A DigiTimes report today indicates that even though the gaming notebook market is expected to grow in 2019, it won't grow at as quick a rate as before. Meanwhile, gaming motherboards and graphics cards will stay flat for the year, and gaming desktops will "hardly grow significantly," according to the report.
DigiTimes cited "industry sources" and said the gaming notebook market is projected to grow 10 percent throughout 2019. In any other category that would be considered a success, especially with so many other device types declining in sales, but that's a huge drop from the 20 percent annual growth the market has enjoyed for the last 6-7 years, the publication's sources said.
DigiTimes' sources blamed expected slowed growth on well, nearly everything. DigiTimes pointed to "limited upgrades in new processors and graphic cards, the lack of great games to stimulate demand, rapid development of mobile games, global economic slowdown resulting from the US-China trade war and demand slowdown in terminal markets."
Note that DigiTimes' report is based on unidentified "industry sources." It's not clear from where these sources are getting their information or for what purpose they shared it with DigiTimes.
In context with the rest of the tech industry's woes, however, slower demand for gaming systems and components isn't farfetched. Part of the blame lies with Intel. The company's 14nm processor shortage has been identified as the cause of lower-than-expected sales for desktop, laptop and motherboard companies and even Microsoft. Some have turned to AMD--and that list continues to grow--but other companies have simply had to wait for Intel to increase production of its CPUs.
Those problems are compounded by declining interest in Nvidia's graphics cards. The company had to revise its revenue guidance for 4Q18 due to "weaker than forecasted sales of its Gaming and Datacenter platforms." Many people don't think Nvidia's Turing architecture offers enough of a performance increase to justify its higher price, so they simply aren't rushing to upgrade.
When you consider all of those factors, a 50 percent drop in growth for the gaming laptop segment, mild growth for gaming desktops and flat growth for gaming motherboards and graphics cards seem more like a small miracle than a disaster.
