Gaming hardware market worth $67 billion in 2014, PCs dominate

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And JPR predicts fast growth in the Android gaming console hardware market.

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One thing that never seems to get explained with 'reports' like this, is how exactly is PC gaming hardware defined? It's not like you have special gaming versions of CPUs, so how is it possible beyond guessing to know what is actually being used for a gaming system? And beyond that, how much is used as multi-purpose hardware, further skewing the pure 'gaming' value of it?

For instance, say someone just buys a PC/laptop. Is that defined as 'gaming hardware'? Because it's perfectly capable of playing games. Or does that person have to launch Minesweeper for their £250 CPU to count as 'gaming hardware'? At one end of the spectrum you could count all general purpose computing hardware as capable of playing games and hence 'gaming hardware', but looking at it another way, you could only count systems which have actually played games requiring more dedicated hardware (i.e. something we'd probably consider a 'gaming PC') via online platforms like Steam/Origin/etc, which is still terribly unreliable.

The whole comparison seems quite nebulous and meaningless TBH.

To me it just sounds a bit like comparing what sort of vehicle people prefer to race, but comparing F1 cars to production car sales and concluding production cars are the more popular racing platform.

Edit: And the smartphone/tablet part speaks volumes TBH. If you add them up (since they're mostly compatible) you get 34% so you could say mobile platforms 'dominate'. Does someone playing Angry Birds once make it count as this ambiguous gaming platform?

I don't "trust" these predictions. Not long ago PC gaming and PC in general was doomed, the obituary was written..... And now look at where PC hardware is, even without software to push it forward a lot.

I remember a statistical comparison that was done a year ago and to compare how the pc gaming market was growing in comparison to other devices was to look at games sold for devices. It wasn't particularly fair however because a tablet can't buy and play crysis etc.

Surely we should start a public health campaign :)

Seriously, nice numbers, it's nice to watch something like this grow that way

Gabe Newell was like Jesus at the end of a dark tunnel. He said to me "put down the xbox, and slowly step into the PC gaming light."