PC and peripherals vendors have been aggressively expanding into the gaming markets of some Southeast Asia countries where e-sport has received much government support, with vendor including Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI), Acer, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell and Lenovo all expected to increase their investments in the region's gaming sector in 2019.

Although vendors are seeing high product ASPs in Europe and North America's gaming markets, these markets have been growing more slowly in the past couple of years. Meanwhile, consumers in China are mainly purchasing devices in the entry-level to mid-tier price ranges.

On the other hand, governments of Southeast Asia countries have been keen on promoting e-sport activities with Indonesia featuring e-sports as one of the demonstration sports of 2018 Asian Games. The Thailand government also established a department specifically for e-sports in 2018; the Philippines has added e-sports as one of the competitions in 2019 Southeast Asian Games it is hosting in November 2019; and Vietnam is currently the fastest growing gaming market.

Asustek with its Republic of Gamers (ROG) gaming brand was the largest gaming notebook vendor worldwide in December 2018, holding a 19.1% market share, according to the company. The company was also the leading vendor in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, having an average market share of 37.8% in many Southeast Asia countries. In Indonesia, Asustek had an around 60% market share.

In Europe, the Middle East and Africa's (EMEA) gaming market, Asustek was also the largest vendor, scoring an average market share of 23.5%, and it was the leading brand in Italy, France, Finland, Turkey, Hungary and Romania, it said.

However, if Asustek's entry-level gaming products are excluded, its shipments are similar to those from MSI. Seeing the business opportunities in Southeast Asia, Acer, Lenovo, Dell and HP have also been releasing new gaming machines as well as increasing their investments in channels, marketing, e-sport events and team sponsorships.

However, gaming PCs' shipment growth has been weakening since 2018 as most existing mid-range and high-end PC hardware is already capable of handling the majority of upcoming triple-A games, while prices for new hardware have continued rising.

Gaming products accounted for 3-5% of worldwide notebook shipments in 2018 and shipments of devices equipped with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU or above were around four million units and the overall number of gaming notebook shipments was 7-8 million units if entry-level models priced between US$700-1,100 were counted.

Gaming PC shipments had an on-year increase of 12-15% in 2018 and the growth is estimate to reach only 10% in 2019. With the market scale to expand in a rate slower amid growing competition between vendors, profitability from the gaming business is expected to weaken in the upcoming years. However, players are still expected to invest heavily in the field seeking good results.

Research firm Newzoo's recent report showed that the gaming industry will see its overall revenues surpass US$1 billion in 2019, while worldwide e-sport viewers are also expected to increase 15% from 2018 to arrive at 450 million people.