Why PC gaming is suddenly a thing?

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't even know why you have that avatar you hated the game and talk shit about every TB or RtwP game worth playing. I think you are a contrarian and hope you either get better or die. Good day sir.

not my fault you only like shit games
go play some gothic 3 or something idk whatever caused you to get so butthurt over me pointing out that PC gaming was shit in the 00s

 

[Bigg Boss]

I SAID GOOD DAY SIR!

 

[Bloodeyes]

The PC market is growing because of Steam and because the new consoles aren't available for sale. Here's why that's not actually a good thing:

Consoles are sold at a loss with the knowledge that money will be recouped from game sales. A couple years ago we had a lot of hype about an upcoming new generation of consoles... from Sony. Not much from Microsoft. Microsoft invested nothing in exclusives and just slapped an Xbox logo on a random piece of square plastic. Fuck all hype, nobody talking about their console.

Then the consoles "released" only supply was absurdly low, enough that almost the entire supply was able to be absorbed by scalpers. Scarcity is normal in some areas in the first couple weeks of a console release but two fucking years later there's still no consoles on shelves. Deathly silence from media on this really. A scant few articles but this is a big deal to a lot of people. Next to no communication from the firms themselves. Very hush hush which is unbelievable. This freaks me the fuck out, not just because I'm poor and my computer can't play the latest games, but because I see the consoles as a kind of canary in a coal mine.

Where there's a will there's a way, and when a multibillion dollar multinational corporation wills something they ought to be able to make it happen. Prima facie the incentive is there - whoever gets their consoles on store shelves first grabs the whole market. Even lifelong fanboys aren't going to stay brand loyal at this point. It's been two fucking years. There's no will to increase supply because consoles cost money to sell. They're not a profitable product they're an investment, a purchase by Microsoft and Sony of a customer's future spending on videogames. Neither Microsoft nor Sony want to invest in a market they know is not going to exist.

We're not going to be buying any videogames, we're going to be way too fucking poor to do anything but pirate our shit. Who buys videogames when they are starving to death? The entire industry is going to collapse. There's hell on the way and Bill Gates knows it because he's right in the center of creating it. Sony obviously figured that shit out too though, because somewhere along the line they slowed production to a trickle. That's why there was never any new Xbox hype. Next to zero marketing. Consoles are done, the business model doesn't work for impoverished consumers. PS4/Xbox 1 was the last generation.

I hope I'm wrong and that in a month or two I'm picking up a new PS5. I'd feel like maybe all the structures of our society weren't being purposefully demolished around us, that those who run the world weren't hell bent on making us suffer and die as part of some insane power grab. Here's hoping. That afro-Hispanic Spiderman game looks pretty sweet right about now.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I remember that in 2010 I used my PC for gaming and a bunch of PS3 for work (as a cheap way to have a Cell based parallel computing cluster).

 

[Great Deceiver]

Rusty has a point here. How the fuck are the likes of Lionheart, Beyond Divinity, vanilla Gothic 3 and mediocrity that is NWN 2 "quality PC exclusives" from the era? And many of those other games listed are strategy games which can't be properly played/enjoyed on consoles.

That's the whole fucking point, isn't it?

 

[Zlaja]

Rusty has a point here. How the fuck are the likes of Lionheart, Beyond Divinity, vanilla Gothic 3 and mediocrity that is NWN 2 "quality PC exclusives" from the era? And many of those other games listed are strategy games which can't be properly played/enjoyed on consoles.

That's the whole fucking point, isn't it?

What I meant was that those strategy games were not PC exclusives because the PC scene was thriving at the time, but rather because releasing them on consoles was obtuse and required total UI redesign.

 

[Konjad]

PC gaming was FINE in the 00s guys, you heard it here first.
We had Gothic 3, NWN2, and uhh... modded Oblivion!

And Arcanum, Prelude to Darkness, Bloodlines, Gothics, The Void, Pathologic, ArmA series, and so on... But because Gothic 3 was also released so good games don't count?

 

[Suicidal]

To be fair Gothic 3 is better than 99% of the trash that gets shat out by AAA companies nowadays.

 

[Zlaja]

PC gaming was FINE in the 00s guys, you heard it here first.
We had Gothic 3, NWN2, and uhh... modded Oblivion!

And Arcanum, Prelude to Darkness, Bloodlines, Gothics, The Void, Pathologic, ArmA series, and so on... But because Gothic 3 was also released so good games don't count?

The discussion was about the 2003-2011 period. That excludes Arcanum, Prelude to Darkness and the first 2 Gothics (but not Arcania).

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

I was always a pc gaymer with consoles to play with friends, i stopped caring about consoles when Sony gave it's back to jap studios but now every single jap game comes out on PC too, so i mainly use portable consoles for untranslated games like the vita and 3ds. I own a switch but i don't like it really much because it's too big to be a portable console.

 

[Freedos]

PC Gaming was always a thing. With better times, worse times, but always a thing neverless.

Now...well, indie and small developers, digital distribution, crowfunding, multiplataform trend...take it to this point: revival of genres like rpgs, turn based strategy games, space sims, point & click adventure games and more along with a lot of games of console genres almost non-existant on PC in the past (fighting games, jrpgs, beat' em up games, metroidvanias, etc) and more experimental and "weird" ones.

Sooo...yeah, always a thing, but now with much better health than, I suposse, Xbox 360/PS3 era, when pc gaming was "dying" (not really, but with some genres barely surviving) and consoles were "better than ever" (neither in my opinion, fans of genres like jrpgs and survival horror games can disagree with this, or a console non-x360 owner).

 

[Lizard]

Rusty has a point here. How the fuck are the likes of Lionheart, Beyond Divinity, vanilla Gothic 3 and mediocrity that is NWN 2 "quality PC exclusives" from the era? And many of those other games listed are strategy games which can't be properly played/enjoyed on consoles.

That's the whole fucking point, isn't it?

What I meant was that those strategy games were not PC exclusives because the PC scene was thriving at the time, but rather because releasing them on consoles was obtuse and required total UI redesign.

The major strategy gaming pubs/devs that are still around today and successful are the ones who focused on exclusive strategy games for pc and mabye the occasional console side project during that era. Firaxis, Relic, Paradox, and Creative Assembly which is now the biggest developer in the UK. Ensemble Studios went from making one of the most popular stratey game franchises to the console only Halo Wars, then chasing the MMO and dying. EA's strategy studios that moved from occasionally porting games to consoles some time after to near simultaneous release are all dead/buried. Only C&C got a second chance with a misguided attempt to chase esports, another failure. For Gas Powered Games Supreme Commander only got a shitty port more than a year after the pc release, then Supreme Commander 2 came out near simultaneous with 360 and bombed. Then they did AoE online and went out of business.

People who released strategy games for PC did so because that's where the audience was, and catering to consoles first by designing for them meant either your studio being crippled financially or killed off. The core pc audience was needed to fund these games/studios and was sufficient.
Devs who abandoned their core, and became too greedy got what they deserved. We saw the same thing more recently with console franchises to mobile, although whether or not that was as much of a failure I don't know. I still delighted in seeing how assmad console tards were now that they were on the receiving end of decline.
People who sold us the lie that pc games need console sales to even get made/exist are copers who were just trying to justify the pub/studio's greed. Once these studios get bought out/switch to consoles they always get bloated and expect pc gamers to be a stepping stone to the console big money promised land then end up sinking within their first few steps.

Now we'll watch as the successful studios I mentioned earlier fail from abandoning their core for progressive bullshit/greed/fads/and bloated studios.

 

[Sarathiour]

There's a lot of strategy games I recognize too, but I'm not too into the genre to know which are good.

AoM/Warcraft 3/RoN/DoW, and that's only for rts.

 

[Sarathiour]

PC gaming was FINE in the 00s guys, you heard it here first.
We had Gothic 3, NWN2, and uhh... modded Oblivion!

And Arcanum, Prelude to Darkness, Bloodlines, Gothics, The Void, Pathologic, ArmA series, and so on... But because Gothic 3 was also released so good games don't count?

The discussion was about the 2003-2011 period. That excludes Arcanum, Prelude to Darkness and the first 2 Gothics (but not Arcania).

It's well known here that it was considered a period of drought for rpg, and one of the reason DAO is still discussed is because there was pretty much nothing else at that time.

 

[lycanwarrior]

The dark side is that, while Steam is good value, people forget it was originally forced on Half-Life 2 owners, just like Ubisoft and EA's unwelcome stores now being built into their games.

This is why my steam library only contains a few games. I have plenty of gog games which I have backed up on physical media, but when HL2 came out with the steam code in the box, I was ropeable. I didn't play that game for years, refusing to jump on the digital DRM bandwagon.

Funny thing, my cousin recently gave me a bunch of his old game boxes (with games, manuals, etc) going back into the 90's, and one of them is an original HL2 box. I tried adding it on to the steam library, and it said "already owned", and he cannot remember his steam account or password lol.

Yep, just started buying more games from GoG a few months ago due to those very reasons. I still buy from other storefronts but will start prioritizing GoG more and more if possible.

 

[lycanwarrior]

There is a perception that PC gaming, previously a very imaginative/dynamic scene, stagnated for a while somewhere in the 2000s (the industry blames piracy), and 7th Generation consoles boomed instead. It was around the time when things like Halo 3 got massive launch events probably. Maybe it isn't as true as people think, looking at the graph in materialistic terms rather than in terms of quality, but I recall there were less games that wanted to play coming out as PC exclusives.

Boomer shooters, RTSs, CRPGs, Space Sims, Star Wars, Star Trek games, felt like they were getting thinner on the ground... at least good ones, as the 90s had been a golden age for many of those genres. Prospective RPG devs elected to make MMOs like LOTRO, SWG, etc.

Right or wrong, but the big AAA companies likely wouldn't have even bothered to continue supporting the PC gaming market if it wasn't for the advances in DRM and digital storefronts. Not to mention more and more AAA games going towards the "live service" model makes pirating them much more difficult.

As much as I love Indie/AA games, it is still AAA games that the majority of "consumers" or casual gamers tend to go for.

 

[NerevarineKing]

PC gaming only dipped in popularity for a bit at the turn of the century.

 

[somerandomdude]

Gaming is actually one of the cheaper hobbies out there, even if you factor in spending $500 a year on PC upgrades, or a $2000 PC every 4 years, that's peanuts compared to lot of hobbies. I'm still rocking the PC I built in 2017, and it still plays any new games at 1440p resolution at 60fps or higher. Reusing some parts I had from the old rig, like the PSU, case, DVD/BluRay drive, it only set me back $1400 and some change, and I put a 1080ti in it, which still holds up even today. I was going to upgrade to the RTX 3080, but the chip shortages and scalpers priced me totally out of the market. The last rig I built was $1400ish for the whole thing, I'm not spending more than that on just the GPU. By the time prices dropped back to (somewhat) relative sanity, the new GPUs are right around the corner. I'll try to get one (even if I have to overpay a little bit), but if I can't, then I'm prepared to simply upgrade everything but the GPU and slap this GTX 1080ti in it, and use it until it dies. New CPU would certainly help me a lot with emulation of some of these later systems.

 

[Semiurge]

The PC market is growing because of Steam and because the new consoles aren't available for sale. Here's why that's not actually a good thing:

Consoles are sold at a loss with the knowledge that money will be recouped from game sales. A couple years ago we had a lot of hype about an upcoming new generation of consoles... from Sony. Not much from Microsoft. Microsoft invested nothing in exclusives and just slapped an Xbox logo on a random piece of square plastic. Fuck all hype, nobody talking about their console.

Then the consoles "released" only supply was absurdly low, enough that almost the entire supply was able to be absorbed by scalpers. Scarcity is normal in some areas in the first couple weeks of a console release but two fucking years later there's still no consoles on shelves. Deathly silence from media on this really. A scant few articles but this is a big deal to a lot of people. Next to no communication from the firms themselves. Very hush hush which is unbelievable. This freaks me the fuck out, not just because I'm poor and my computer can't play the latest games, but because I see the consoles as a kind of canary in a coal mine.

Where there's a will there's a way, and when a multibillion dollar multinational corporation wills something they ought to be able to make it happen. Prima facie the incentive is there - whoever gets their consoles on store shelves first grabs the whole market. Even lifelong fanboys aren't going to stay brand loyal at this point. It's been two fucking years. There's no will to increase supply because consoles cost money to sell. They're not a profitable product they're an investment, a purchase by Microsoft and Sony of a customer's future spending on videogames. Neither Microsoft nor Sony want to invest in a market they know is not going to exist.

We're not going to be buying any videogames, we're going to be way too fucking poor to do anything but pirate our shit. Who buys videogames when they are starving to death? The entire industry is going to collapse. There's hell on the way and Bill Gates knows it because he's right in the center of creating it. Sony obviously figured that shit out too though, because somewhere along the line they slowed production to a trickle. That's why there was never any new Xbox hype. Next to zero marketing. Consoles are done, the business model doesn't work for impoverished consumers. PS4/Xbox 1 was the last generation.

I hope I'm wrong and that in a month or two I'm picking up a new PS5. I'd feel like maybe all the structures of our society weren't being purposefully demolished around us, that those who run the world weren't hell bent on making us suffer and die as part of some insane power grab. Here's hoping. That afro-Hispanic Spiderman game looks pretty sweet right about now.

TLDR for "We'd, as the west, better bring production back where it belongs, including microchips. No matter the cost. Covid was just a hint of the supplication to come unless we kick the chink habit."

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

I feel PC should be winning just by putting in the prefix "mod support".
When I go around asking random people on the streets in a screeching voice why the hell they enjoy Skyrim, their reasoning usually starts with "Akshually, unmodded Skyrim is pretty shitty, BUT with Fabio Hair and No Undies mod..."
Can you even mod it on consoles easily?
If not, it seems like most people played it on PCs.

I personally would prefer console death. Not because I'm petty or anything, but because it actively messes with a lot of games that could be so much better if they weren't made with console optimization in mind.
They would not need to go entirely, just back to their niche that they had back in my day. A SNES was fine as a children's toy when I was too young for a real PC yet, and for that alone it was great, but I'll never forget how awestruck I was when I saw a real graphics design software at work when all I had tried prior was Mario Paint.
(Mario Paint still awesome for children to discover their artistic aptitude btw)

 

[Maxie]

thankfully Nintendo is too smart to buy into the PC meme
every next Nintendo machine has been sold with the intention to introduce some new way of gaming interaction, with starting line-ups of exclusives showcasing what the hardware can do, but not too concerned with raw power since the Wii
like it or not, the fact that Nintendo sells an experience incompatible with the PC keeps them not only afloat, but quite literally put them back on the map after the Gamecube fiasco
it's Sony that slept through this and tried peddling a PC ersatz, Xbox has never been a profit-driven project

 

[Sarathiour]

What a dumb take

Nitendo stay afloat because they focus on a handheld and casual experience, for which you indeed do not need powerful hardware. Nothing prevent you from emulating shit on a decent pc.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

nintendo stays afloat due to the massive western pedo customerbase

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Eh I guess you can, but do a lot of people really do that?
As much as I hated wiiii motion controls, they were a really strong selling point for the people who had one, and also allegedly worked better than kinect or whatever the competition offered. The wiiii uuu was a flop, because people didn't understand it was a new thing and not just a wii peripheral, but the original wii I think outsold its competitors. Emulating something like wii fit on PC seems rather pointless.
I did not own a wii, but the DS with touch screen and the two screens I did love quite a bit to have on lengthy nightshifts whenever there's a lull in the action, since I can't get to sleep anyhow. Emulating the DS on PC is possible but I never wanted to do it because I find it unwieldy.
On the other hand, PS 1/2 games seem almost tailor made to play on an emulator and you lose basically nothing for doing so.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The Switch market is overflowing with games originally developed for PC.

 

[Spectral Pontifex]

Naturally, PC gaming is winning because you have shops like piratebay that offer games at a significant discount.