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Path: ...!local-4.nntp.ord.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-1.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2024 01:21:53 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Subject: Is PC Gaming Mainstream Finally? Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2024 21:21:52 -0400 Message-ID: <69v38j16mbkor2sakjgukuok93ooom78ik@4ax.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 78 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-fwIqkr+hFMyj4us2rtZAbQgZSsWcnS8BUTmA8IN9OAtJn+nGJS1ZS5yb/6+q9WD3nycl8DWgrALKgll!JtsZ5OVtfAszH6rFvqCGkl4E4NlHkyfT6jr031JrisL8eTRdDBfkCGti2eVbgbAZj5tFUu4= X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 4770 Is PC gaming mainstream finally? That's what a recent article* by PC Gamer** postulates. They point to the cameo of a Steam Deck on some cartoon a while back as proof as their thesis. "Look, this black wedge a side character is holding in the background for a few seconds on a second-rate TV show almost nobody watches is clearly maybe perhaps a Steam Deck, therefore PC Games are all the rage now!" I didn't say it was a /good/ article. But PC gaming has definitely become more popular over the years. Or has it? Sure, we can all point back to the late 80s and comment on Nintendo's dominance of the gaming market back then. And, sure, in the late 90s all the kids were talking about was Playstation versus N64 versus Dreamcast, and sneered at people who dared suggest, "But on the PC...". And there was a notable flight of publishers to consoles in the late 2000s, with numerous doomsayers claiming (for perhaps the hundredth time) that The End Of The PC Was Nigh. But you know what kept chugging along, constantly pumping out hits and gaining an ever larger audience? That's right, the PC. Sure, the consoles got a lot of coverage in the news, but that's because it had major corporations pushing out a lot of marketing copy promoting the platforms. The PC, on the other hand, far more diversified, never had the same unified support from its manufacturers promoting it as a gaming machine. But it had an audience. Since the mid 90s, roughly 200 million PCs are sold in /per year/. Compare that to the 155 million Playstation 2 consoles sold worldwide over its entire lifespan. And yes, many of those PCs were sold to businesses... but a lot of them end up in homes too. And I'd wager a lot of them get used for video games at one point or another.*** PC gaming only /now/ becoming mainstream? It's been mainstream FOREVER, biatch! It's been the platform so ubiquitous that you just don't notice it's there. Oh, sure, consoles got the limelight. But for decades, everyone I knew played games on the PC. After all, you needed a PC anyway (for school, for work, for taxes, whatever), so why not install a few games on it while you're at it? Sure, they might also play games on XBox or Nintendo or Playstation. They might even use those platforms MORE. But for over a generation, the PC was the old faithful standby, ready to offer a different experience when necessary. I suspect that it's lack of appearance in the 'mainstream' media had more to do with the writers of said media than the omnipresence of the platform. After all, most writers of TV shows came of age when Nintendo undeniably /was/ the king of the playground (if only because the computer market was still fragmented between Commodore, PC, and Apple). It's sort of like how all high schools on TV still look like they're stuck in the 80s and 90s. "Kids play video games, right? It must be on the newest console; what is that, Atari? Anyway, stick one of those in the protagonist's living room to show he's cool." It's only now that these shows are getting writers who actually grew up with PCs that they're starting to get the recognition they deserve. Then again, I'm writing this on a PC gaming-focused newsgroup, so obviously I have a bias -and blindness?- that makes me pedestal my platform of choice. Do you think the PC is more mainstream now? Less? Or was it always just as cool -and uncool- as it is today? ---------- * Read here: https://www.pcgamer.com/pc-gaming-is-mainstream/ ** Remember them? They used to be a notable publication -by video game journalism standards anyway- and apparently they're still lingering on as digital media *** Even the ones in the office. Just don't tell the boss.