I was doing some reading as I lay here and vegetate, and came across an old joke where people proclaimed PC Gaming was dead. One could argue the PC gaming market is the strongest its ever been. Of course we know it’s a combination of factors, but I want you to choose the one biggest factor to play into PC Gamings strength and renaissance:
Steam is my vote. It made it extremely easy to find, buy, and manage PC games at a time that retail stores were starting to stop stocking PC games and instead utilizing the shelf space for console games.
Steam sales, the rise of the Unity store reducing the cost of entry and boosting potential quality of indie games, and the fact that PC gaming has become much cheaper over the past couple years. You used to need a powerful computer and $400+ videocard. These days any cheapo i3 and relatively inexpensive 1050ti will handily outperform all consoles.
Everybody owns a laptop. When eGPUs finally take off and you can plug one into your laptop PC gaming will see another resurgence.
I would put a decent chunk of my money on the decline of console games being the main driver for PC games. Console manufactures and developers left a big gap in the market which PC games were able to fill because they could be developed faster, with better graphics and usually cheaper.
In many ways I see the PC gaming boom as a shuffling of a certain gaming audience. They have gone from PC to console back to PC again over the space of 20 years.
Price competitive with consoles and have other uses. As an entry platform, easier to rationalize buying than buying a console due to the other uses. Since it is portable, there is more time available to use it to … waste that time. If you will be waiting in an airport for 2 hours, no one brings a console. But …
That’s a very good point-- in addition to indies, I would add the popularity of games that play well on most laptops like LoL and WoW. And of course, integrated GPUs are much more performant these days. They used to be complete garbage.
Rod, what do you mean by the decline of console games? Have consoles dipped in popularity in recent years?
I suspect churn in the console space helps as well. Remember Microsoft’s console systems before they nosedived themselves into irrelevance? Remember when the PS3 was a struggling third or fourth place contender? Remember when we first heard the word Wii, and then a U got stuck on the end, and now there’s a Switch, and what am I supposed to do with these motion controllers? All that turmoil can’t be easy for software developers, so, hey, the PC is the same as it’s ever been. Let’s make our game for that in order to hedge our bets.
PC gaming’s never been dead, of course, and the indie games have been a thing for ages. But in terms of AAA gaming migrating back to PC in a much stronger way, I think we can blame a confluence of factors:
More PC-like architecture in consoles - makes porting much easier.
Consoles’ slow technological advance - makes PC technically superior…this generation, practically from the outset…while making it cheap to get a gaming-capable PC together.
The increasingly massive budgets of AAA development - makes multiplatform releases practically mandatory
I’ve always been a PC-primary gamer but those factors combine to make the latest generation of consoles completely irrelevant to me since I can play the vast majority of releases on my preferred platform and there are too many of those for me to miss the occasional console-exclusive gem.
Consoles have frozen tech levels for large swaths of time. As such they have held PC hardware creep down as software is more aimed at the current console tech rather than the olden days of bleeding edge churn. This makes it so rigs last longer and you can accumulate more and more games on the cheap through Steam/ key activation sales without spending a dime on anything for years and years. Also for parallel reasons you have FtP models making extensive gaming on the cheap (theoretically) in popular MOBA games. Finally Consoles have hardware update grind with memory adjustments and mid gen tech updates.
While it sounds like I am naming several items it all comes down to… Other: PC gaming has become cheaper while at the same time easier.
It helps that I can play modern games on a modest gaming machine for almost six years. When I gamed as a young adult it was around 6 months before my hardware felt outdated and unable to even launch the latest announced game.
I say Indies helped a lot : great quality, lots to choose from and often any machine can play so many of them.
I’d say ‘Steam’ overall, but because it was Steam that allowed the rise of indie games (and early access - at least when early access works). Back in the day, it was a competition to have the next AAA game, with a bigger budget and greater hardware demands. Suddenly, a gazillion “C-64” style games come on the scene with massively lower price-points - many actually being good. Many can get just as much enjoyment out of Minecraft/Terraria/Stardew/Factorio as they would out of the next $60 blockbuster and play it on any potato.
Consoles have lost the entirety of the “easier to use” factor they had for a very long time. Gone are the days of “put the game in the system and start playing” - now you almost always have to wait for the game to install (with preloads for digital copies still being more uncommon than not), download a multi-gigabyte day-zero update (which is still often a separate download when you buy a digital copy), wait for that to install, and finally start playing your game. Most people in the US still don’t have good enough Internet to make that take anything less than several hours, and if you’re in that situation and bought a digital copy, you’re probably better off going to bed and playing your game after work or school the next day.
Meanwhile, over in Steam land, you can usually preload major new releases, and patches are generally rolled into the game download. Even when a game doesn’t offer a preload option, you can just launch the Steam app on your phone and tell it to start downloading the game to your computer once it’s available. It’s just more convenient and the games generally run better than on consoles.
The pricing differences certainly help, but it’s not the deep deals so much as deals existing at all. There was a very brief period on consoles when you could actually see better sales than on PC (the Tomb Raider reboot hit $20 on PS3 long before it got that low on PC, for example), but prices are back to just being better all around on PC.
Resurgence of AA tier games (indie or small publisher) really helped. Before that it seemed like every third indie game was a puzzler or a clone of Audiosurf. Unity definitely played a big role in this. It’s hard to attribute this revival to a single factor though, I’d say that PC ports of console games now are significantly better than they were in the dark period of 2003-2009 and nearly every big release these days also gets a PC version (fuck you Sony).
I’d say backdoor DRM and product control via Steam that allowed publishers to feel safe investing in the platform and gave smaller developers an easy marketplace to support. Maybe 2008 on?
Absolutely, 100% the answer - imo the only answer - is Steam. Steam saved PC gaming. Steam IS PC gaming. It’s not just the most reliable delivery platform for digital games but a marketplace where experimental games from smaller dev houses, games which wouldn’t have been able to get on a console, or if they had, probably wouldn’t have been near as successful, were allowed to be self-published or small house published with minimal advertising and still find runaway success.
And other than the technical wizardry of being by far the easiest, most reliable and hassle-free platform, Steam is the only major games platform that is Publisher Neutral. If a Microsoft or an EA platform had “won” they would have had little incentive to help indie gaming succeed. Not one major platform - other than the iOS App store - has been anything but a wasteland of depressing shovelware and first party exclusive AAA games, without exception to this very day, because traditional publishers see little reason to make their storefronts anything but barely functional kiosks for their own products and probably begrudge every dollar spent maintaining digital storefronts.
I have no problem going to the mat over this distinction. Had Sony, Microsoft, EA, or some other major publisher become the most successful digital platform, they would immediately lock out their AAA competitors from their platform at best, and lock it down completely from all third party games at worst; but imo they never wanted digital gaming to become a thing at all in the first place and the truth is they only have digital storefronts to begin with because of Steam. Steam is almost the equivalent (imo) of a “Gamer’s Operating System”. PC gaming was dying even then and is now completely and utterly dead at retail (thanks in part to Steam!), and MS and Sony were probably much more inclined to let PC gaming die off entirely and capture all gaming onto their proprietary platforms then save it by sticking their necks out making expensive, high maintenance digital storefronts. Valve screwed up the equation so much that they’re also now proponents of digital gaming, and the pricing pressure of Steam has affected the entire industry from top to bottom, favoring “big win” low budget indie games at the cost of middle tier knock-off studios. It’s even possible the only reason there is a digital store on consoles at all is a consequence of Steam.
The death of AA and A games, and the rise of small dev house indie games, is entirely, 100% due to Steam, and in a world where MS and Sony control all “core gaming” those indie games would simply never have happened at all.
