-meets-MMO Destiny. Bungie co-founder Jason Jones threw a bit more fuel on the fire of perceived PC gaming disrespect, though, by telling Destructoid that, in essence, Halo made keyboard and mouse controls obsolete:

We did a bunch of ambitious things on Halo deliberately to reach out to people. We limited players to two weapons, we gave them recharging health, we automatically saved and restored the game—almost heretical things to first-person shooters at the time. We made the game run without a mouse and keyboard. And now nobody plays shooters the way they used to play them before Halo 'cause nobody wants to. [emphasis added]

Taken literally, this statement is inaccurate on its face. There are obviously still millions of people playing first-person shooters on their PCs with a mouse and keyboard (and more than a few games that don't have recharging health, automatic saves, and the like). But Jones' general point is clear: keyboard-and-mouse players are getting less and less important, from a business perspective, in the console-dominated first-person shooter market that Halo spawned. On this point, it's really hard to argue with Jones.

Reliable, confirmed sales information for most video games is notoriously hard to come by. Getting breakdowns of those sales between PC and non-PC platforms is even harder, especially when you have to take into account digital sales data that's often not shared with the public. That said, when such information can be culled for the most popular first-person shooters, it's usually no contest: the number of PC players is dwarfed by the console audience.

Let's start with the current best-selling franchise in all of gaming: Call of Duty. The best console-specific data I could find for the series of late was first-month sales statistics for Black Ops released by NPD back in 2010. Apparently the game sold 8 million copies on the PS3 and Xbox 360 combined and less than 400,000 on the PC. Even if the unreported digital sales on the PC were ten times as strong as those at retail, and assuming that PC piracy added another 50 percent on top of legitimate downloads, that would still mean there were roughly four console players using a controller for every three playing the PC version in the game's first month. That adds up to a deficit of millions of people for the mouse-and-keyboard crowd, and one that's likely compounded by other Call of Duty games.

I found a similar trend in practically every multi-platform first-person shooter I could find reliable sales or play data for. BF3Stats.com shows 8 million people combined played the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Battlefield 3 over 2012, compared to just 3.1 million players on the PC. The PC version of the original Bioshock sold a million copies through June 2008, but the game sold 2.2 million copies overall [PDF] in that time, meaning the console versions were a little more popular. Even Valve's own Left 4 Dead franchise sold over 6 million units on consoles out of roughly 11 million total sales [MP4 link] through May 2011, meaning the PC version lost out yet again.

Looking at the popularity of platform-exclusive titles doesn't really help make the keyboard-and-mouse popularity case either, I'm afraid. Steam data shows a peak of about 70,000 people playing Team Fortress 2 concurrently on Steam yesterday, but Halo 4 peaked at about 75,000 players (down from an astounding 400,000+ concurrent players at launch), according to HaloCharts.com. Counter-Strike and CS: Source may combine for about 100,000 peak concurrent players on Steam in an average day, but Gears of War 3 managed 300,000 simultaneous players on launch day, and Gears of War 2 had a million people playing simultaneously at launch [PDF, page 5] (yes, these games are "third-person" shooters and may have dropped off significantly post launch, but the data argues a similar point).

The only exception to the "shooters tend to sell better on consoles" rule that I could find was Portal 2, which Gabe Newell told Gamasutra "did better on the PC than it did on the consoles," through May 2012.

Obviously, a comprehensive count of the number of first-person shooter players on consoles versus PCs is impossible to compile. But the anecdotal data I was able to dredge up makes it pretty clear that PC keyboard-and-mouse players are not the dominant market for first-person shooters anymore (and that's not even taking into account the non-zero number of PC players who actually use a gamepad on an FPS for whatever reason). This isn't a subjective matter of taste or a reflection on the gameplay superiority of one control scheme or the other. This is purely a matter of numbers—and in that matter, the keyboard and mouse have been overtaken.

This is what Jones' "Halo changed everything," quote is really getting at. Like it or not, the market has shown that the PC is no longer automatically the most lucrative platform for a serious first-person shooter. This is the business reality Activision and Bungie are working in when developing Destiny. That doesn't mean they should ignore the still-sizable PC market (and there's still a good chance a PC version of Destiny will be announced before the game comes out sometime after 2013), or that the PC doesn't bring other gameplay and performance benefits that consoles can't match. But arguing that first-person shooter players are overwhelmingly demanding those mouse-and-keyboard controls that only the PC can provide is just not a valid argument.