Toms Hardware wrote their article to reflect the Bloomberg article so I understand this Running Total thing; however, I do not understand why Bloomberg did this. This article should have been extended further as there are many types of gamers. This article was composed in a way that suggests if you play games at all, you play games on your PC, a console with a home theatre system, and while you're on the go via phone and/or portable gaming console, which this may be true for some, but not many gamers – certainly not all gamers.
For version two of the article the author should split the gamer in to realistic categories and create unique running totals for each category, and then one category for the super gamer who buys them all.
My personal observation is that most people pick one game style and stick with it. Meaning, you're either a console gamer or a PC gamer, rarely both, and if you do play both you still focus on one and skimp on the other.
Thus, we have a running total for the PC gamer. Although, it's expected that every American now have the internet and a PC; thus, to be objective as a journalist ought to be, you'd have to project the cost of an ideal gaming PC (as TH has done) and subtract cost of a low-end PC used for day-to-day computing. In doing so, you have created the proper projected total of a PC gamer.
Likewise with consoles, then with portable gaming... With portable gaming, I believe the statistics are showing that iOS games are out selling Nintendo game sales on the DS, which surpass Sony portable game sales as well. (correct me if that's wrong, can't recall that source, but i'm not a paid journalist!) So, the portable gaming world is being taken over by phones, which throws another kink into the mix. Who buys a phone with the purpose being to play games on it? You buy a phone so you have a phone, you want a phone with toys and games to entertain you during the 2-3 minutes of boredom while you wait on the bus, or wait in line at the store.
Home entertainment and internet costs... we need to be clear on this as well. Again, we're expected to be on the web, so we're expected to be paying monthly for internet and buying routers and wireless cards... Thus, this needs to be taken in to account and subtracted from the running total. You don't bump up your download rate to play games, you bump it up for multiple people or for downloading copious amounts of data. Home entertainment systems are often bought to entertain guests, watch films, and play games. If it's not exclusively the latter, than the former should be taken in to consideration and the running total should reflect such data.
That's a lot more work than doing a quick search on best buy's webpage and sorting by cost and selecting the most expensive items and throwing them into an excel data sheet, but that's what a journalist ought to do; it's their job.
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