PC gaming appears to be thriving. Last week, GDC 2017’s survey claimed that the PC platform is the most popular one as 53% of the survey-takers were developing their titles for the PC platform. Not only that, but NVIDIA claimed that PC gaming has doubled its revenue in five years. And today, we are happy to report that PC gaming hardware sales have passed the $30 billion mark for the first time.

According to a report from Jon Peddie Research, the global PC Gaming Hardware market exceeded $30 billion in 2016 and is forecast to grow at a 6% CAGR through 2019.

Ted Pollak, Senior Game Industry Analyst for JPR, said:

“Global consumers continue to embrace the PC platform for video games due to multiple factors. The desktop ergonomic is popular because the display distance offers increased detail when using HD and UHD monitors. Additionally there is superior control with mouse and keyboard control interfaces. This has been validated with eSports overwhelmingly being played on PCs. Additionally, product designers have given PC gamers thousands of options for complete customization from a functionally and aesthetic perspective. Examples of this include dedicated driving and flight systems, multi-display setups, super-powerful graphics boards, and a wide selection of gaming notebooks ranging from desktop substitutes to innovative “thin and light” offerings. Liquid cooling, lighting, solid state drives, genre specific gaming mice, mechanical keyboards, notebook graphics amplifiers, and Xbox accessory compatibility offer gamers more choices than they have ever had.”

What’s also interesting here is that JPR has provided a graph, breaking PC gaming hardware down into three categories: entry-level, mid-range, and high-end.

As we can see, there is high demand for high-end PC hardware. The high-range category pulled in over $13 billion, accounting for 43%. The mid-range category added $10.6 billion, while the low-range category brought $6.68 billion.

Jon Peddie, President of JPR, added:

“We know that gamers with lower budgets are just as passionate about gaming as those with more resources and are enthusiasts in the purest sense of the word, so we decided to transition to a more descriptive terminology. Nvidia and AMD are not ignoring these customers either and offerings like the GTX 1050 bring powerful graphics processing for around $120. We are also very excited about the prospects for the AMD Ryzen CPU platform and think it will be adopted at all three hardware tiers. Of course Intel CPUs currently offer superior power and value for gamers of every budget level, and their integrated graphics now rival game consoles.”