Research firm Forrester's latest report on the video games industry, entitled "North American Video Gaming: Surviving a Midlife Slowdown", summarizes a video game related mail survey of over 10,000 US and Canadian households. The report provides numerical evidence that PC gaming is not declining but is in fact already the dominant platform for video gaming and the penetration of PC gaming into North American households is expected to rise.

According to the survey, 39% of all households use PCs for playing video games - this group makes up the vast majority of the 48% of households that have any sort of video games hardware. For comparison: 30% of households in Canada and 37% of households in the U.S. have some form of console based game hardware. The reason that PC gaming is more prevalent is probably due to the multi-tasking nature of personal computers. If it's there (for whatever reason: word processing, doing the taxes), why not use it for playing games as well?

The second major statistic that the survey uncovered was that 53% of all households that own PCs play games on the PC. We're not sure that this is a positive statistic. This means that a vast swathe of PC owning households do not play games on their PCs. Publishers should aim to target these non-gaming PC owners and there's certainly a lot that developers and publishers can do to solve this problem. At the moment, PC gaming is a complex affair that can confuse even the most hardcore of gamers. The PC gaming experience must improve if a greater PC owning audience is to be captured.