One of the few things that pretty much everyone in the games industry seems to be agreed on these days is that the PC games market is (to quote one industry veteran) "More fucked-up than a big fucked-up dog." Wherever you go, you'll hear software companies bemoaning the desperate state of their PC figures, and you'll see publishers who rely heavily on the PC side of their business posting some truly awful losses and looking longingly at the window-ledge of their 24^th-floor executive office suite.

Yet, on the other hand, the official figures show that the games business in general has never been in ruder financial health. It's only a couple of weeks since we saw the 1999 Q1 stats, which indicated 7 per cent growth on the same time last year, and a pretty phenomenal £200 million of business being done at a time when there were only really two triple-A titles released on any format in the entire quarter. So what the heck is everyone moaning about?

The first explanation you might expect to find would be that, since everyone's complaining about the PC and in ecstasy about the Playstation, presumably a huge majority of the total figure is being accounted for by the Sony console. And yet, it's not so - by units, the PC market is only fractionally smaller than the PS and N64 combined (3.48 million compared to 3.83 million for consoles), and even by value the difference is quite small, with the PC market worth 75 percent of the value of the supposedly booming console sector. (And bear in mind, of course, that when you take into account console licensing fees, which don't have to be paid on PC games, this means that the values of the two markets to publishers are pretty much identical.)

The next approach you might try to explain the discrepancy in perception, then, would perhaps be fragmentation. And here there seems - at least at first - to be a little more logic in operation. According to Chart-Track's figures, the first quarter of 1999 saw a total of 39 new Playstation games released, an embarrassing nine for the N64, and a faintly astonishing 436 on the PC - almost five new games every single day, compared to barely one a fortnight for those poor N64 owners. (It's also an interesting statistic when viewed in the context of packaging sizes and shelf space, but that's another argument altogether.) With almost 10 times as many games competing for more or less the same amount of sales, then, it seems easy to pinpoint where PC titles suffer. Except that then, you would logically expect a look at the individual format charts to show a big drop-off in figures for PC games as you moved down the list compared to PS ones, with dozens of games all selling smaller numbers compared to a few console titles shifting many more units each.

And yet, it's not so. In fact, the reverse is true. While examining the Q1-99 Full-Price Top 200 listings for each format, the few top sellers on console outstrip their PC counterparts by roughly 2 to 1 (PS No.1 Metal Gear Solid did 182,000 copies in the first quarter, while PC leader Championship Manager 3 could only manage 83,000, and the whole PS Top 5 did 407,000 compared to the PC's 205,000). However, the graph levels out quickly. By the time you get to games selling less than 10,000 copies (for which you only have to go to No. 31 in the PS listings and No. 27 on PC), the PC is actually the more consistent format, and as you go even further down the chart, the PC game figures are the ones which in fact hold up much better. PC sales don't get below 5,000 until No. 71 (as opposed to No. 51 on PS), and not below 3,000 until No. 111 (with the PS running out of steam at 69). While the few top titles sell twice as well on console, the games towards the bottom end of the PC charts do more than three times as well as their console counterparts. (The respective No. 200s shifting 600 on PS and 1800 on PC.)

So despite this dizzying array of stats, we're not much nearer an explanation. In fact, all the figures so far seem to suggest the PC market is actually a much healthier place to be than the console market - there's far less polarisation than on consoles (where if you don't have an absolute blockbuster your sales drop off at a terrifying gradient), and therefore much more chance of getting a nice medium-scale hit to keep the money rolling in steadily and paying the wage bills while you DO try for that big No. 1 smash. Okay, it's going to take you a bit longer to get your first Ferrari this way, but in this mature business of ours you would imagine people would have grown out of that whole get-rich-quick whizz-kid mentality by now anyway. (Wouldn't you?) Furthermore and relatedly, the PC market remains pretty steady throughout the whole year, while the console one shows a massive peak in Q4 (last year, console sales in Q4 were more than three-and-a-half times those of the previous quarter, while PC games less than doubled), giving you four times the chance of having a tick-over hit instead of everything being December-or-bust.

And while these figures all deal with the full-price market, it's no use expecting the budget sector to hold any answers either. In fact, budget accounts for a much higher proportion of PS sales than of PC sales - over 25% of revenues as opposed to about 15% on PC, which would seem to bias the situation still further in favour of the PC as far as publishing full-price games goes.

And lastly of the possible statistical explanations, it's not a monopoly thing, either. No one company has a stranglehold on the PC market, hoovering up all the cash and leaving the rest to fight for scraps. Only two companies take more than a 10 percent market share by value (and the biggest of those is Microsoft on 13 percent, with mostly non-games product), and the top 10 publishers between them account for only 63 per cent of all revenue. Compare with the console markets again, and you find Sony taking up a fifth of the PS market on their own, and the top 10 publishers raking in a whopping 84 percent of all the money made on the format. (And as you'd expect, the situation is even more terrifying on the N64, with a colossal 55 percent of the market's value going straight to Nintendo and another 19 percent to Acclaim, leaving everyone other than those two companies to fight over the paltry 26 percent share left over.)

(NOTICE FOR NERVOUS READERS: STATS OVER) But hang on. Maybe that's it all along. Maybe the reason that publishers don't like the PC market is exactly because there's no monopoly in it. After all, no matter how many units you might actually be shifting or how much profit you might be making, there's little opportunity for corporate willy-waving if you're just one of a couple of dozen companies all taking a three percent share of the market. (Especially given the industry's utterly inexplicable public secrecy about actual sales figures, contrasted with the rest of the leisure sector's keenness to tell you exactly how much cash Film X took at the box office in its first week). And without corporate willy-waving, no-one in the City is going to notice you exist, and hence isn't going to start paying patently stupid prices for your shares and attracting huge buyouts from the multinational entertainment behemoths that everyone so likes to sneer at, but at the same time wants so desperately to be absorbed by so they can escape from the "cultural cringe" that still afflicts the games business. ("Making one's money from Space Invaders just doesn't get one any respect down at the golf club, you know.")