The overall PC market has been declining in recent years, largely thanks to many more casual users of home PCs switching to lighter solutions such as tablets and Chromebooks. But whilst many home users are moving away from PC, PC gaming hardware is actually continuing to grow and expand, according to new research.

According to market analyst John Peddie Research (JPR), PC gamers are now investing more and more in high end machines, meaning that the global PC gaming hardware market is now worth twice that of the console gaming market…

PC Gaming "Trounces" Consoles, Says Analyst

“We continue to see a shift in casual console customers moving to mobile,” said senior JPR gaming analyst Ted Pollak. “While this is also occurring in the lower-end PC gaming world, more money is being directed to mid- and high-range builds and upgrades by gamers.”

He went on to discuss the fact that PC gamers are not merely satisfied with “pure content consumption”, saying that the interest for PC enthusiasts lies in the power those machines can achieve, playing games on super high settings and thus being able to achieve other desktop tasks – such as video editing and content creation – with as much horsepower as possible in their rigs.

According to JPR, the PC gaming hardware market is currently worth a staggering $21.5 billion, and is expected to increase even further in the next few years to reach over $23 billion by 2017. JPR president Jon Peddie said that, whilst consoles remained constant for years, the continual performance increases in gaming PCs would help to keep the market alive and healthy and consoles struggle to keep up in the power stakes.

“Nvidia, Intel and AMD have enthusiast CPU and GPUs that are so powerful that, when combined with SSDs and fast memory, they absolutely trounce the computing power and gaming capabilities of the newest console generation” he said.

It comes as no surprise to us at GD that the hardware capabilities of gaming PCs is encouraging more and more people to invest. Growing value in the PC gaming market can only be a good thing for consumers, helping developers and hardware manufacturers alike to invest in the market in the hopes of gaining a slice of that $21 billion dollar pie.

Are you glad to see the PC gaming market so healthy right now? What do you think to the news that the PC market is now worth double the console gaming market? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment.