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"No, PC sales are dropping, not some sub category, the WHOLE THING."

LOL

The report points out that China is the fastest-growing and largest market for PC games with nearly $7 billion of revenue. Not only does China have a rapidly-growing economy, the console market is non-existent there, giving rise to PC as the dominant platform.

There are over one billion PC gamers in the world now, and DFC expects the industry to grow to $25.7 billion by 2016. As Matt Ployhar, PCGA president pointed out at a press conference yesterday, "you need to add three consoles to get close to that figure."

http://www.shacknews.com/article/78421/report-pc-gaming-software-sales-reached-20-billion-in-2012#

Also, digital sales are not tracked like box stores. Steam (Valve), GOG, Origin,Amazon,etc... are growing in digital sales.

Now you’re desperately sliding around the point. PC sales are down, PERIOD. China MIGHT cause a bounce but that’s the future, and you have to deal with the fact that China’s economy is built on knockoffs so even if they do start buying lots of PCs they probably won’t be name brand PCs or have name brand parts in them.

I didn’t say anything about the sale of software. That’s a red herring. The software market is fine, really even the PC market is fine. A lot of industries would love to have a sales slump that results in 300 million sales a year.

And no actually the HARDWARE drives the hardware market. Software gets made to run on the hardware companies have a reasonable expectation of their customers owning. If that hardware is compatible with the previous generation of hardware (evolutionary not revolutionary) then that’s a wider range of compatibility, and less reasons to upgrade. But the software is written for the hardware. And again the example you provided shows it. Crysis 3 is the big hot new game that runs on 6 year old CPUs supplemented with 3 year old video cards. They wrote it for the hardware their customers have, and their customers are living in the world where the hardware is no longer leaping forward and making itself obsolete every 3 or 4 years.