Industry analysts DFC Intelligence have revealed that PC gaming is actually doing pretty well, and has generated around $20 billion in software sales for 2012.

We don’t have a breakdown of the sales so far, but it would have been interesting to see what brought in a lot of revenue. EA’s charts last year revealed that social gaming took the largest share in the revenue chart.

These figures were found by the PC Gaming Alliance which features notable members like Intel, and they have reported that it’s a 8% increase in sales from 2011, and high profile games like Diablo 3, Minecraft and Guild Wars 2 contributed a lot of revenue.

Diablo 3 itself sold 12 million units according to Activision Blizzard and say what you want about the game’s quality, the game was a massive commercial success. Minecraft and Guild War 2 are also comfortably over 5 million sales each on the PC.

China’s prospects as a major PC market is looking good as $7 billion revenue came from that country itself. The PC market is expected to grow to $25.7 billion by 2016.

Considering the immense sales the Xbox 360 sales has had in the past few years in the US, it is easy to see that happening, despite the massive sales Nintendo’s 7th generation home console has enjoyed over the years, having sold over 90 million units worldwide and leading the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in the worldwide race by almost 20 million units.

And with Nintendo’s focus having shifted to the Wii U, the Xbox 360 will have an advantage over it, considering both Microsoft and third parties will be giving it proper support for at least two more years.

“Amazingly Microsoft didn’t have to do much exaggerating as in its seventh full year on the market the Xbox 360 had a stellar performance,” said DFC Intelligence. “For its generation, the Xbox 360, not the Wii, will end up as the number one selling console system in the US.”

The firm projects that the XBox 360 will have lifetime sales of 46.1 million units in the US, slightly ahead of the Wii, which is forecasted to sell 42.1 million units, while the PS3 sells 33.5 million units.

“Shockingly it was in the later years of its life that the Xbox 360 really took off,” DFC continued. “The success of Microsoft and the Xbox 360 during the past two years highlights a radical changing of the guard in the game industry. Much has been made about a steady video game sales decline in the past three years.”

“In reality the decline has mainly been due to the aging console systems and more importantly because of Nintendo’s collapse,” said the research firm. “Unlike Microsoft, Nintendo has been in a major downward cycle, much of it self-inflicted. Nintendo’s spin for the Wii U focused on how it made more revenue than the Wii at launch. Of course, the Wii was supply constrained at launch and sold at a lower price so that is not surprising. The reality is that many Wii U systems were sitting unsold on shelves at year end. Consumers love games more than ever but a new order of game providers is resulting in market shifts that are proving painful for Nintendo and other established game companies.”

It is interesting how the PS3 lags behind in the US, considering Sony recently announced that it had overtaken the 360 in the units that had been shipped worldwide.

[GIBiz]