PC gaming is mainstream. Now what?
PC gaming is mainstream. Now what?
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.
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.
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?
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. Meanwhile on Linux you type something like “sudo apt install cups” and 15 seconds later you have printer drivers.
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.
edit: a letter