RPG News - PC Sales on the Rebound

The NY Times has an article that claims PC games sales are on the rebound.  It uses the single example of one Bennett Kirschner buying Civ4 instead of a console game and then goes on to look at various NPD figures.  As is often the case, it isn't clear if console hardware is included in some of the numbers and it also isn't clear if the NPD figures are using different criteria, but the main thrust is that World of Warcraft is selling a lot of copies and PC game sales are up:

Anita Frazier, an industry analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm, noted that in the first two months of 2007, domestic retail sales of PC games reached $203 million, a 48 percent increase over the $136.8 million in the period a year earlier. She noted that these figures do not include revenue generated by PC game sales online, or online subscriptions to play PC games.

“Yes, it does look like a fluke, doesn’t it?” Ms. Frazier said. “Rest assured it’s not.”

She said the bulk of this surge in sales is rooted in the role-playing video game genre that, itself, grew 43 percent over the same period last year. “The robust performance we’re seeing in PC game sales can be tied to several key titles across several genres,” she said, “but we’d be remiss not to address the continued success of World of Warcraft.”