(Please note: I am finally posting this 2010 article on the site now, in June 2026.\u00a0 This is an article I have both wanted to post here ever since I wrote it, and didn’t want to without significant additional work.\u00a0 Considering how well it ties in to my 1998 articles, though, I think I really should put it here.\u00a0 I posted it with the posting date it was originally written, but I have added to it for this reposting on my site.\u00a0 I added some things to the article in order to try to improve it and clarify the point.\u00a0 If you want to read the original version of the article, I link the original forum version near the end.\u00a0 That is not updated since 2010.)<\/p>\n
Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n Opening Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n Before I begin, a few disclaimers.\u00a0 To be clear, despite the title of this article, I do not believe that PC gaming now is awful, or dead.\u00a0 There are still many good PC games in development, in fact.\u00a0 But when you look at the American and Western European development scenes, it is incontestable that PC gaming does not have the same place that it did ten or fifteen years ago.\u00a0 Note the regions I am focusing on — that is very important to remember.\u00a0 What I am trying to go through here are possible reasons why it happened, beyond just “it is explained by changing tastes” or something like that.\u00a0 Yes, I know that PC games are still being made, but they are mostly indie games or console ports.\u00a0 Things are lesser than they were.<\/p>\n Last, yes, I miss PC gaming as it was in the ’90s.\u00a0 That should become immediately very obvious.\u00a0 I have a lot of nostalgia for PC games of that era.\u00a0 But again, I do think PC gaming is still great, and I don’t dislike console gaming — I love lots of console games, and spend just as much time playing console games as I do PC.\u00a0 I like both… which is why I’m so sad to see one of those fading away so much.\u00a0 PC games are not unique once they have merged into console games, and become more like them than like what makes them what they are.<\/p>\n On the Downfall of ’90s North American Computer Gaming<\/strong><\/p>\n History is very important to me and I have studied it extensively, which is probably why I thought it best to start with an early history of PC gaming, before I got into my attempts at explaining the reasons behind what happened to it in the last decade.\u00a0 Even there though the historical perspective is an important part of it I think.\u00a0 Also, as I say at the end, I don’t really consider this “complete”, due to all the things I’m sure I’m not thinking of, over-emphasizing, or what have you.\u00a0 That’s why the title is “an attempted analysis”, not “an analysis”.<\/p>\n Electronic gaming was invented in the US. From 1946 to the early 1980s, all of the major advances in electronic gaming happened here. Everyone else was playing catchup. The first PC game was American, from 1962. The first arcade game American, from 1972. The first videogame console American, from 1972. And then the first significantly successful console American, from 1977. But in the late ’70s and early ’80s, though there were many American companies making videogames, none of them thought of videogames alone as the answer. They all thought that the actual goal was a hybrid computer-console system, or perhaps just a computer alone, and that the consoles were just a transition or a hook to get people into their “real” business, the computers.\u00a0 Computers were serious pieces of equipment with real uses, after all, not just games machines.\u00a0 They were wrong that that was what people wanted, but they didn’t know that.\u00a0 And so, before the crash we saw things like Coleco’s Adam computer addon, the Intellivision computer addon, the Atari 5200 being a consolized Atari 400\/800 computer essentially, and more.\u00a0 Even the Japanese got into the act — Sega’s first console, the SG-1000, had a computer addon for instance.<\/p>\n Then, in 1983-84, the Western console industry crashed. It would be famously “brought back” by Nintendo in 1985-86, but in fact gaming never went away — because those computers didn’t crash. The IBM PC, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and more, all had significant market shares and large games markets through the ’80s and into the early ’90s (Only the PC would get beyond that, in the early ’90s all the competitors except for Mac died off). So the standard story, that Nintendo saved gaming, isn’t precisely true… console gaming crashed, but the then-smaller computer gaming market never crashed and never died off.\u00a0 This is obviously important — as a result of this American development changed focus to the PC, a fact which continued to be true for a long time afterwards.\u00a0 Europe, a place where consoles were not significantly successful until the mid ’90s, started out mostly making computer games.\u00a0 Of course some Western studios made console games, but they were a decided minority, and in many cases their games were not as good.\u00a0 This was a reality which would only very slowly change.<\/p>\n So, while there were a relative few great NES games from Western developers, but there were LOTS of great PC games during that era.\u00a0 Adventure games (text, graphical, and FMV-based), RPGs, platformers, strategy games, space sims, wargames, military vehicular sims, later on FPSes, and more… there were a huge variety of titles on the PC through the third, fourth, and fifth console generations, and a lot of the games had big budgets for the time, certainly comparable and almost certainly above the budgets of your average probably junky Western-developed console game then.<\/p>\n So, the ’80s were really good for PC gaming. In the ’90s consoles continued to grow in popularity, but despite that, PC gaming stayed successful through the decade. Now, here’s an important point — PC games did not sell like console games. That is, console games are now and always have been heavily front-loaded — the majority of sales happen in the first week. PC games just weren’t like that. You would release a game with the expectation that it would be on the shelves for years and sell slowly over that period of time, and that is exactly what happened. Back in the early or mid ’90s you could go into any Software ETC and see large numbers of games that came out years ago there on the shelves being sold new. People play PC games for longer on average than console games because they often have much more content thanks to things like level editors, online\/modem multiplayer, etc., and they do not always buy them right when they came out.<\/p>\n Europe was even more focused on PC games over console games than the US. In the second half of the ’80s and the early ’90s, most people gaming in Europe did it on computers such as the Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. While in Western Europe eventually consoles became quite popular starting with the PlayStation 1, PC games are still much more popular in Germany and some other Western European countries than they are in the US.\u00a0 Also, in Eastern Europe most gaming is still done on PC. That is why so many PC games these days come from Eastern Europe.\u00a0 Europe has always been one of the major strongholds of PC gaming.<\/p>\n It was only Japan where consoles always dominated…<\/p>\n But wait, even in Japan there were PCs in the ’80s, with a stronger gaming scene than they had in the ’90s and beyond. The NEC PC-8801, NEC PC-9801, MSX I and II, FM Towns, and Sharp X68000 all had real markets back in the ’80s and into the early ’90s. The MSX particularly was very successful in Japan. It’s too bad that the PC didn’t keep that market going but instead almost everything went to consoles… but yes, for a while computer games did have some success in Japan.\u00a0 It’s just that there that mostly died off in the early ’90s.\u00a0 Perhaps it has something to do with the kinds of genres popular in the region, or how people play games, or something else, I’m not entirely certain.\u00a0 I’m sure lots of factors are involved.\u00a0 Now of course in Japan it’s basically mostly visual novels and dating sims, aside from doujin games and the occasional release from a Falcom or Koei.<\/p>\n Getting back to the US though, by the late ’90s computer game developers and publishers were getting bigger, but the market wasn’t growing enough to satisfy them, so they started looking more seriously at other markets.\u00a0 \u00a0PC games had been the main focus of North American game developers for 15 years by the end of the ’90s, but that ended there.\u00a0 The problem was that revenues could not keep up with the steadily increasing budgets.\u00a0 Game budgets were exploding, increasing significantly year upon year, an increase that has not slowed.\u00a0 Developers, searching for a solution over the course of the years after 1998, steadily moved one after another to consoles.\u00a0 The result of this ended the era of North American game developers putting their main focus on PC games.\u00a0 The few remaining studios mostly switched to working on online RPGs or were tiny little indie teams making games on a strict budget.\u00a0 In Europe PC game development survived longer, but over time even there PC-focused games declined in favor of console ones.\u00a0 \u00a0The decade of the ’00s was a rough one for PC gamers.\u00a0 Late in the decade the decline seemed to slow thanks to the rise of digital distribution, but the situation is still bad.<\/p>\n But yes, after 1998 or so, company after company started moving towards consoles, lured by the large number of gamers and the promise of more immediate dollars than they were getting on the PC.\u00a0 After all, again, console games always have been more front-loaded in sales than PC games are, and sell for higher prices day one.\u00a0 I’m not sure how important a factor the day one sales aspect was, but surely it was one element pushing studios away from the PC.\u00a0 Costs increasing faster than revenues was the primary driver away from the PC, but for some greed and a desire for greater profits certainly has to be seriously considered as a factor.\u00a0 Once again, after all, companies exist to make money for their shareholders.<\/p>\n The Rise and Fall of Genres<\/strong><\/p>\n The kinds of games being made changed dramatically in the ’00s as well.\u00a0 The question that is hard to answer is,how much of that was natural change because of changing tastes in society and among gamers, and how much was because of the collapse of PC-focused development in favor of indie and console\/PC hybrid titles?\u00a0 This is an impossible question to answer definitively, as surely both elements were factors, but it is interesting to think about.<\/p>\n Through the ’90s, the popular genres were somewhat different from what they are now.\u00a0 FPSes became more and more popular, but wargames, military sims, platformers, top-down action games, turnbased and realtime strategy games, graphic adventures, life sims, puzzle games, building sims (SimCity, etc), and more were all there to provide a massive amount of variety.\u00a0 Over time adventure games did fade and FPSes and RTSes become more prominent, but the other genres did not entirely disappear until the ’00s, as PC gaming became more and more dominated by those few genres and most PC developers stopped being PC exclusive.\u00a0 Puzzle games have survived in the casual sphere of course, as well; sometimes I forget it, but PC puzzle games are probably actually more popular now than they ever have been before.\u00a0 Most other genres, particularly anything requring a budget, have not been so lucky of course.<\/p>\n One of the crucial developments happened in the mid ’90s when MMOs arrived on the scene in a big way after Ultima Online was released. The genre had always been around in the MUD form, but UO (and Meridian 59 before it, though that one was much less successful) was a new breed, a graphical, large-scale massively multiplayer online RPG. The game was a massive hit and is still operating today. EverQuest a few years later compounded that and the MMO craze was on. I do think that this had an important role in what happened to PC gaming — because in terms of raw dollars, PC games never actually decreased in income. It’s just that an increasingly large amount of that money, and gaming time, went into MMOs, with their monthly fees and massive timesinks. There was less and less room for other kinds of games to have much of a market.<\/p>\n Still, adventure games, space sims and wargames lasted past the early years of the MMORPG without entirely disappearing… but by 2001, all three were obviously on their last legs.\u00a0 Adventure games survived as low-budget titles developed by small, often Eastern European developers.\u00a0 Wargames are still quite popular, but they receded into a niche where nobody who doesn’t follow the genre even knows about their existence, a far cry from the genres’ general popularity in the 20th century.\u00a0 The situation is worse for high-end space, flight, and military vehicular sims, genres which pretty much entirely disappeared, as without the big budgets that those games required nothing like the great ones of old could be made again.\u00a0 Each genre has maybe one noteworthy title left, such as iRacing for racing simulations.\u00a0 This is the situation today with those genres.\u00a0 Non-MMO RPGs of course did not die off, as games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age show, but they did become much less common.\u00a0 These were all side-effects of the shift of focus from PCs to consoles in so many Western video game developers and gamers.\u00a0 If someone believed that the fading of those genres helped cause the shift it could be a cause as well as an effect, but I’m not certain which way that goes.<\/p>\n This returns me to the subject of changing tastes among gamers.\u00a0 On both PCs and consoles of course over time tastes change, but in the past decade tastes for the majority seemed to head in an even more console-centric direction than it had been before.\u00a0 Why was this?\u00a0 I’d think some people would still want to try the more traditionally PC styles of games too, as well as relatively simpler console titles.\u00a0 Perhaps they would if they still existed, but don’t because they don’t and make to with much simpler console games that are sort of “comparable”.\u00a0 Or perhaps they just don’t know that they might like them because they’ve never tried, because people assume that no one wants to play those games anymore so few people make them and even less effort is put into marketing the things.\u00a0 I really don’t know…\u00a0 I will say, though, something like the recent IL-2 Sturmovik console game with both a sim and an arcade mode is a pretty good idea, for these times.\u00a0 But why did it get to this point to begin with?<\/p>\n The Collapse of PC Retail<\/strong><\/p>\n Another important factor, also monetarily related, is retail space.\u00a0 Retailers like the console market, with its high turnover and quick sales, better in general.\u00a0 They also disliked the large boxes that most PC games used because of how much space they took up, so in the early ’00s Wal-Mart forced smaller boxes on the PC gaming industry.\u00a0 I would mark that as a major step towards the collapse of PC gaming as it had been, for without a larger box you cannot fit a large manual, as many extras like maps and quick-help cards, and sometimes even a real jewelcase in the box.\u00a0 The losses of things such as jewelcases and thick manuals helped push the picture of PC games as losing what they had had and being ‘cheap’, I think.\u00a0 Is it really a coincidence that this happened at the same time that PC gaming was starting to struggle in ways it had not before?\u00a0 Perhaps it was just an effect, but I think it was probably a partial cause as well.\u00a0 As the amount of space the PC game section of game stores took up decreased, sales decreased.\u00a0 This spiraled, combining with all other factors, until eventually the PC section of game stores nearly ceased to exist.\u00a0 The PC market moved almost towards a strong digital-distribution focus in the later ’00s, before most gamers were buying games exclusively digitally.\u00a0 PC gaming never had a strong resale market, so the used section of a game store never had many computer games in it, reducing space even further as compared to consoles, where used sales are a huge part of the business.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, at the same time, the 6th generation of consoles (PS2, Xbox, GC, DC) simply were far too successful and popular to ignore, I guess.\u00a0 As I said above, the PC developers were lured in, I believe, by both the narrowing PC market (thanks to MMOs and the huge success of specific strategy and FPS games that pushed smaller genres and developers out) and by increasing budgets, that made PC game development much more difficult on the scale it had previously existed on. You needed to sell a lot more units now in order to make money, so that new flight sim would cost more than ever to make without more return.\u00a0 For some cases though as I said earlier I do think greed had a big part of it too, as they saw this big other market and wanted in.\u00a0 And then after some moved over, more and more followed them and it snowballed into the situation we see today where PC games are mostly either console ports, MMOs, or Eastern European.\u00a0 Apparently in Eastern Europe, game stores even still have physical PC game sections!\u00a0 That would be nice to see.<\/p>\n Hardware Issues<\/strong><\/p>\n One interesting case of change over time is Western developers’ reactions to the controlled nature of console systems versus the open nature of the PC.\u00a0 I mean, computers are at their best when they are open and accessible.\u00a0 There are also no licensing fees, no company that must certify that you are allowed to release a game on the platform.\u00a0 On consoles there are rules and restrictions. Anyone can make a computer game, but that isn’t true on consoles. Back in the ’80s these rules turned off Western developers, who went to great lengths to try to avoid paying Nintendo and Sega’s licensing fees.\u00a0 For more on this look up Atari\/Tengen v. Nintendo, Accolade v. Sega, and the EA\/Sega deal that got them on the Genesis — in all three cases the companies used their own technology to create carts that would work on those systems without a license. In EA’s case they used that as leverage to get lower licensing fees out of Sega.\u00a0 American development on consoles increased in the SNES\/Genesis period, as restrictions got a bit lighter, and then even more on the PSX and N64, as the fees and restrictions were again reduced, but still, it was a barrier.\u00a0 However, now many companies actually seem to prefer that kind of environment, because the controlled nature allows THEM to be more controlling too, while on the PC they blame piracy for destroying their sales as if their own decisions haven’t had an even greater impact (see: Ubisoft).\u00a0 Corporate cultures have obviously changed.\u00a0 Perhaps the dollar signs overwhelmed their caution, or the reductions in fees and such were enough for them, or piracy really was that big of a problem… I’m not sure, though I do think that they overstate the amount of damage done to them by piracy; the evidence is that most people who pirate games would not have paid full price for them.\u00a0 Most pirates either wouldn’t or couldn’t have paid for the games they downloaded.<\/p>\n Other than Eastern European games and multiplatform titles there are still a few games here and there being released for the PC, particularly in the MMORPG, RTS, and FPS genres, as well as longrunning series like Civilization.\u00a0 The other major bright spot is casual PC gaming, which is now more successful than ever.\u00a0 Facebook games, Popcap games, and more are doing very well.\u00a0 However, that has not led to any rebirth of the hardcore, big-budget PC gaming market that is my focus here, so so far at least it is not a savior of serious PC games.\u00a0 It’s good, and worth noting, but not the answer.<\/p>\n There is an important factor compounding this: many people who play those casual games are not people who could play hardcore PC games even if they wanted to.\u00a0 Their computers, if desktops, probably have integrated graphics chips on the motherboards as their only video hardware, and if a laptop or, worse, netbook, have worse capabilities all around as a rule.\u00a0 Nobody with a netbook as their computer could be playing games even if they wanted to.\u00a0 On a laptop or low-end desktop, it’s unlikely unless they were already a gamer, and that creates a viscous circle where only people already gamers buy computers good enough to play games on.\u00a0 Needless to say, that is not a good cycle to get into.\u00a0 Hopefully someday there will be a solution to this, and cheaper computers will start actually including graphics chips good enough to play games on, but for how it’s a real issue.\u00a0 Oh, and I also should mention cellphones, and that anyone using a phone as their major internet medium probably isn’t using their computer as often as they used to, and are playing some simple little games on their phone as well.\u00a0 People only have so much time and spending more of it on cellphone timewasters reduces time for more substantial games.<\/p>\n So, you need to already be a gamer before you end up getting a computer good enough to play games, and that is of course a viscous cycle. Before integrated graphics took off, there was a short time where many more people had machines capable of playing at least midrange PC games.\u00a0 Hopefully eventually something will be done about this problem, but for now it’s definitely a big one.\u00a0 Such machines can probably easily play indie games, but likely not theoretical high-end PC-focused titles.<\/p>\n On Digital Distribution as the Solution<\/strong><\/p>\n First, If it was still actually possible to find PC games in actual stores, like it used to be, we wouldn’t need to rely on online distribution for everything… some people would anyway, of course, but the choice would actually be there.\u00a0 It isn’t really now — PC games are mostly digital only, with Valve’s Steam platform as the lead marketplace.\u00a0 But, if Steam is the answer that is saving PC gaming, then why are most of the AAA games on it either multiplatform titles also available on consoles?\u00a0 Sure, they are often a little better on PC, but are also on consoles, and which system was it designed for first and foremost?\u00a0 Usually consoles.\u00a0 Alternatively, they are probably European titles with midrange budgets, or are low-budget homebrew games, the modern equivalent to the shareware games of the early ’90s.\u00a0 Steam as a service is just a distribution mechanism.\u00a0 Look at what the actual GAMES on Steam are and you’d see that they prove my point entirely.<\/p>\n Yes, DD has done a good job of providing a place for games like those to be sold now that the retail market for PC games is so dead.\u00a0 But that right there is part of the problem I think, that people have forgotten what it used to be like and think that DD is better than retail ever was… but I like physical media.\u00a0 I don’t mind digital distribution, particularly for smaller titles, but when possible I prefer having a physical object.<\/p>\n So yes, for those small homebrew-style games DD is probably better than retail or the limited amounts of digital distribution possible in the early to mid ’90s ever was, but for almost anything with a budget, is it really better now?\u00a0 For anyone who can remember, is Steam really better than, say, a Software ETC. or something in the early to mid ’90s? I don’t think so, myself.\u00a0 Maybe part of that is that, again, I like owning physical copies of games, and part of it is that I don’t love Steam as much as some do, but I definitely don’t think so.\u00a0 I have issues with Steam, but it is certainly infinitely superior to the terrible PC sections of Gamestops today.\u00a0 Of course, that is in fact a part of the problem.<\/p>\n For, without retail you make it a lot harder for people to become interested in PC games in comparison to console games, which still have significant presence in stores. Unless there is some kind of hook from those now very popular casual games into DD services, how would those people even know where to look?\u00a0 And also, without the pull of spur-of-the-moment sales of boxed games, will as many people try them as otherwise would?\u00a0 Out of sight, out of mind, you know.\u00a0 I know that Steam is growing, and other services (that are simpler but possibly not as annoying as Steam in a lot of ways) like Direct2Drive, Good Old Games, Impulse, etc. are too, but still, I just don’t see how you ever get over that hurdle.\u00a0 There’s a big market for whom boxed games are just the better way to reach them, I think.\u00a0 The death of buying boxed PC games among the hardcore hurts the industry in some important ways — those people looking at the PC section of their Gamestop now see a small, pathetic selection of titles, and dismiss PC gaming immediately as a result.\u00a0 How would they ever even know that there’s a much better selection than that out there, only they’re mostly only available digitally?<\/p>\n The success of Valve’s own games definitely pushes Steam and helps with this, but still, it is an issue.\u00a0 Plus, I at least do not see the death of the box as a good thing!<\/p>\n That is not to take away from the accomplishment of making it so much easier for people to access shareware-tier games than it ever has been before. That’s fantastic.\u00a0 I love a lot of games like that.\u00a0 But for people like me who do like owning boxed games, or for the much larger market I just described, having boxed PC games continue to fade just isn’t something that I can see as an improvement — even if it does come with the continued growth of DD services.\u00a0 That growth helps a lot, without them the situation would be indescribably worse than it is, and do do very good things like give people anywhere access to games which they might not otherwise have, but I just don’t think that they’re the whole answer.\u00a0 Arguably, their growth is actually helping to cause part of the problem.<\/p>\n So, nothing I just said here really disproves my article’s validity.\u00a0 As I said DD has just sort of replaced a piece of the old ’90s retail boxed market with online sales.\u00a0 It has done that at the cost of removing those boxes from the sight of people who might have otherwise got interested in PC gaming and making PC game sections in stores look weak.\u00a0 And it has absolutely not reversed the decade-long trend of North American and Western European developers abandoning PC development in droves.\u00a0 Perhaps it has staunched the pain a bit, if you believe that people buying on Steam would not be buying boxed copies of those games if that was how they were only available, but it has absolutely not reversed the trend, either in total releases or in budgets of those very few exclusive releases left.<\/p>\n Because remember, I’m not just talking about the number of games, but the number of big-budget games.\u00a0 So we have more Facebook games now.\u00a0 Yes, that’s nice.\u00a0 But when are we getting Falcon 5.0, FreeSpace 3, or Grand Prix Legends 2, to give some examples, at budgets and studios that would get products as amazing as the old ones but with today’s technology?\u00a0 Never, right?\u00a0 And that is my point here.<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n So, things seem bad, with Steam and other digital distribution platforms as the only hope for PC gaming’s resurrection into relevance again.\u00a0 We’re not at a worst-case-scenario yet, however.\u00a0 I’m a huge Blizzard fan and am looking forward to Starcraft II as much as anyone.\u00a0 But looking at the big picture, across all genres, it is very clear that unless all you care about are RTSes, MMOs, and FPSes, PC gaming is a shadow of what it was.<\/p>\n So, overall, I don’t know the complete answer.\u00a0 There were obviously a lot of factors involved in why PC gaming declined particularly in North America, though, and I was trying to work through them here.\u00a0 I’m sure I got some and missed others entirely.\u00a0 I’m just trying to think of things that were probably factors. The things I’m talking about were probably all involved, to some degree or another. I’d like to hear thoughts and opinions though, because all this is still very rough and incomplete.\u00a0 I think I’m getting a little closer now, but still, I do not have a complete picture of what happened and why.<\/p>\n Oh yeah, as an aside, of course, now that budget problem has hit them again, and worse.\u00a0 Now even PS360PC development doesn’t always make their money back, and game development costs just keep skyrocketing upwards… what do they do now? \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 Where does gaming go from here?\u00a0 Those ever-increasing costs aren’t going down…<\/p>\n 2026 Addendum: Looking Back at the Article Above<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, this article was an interesting one to reread, 16 years later.\u00a0\u00a0I originally posted this article on NeoGAF as a thread, here: https:\/\/www.neogaf.com\/threads\/what-was-the-downfall-of-computer-gaming-an-attempted-analysis.390128\/<\/a>\u00a0 It caused some controversy, five pages much of which is people arguing against me.\u00a0 Looking back at it it is somewhat surprising how many people didn’t seem to realize that PC gaming had dramatically changed in the ’00s, that most developers had left the PC behind to go make multiplatform games instead of PC-only games, that big budget retail titles and smaller indie games are very different things in budget and scale, and so much more.\u00a0 The people saying that Telltale games are just as good as Lucasarts or Sierra titles are particularly amusing, I was being nice in the thread and not really pushing back too hard against that but that just is not true, and I think that with time more people looking back would agree with me on that one.\u00a0 Telltale’s games were simpler, primarily focused on conversations and not things like item puzzles, after all.<\/p>\n Why did I never post this article on this site until now?\u00a0 Well, one was that I wanted to follow up on some of the comments by finding more facts to back up the article above instead of the more opinion-based article that I wrote… but it’s been fifteen years and unless the 1998 articles covered that gap, I still haven’t done it.\u00a0 I think that this article pairs well as a prequel slash sequel to the 1998 articles, though, so I have long wanted to post it on the site and finally decided to do it.<\/p>\n Also, I have long thought that the major weakness of this article is the section near the end about digital distribution and Steam being worse than ’90s style shelves full of big box PC games were.\u00a0 After all, I wrote that in 2010, right as PC digital distribution really started to seriously take off, and it’s been only up from there.\u00a0 That section is a serious time capsule; I do love physical media, but I’m not sure if my point about digital discoverability being worse is true.\u00a0 That is certainly true on cellphones, but Steam and such have decent discoverability.\u00a0 Is it as good as physical was?\u00a0 In some ways no, in some yes.\u00a0 I do still like physical media, it leads to more ownership than digital downloads do and the boxes look nice on a shelf.<\/p>\n Anyway, regardless of my opinions there, physical media on the console side has declined dramatically over the last decade.\u00a0 Today, console game physical media space in stores is nearing the position that PC games were in the early ’00s, with small and shrinking floor space being taken over by other things.\u00a0 Consoles are going mostly digital as well, which is a problem given that, unlike the PC, they are walled gardens where you have zero ability to find any competitive pricing on games.\u00a0 Even with how dominant Steam is today, it isn’t the only game in town and there is still competition for PC game marketplaces in a way that does not exist on consoles.<\/p>\n Where Are Things Going Now?<\/strong><\/p>\n Also, that last point I make in the conclusion’s borderline prescient, huh.\u00a0 Where does gaming go from here, as console game development costs keep increasing, in a world where the last decade has seen console sales stall?\u00a0 For a while the PC seemed like it was going to be the future again, but then hardware prices started skyrocketing over the last year or two “thanks” to AI, and now suddenly all home computing is in danger.\u00a0 Are we heading towards a streaming-only future?\u00a0 That would be worst case scenario, we need to do everything possible to make sure it doesn’t happen.<\/p>\n Regardless of the future, what happened to ’90s North American PC gaming?\u00a0 First, the passage of time changed things, as it always does.\u00a0 The genres that were popular then mostly fell in popularity in favor of others, as genres like flight sims, RTSes, and wargames fell in popularity while others like MOBAs, Soulslikes, and Metroidvanias rose.\u00a0 The kinds of games changed, towards simpler games on the AAA end.\u00a0 The number of games being made steadily increased, towards a probably unsustainable number in much of the last decade.\u00a0 I am nostalgic for the games of the ’90s, so while I like modern games also I miss that time.\u00a0 This is purely subjective, but the change in developer focus isn’t, and nor is the move towards consolization.\u00a0 Ones’ opinion ON consolization, and simplification, is opinion, but that it has and is happening, and what changes that has brought to the industry, cannot be.\u00a0 Even when we got throwbacks, such as the first Dragon Age, their sequels consolize things.<\/p>\n In fact, that move towards consolization is not over.\u00a0 In my original article I mention Guild Wars, one of my favorite games ever.\u00a0 It got a deeply disappointing sequel in the 2010s, but it was at least still a PC game, with design inspired by World of Warcraft.\u00a0 Finally, this year, developer ArenaNet announced a third game in the series.\u00a0 Guild Wars 3… promising that it will release on PlayStation 5 alongside the PC and that it will have faster, more action-focused design.\u00a0 This article was written to mourn exactly that kind of announcement.\u00a0 Thinking of Guild Wars 3 is surely what inspired me to finally post this article on this site instead of leaving it just as a very old forum post.\u00a0 I expect little from Guild Wars 3; I’ll stick to the first one, which is still one of the best games ever made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Please note: I am finally posting this 2010 article on the site now, in June 2026.\u00a0 This is an article I have both wanted to post here ever since I wrote it, and didn’t want to without significant additional work.\u00a0 … Continue reading \n