Blizzard: PC gaming "super healthy"
"It keeps on growing," says Pardo.
World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2 creator Blizzard has rebuffed the suggestion that PC gaming is dead.
In fact, PC gaming is in rude health, Blizzard executive vice president Rob Pardo insisted in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
"The industry is as healthy as ever," he said. "From our experience our games continue to sell better than the last ones. I always laugh because as long as I've been in the games industry, every year I'm asked 'is PC gaming dead?' But it keeps on growing despite the fact it's been pronounced dead 20 times."
Pardo has good reason to be positive. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty sold three million copies worldwide during its first month on sale, is the fastest-selling real-time strategy game ever, and the best-selling PC game so far this year.
Of course, it may not end up as the best-selling PC game of 2010. Blizzard's own World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm releases in December.
World of Warcraft itself is the world's most popular MMORPG; more than 12 million people subscribe to it.
Pardo, however, understands why many believe PC gaming to be in trouble: it's because digital download sales aren't included in charts.
"The PC games industry and the gaming industry is super healthy," he said. "It's always been tough to do metrics in any industry and especially once you start having a lot of digital distribution it's hard to capture the real metrics of the health of the industry. Even if you look at something like NPD there's still an estimation involved there, they don't really have real-time data from every retail chain. By necessity they're guessing."