There are over 900 million PC gamers in the world.

PCs have 43% marketshare in the total game console market. Yes, that includes marketshare against the Nintendo Switch.

There’s a bit of a bubble of non-gaming in this forum, but gaming is definitely a top use case for PCs.

Just walk into your local Best Buy in the laptop section and count up how many of the laptops are marketed as gaming systems. That should give you a rough idea of how many systems are purchased with gaming as the primary intent.

Sure, HDR is a niche at this point in time, but technologies like OLED and mini LED are increasingly common. If you buy a gaming laptop in 2026 at most reasonable price points it’s very likely to have an OLED monitor.

Example: Legion 5a Gen 11 AMD, price on Lenovo’s site is $1500, has an OLED monitor. You can buy OLED gaming monitors below $500 nowadays, so a lot of people upgrading have that as their next upgrade path…if not today, then tomorrow.

On that subject, most people just use the copy of Windows that comes with the computer, so the whole debate about Windows 10 is perhaps not worth having in the first place. Microsoft most likely just misjudged the pace of hardware replacement especially in the AI era where computer sales have slowed.

▲

throwawaytea 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Calling 1 in 7 people on Earth a gamer is a stretch, unless we're calling preloaded trivial game players, gamers.. and even then I'm not sure.

▲

Grombobulous 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/420621/number-of-pc-game...

https://www.demandsage.com/most-played-games-right-now/

Some of it is unclear about multi-platform splits and mobile gaming but I don’t think I’m incredibly far off.

Gamers across all platform estimated at over 3 billion: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-gamers

▲

throwawaytea 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

Half the world's population is easily too young or too old or too poor or too rich to be gamers. So that 3 billion stat alone shows me people love just counting any moments spent in a video game at all for who knows what reason on any super bad quality 'game' as gamers.

	▲	Grombobulous 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Anyone with a smartphone can be a gamer. I think my mom playing Wordle on her smartphone does indeed make her a gamer.

▲

hypfer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes and how many of those people have the cash for cutting edge tech?

And how much does that cutting edge tech truly matter for the core game experience. I think the steam hardware survey might have some answers there and can tell us for which level of hardware currently developed games are being optimized for.

And that's just the currently developed ones. Not the massive backlog that existed before OLED or microLED HDR screens.

Tiny group. Tiny.

___

Btw, super lame to try to improve your argument after the fact with edits, but, well. Anyway.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

	▲	Grombobulous an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Certainly, I agree that most gamers do not have cutting edge tech. The cutting edge tech does improve the core experience. Quite a lot. You do have to have the money for it, though, and like anything else, diminishing returns on investment. Steam hardware survey shows Windows 11 gained 2% this month over Windows 10. That’s a significant rate of change. I recognize that you don’t like my use of edits, however, they are part of this platform and I’m not using them to diss anyone or engage in any kind of negative conversation. Just trying to make my point and support it.