PC gaming has been a thing since PCs began. Good devs will make good games, shit devs will make a 14th version of CoD. There is no vendor lock-in, no platform restrictions, compile your game and ship it. If it’s good people will buy it.
I mean it’s already practically there. I made the switch from Windows to Linux this past week. I’ve been able to get World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elden Ring all working on it. and the “hardest” one to get going/install was WoW only because I needed to install one script to get working. FFXIV and Elden Ring worked right out of the box on steam.
I don’t remember the last time I haven’t gotten a game to work on my (Linux) machine, besides for the fact that I’m on a laptop right now, so obviously some stuff will have bad performance.
For example, I played GTA V yesterday on it, the install was painless with steam and the launcher just needed to be started twice.
Dealing with proton shenanigans is much easier than dealing with all of Windows and Microsoft’s bullshit.
The windows “desktop environment” is so slow and clunky. It makes game development or really any workflow requiring the use of multiple open directories almost too hard. It makes me wonder how they even develop this piece of shit at Microsoft HQ. Do they have an in-house developers ui that’s maybe a little more efficient? Do they have special accelerated hardware that makes it run faster than fast on the development machines? I guess the windows server ui is faster than the windows 11 ui and maybe it has a better file explorer so maybe that’s what they use.
When you need to install a program, all the choices available are too spammy and corporate. The hp printer driver is 300mb and takes 15 minutes to install on a ssd on Windows. Meanwhile on Linux you type something like “sudo apt install cups” and 15 seconds later you have printer drivers.
It’s pretty easy to identify the sweaty mlg titles that lock down everything with windows-only anticheat before buying them. Beyond anticheat games, I can’t even recall a game I couldn’t get running.
I find the article bizarre. Nearly every single guy I know has or had a gaming PC. Some lucky bastards got them when they were 10 years old or younger, while I got mine way in my teens (poor family). As a comp-sci grad it was nigh 100% who had one, and working in tech there were definitely lots of them (and board games + DnD were quite popular).
Either I lived in a bubble or the article is uniquely describing the North American experience. Nobody ever told me to my face they found it weird to leave a party to watch eSports or play a few rounds of whatever MMO was around at the time.
Reading that it’s now “mainstream” just doesn’t fit my experience. It was already popular before my time.
You are definetly in a bubble, even if its a pretty big one. Owning a pc is pretty much a prerequisite for going into comp-science or working in IT.
Out of all the 30 odd people I know of at my workplace, one other apart from me has a gaming pc, and two others have consoles. The rest doesn’t play any games at all.
problem is pc gaming never died and has been healthy all along but when retailers stopped selling cause they made more profits with consoles or we stopped buying. the industry or more like the suits and media made a native that pc gaming died. we just went to the guy that respected us and now he has a dragons hord of wealth and moved in beating the consoles at their own game by respecting is with an open platform.
I am 39. I have lived in California my whole life and I barely know anyone with their own PC other than myself. Gaming in general wasn’t even as mainstream as it is now, let alone PC gaming.
When I read about the PC scene I Europe during the 90’s, it makes me jealous I was born American because yeah; it wasn’t very common here. I’m not even sure how common it is now. Most people I meet who even play games are 15-20 years younger than me.
As long as major games like Elden Ring are shipping without basic PC features/settings, I would say the industry is definitely not treating it as mainstream.
Those are big ones. Also, no way to disable chromatic aberration (a known migraine trigger), no DLSS/FSR, and broken anticheat that blocks online play if you dare to fix those problems yourself.
Best part was the DLC patch making the game forget it doesn’t have ultrawide support for 20s, letting me use ultrawide and giving me hope until it finishes loading and adds the black bars again. What the actual fuck fromsoft
Lords of the fallen had a really nice spell / ranged select system, I would love for fromsoft to implement something similar in the future, but we will see
I need to go back and play that. I put it on hold shortly after release in the hopes they’d polish it up. I’ve heard they did, but I haven’t gone back.
That’s a defining characteristic of console gaming, though. Even things like performance vs quality modes didn’t exist until this generation. It’s one of the reasons most PC gamers aren’t also console gamers.
Things are worse that’s for sure. I don’t care if that sounds hipster ish or gatekeepy, the vc bros finding another hobby to infect has not been good overall.
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