Smoke in the Room: The end of PC gaming

 

    PC gaming is coming to an end for the same reason it started. Business has been the driving force behind PC demand. My first PC gaming experience was a helicopter simulator game secretly installed on a CAD workstation. Back when kids were arguing about the superiority of Super Nintendo vs Sega Genesis, there were nerds installing the most demanding games on work computers that were outfitted with hardware way out of realm of the average, even most wealthy consumer. While Neo Geo was trying to sell pixel perfect arcade ports, PCs were rendering polygons. It remained this way for years to come as enthusiast developers pushed these industrial spec machines further and further. Nvidia went from outfitting Dell Precisions with CAD cards to Alienware with GPUs. 

   By the early 2000s, the internet had cemented PC gaming as an economic force. From Unreal to Everquest, from World of Warcraft to Battlefield, then onto the "Can it run Crysis". PC gaming had ridden the business sector into a casual money maker. By the 2010s, PC gaming had DRM-driven Steam with giant sales and larger libraries. Things looked good for PC gaming. 

   Then Cloud technology came along and started to crack the PC gaming egg. First the thin-client approach of OnLive Gaming made a futile attempt to capitalize early on a technology that a company called Netflix was quickly growing into a successful platform. While OnLive quickly failed as did every succeeding competitor, and PC Gamers continued to sink thousands of dollars on computer parts, something was happening on the business end of the stick. Business had long been using thin-clients and private networks to run massive operations. It reduced overall cost, but increased complexity. The need for experienced IT workers was a burden on budgets. Business, unlike the average at-home consumer, wanted this cloud technology to come sooner than later. 

    Now cloud-service providers are ramping up their options for businesses and selling them a paradise of low-cost, internet boxes paired with subscription plans and reduced needs for IT staff. At the head of this pack is Microsoft. Forget needing to manage thousands of licenses for Microsoft Office, now with Microsoft 365 all the Office applications are in the Cloud. Those CAD workstations? Obsolete with Microsoft's High Performance Cloud Computing packages. Run Matlab from a tablet. Run the Astrophysics Lab from a phone. All business users need is an ISP and a box with barely more than a NIC. Rumors even show that there is a push to make the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows OS a platform on a subscription plan. Microsoft is moving business to the Cloud, which means companies like Dell, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel don't need to make high-end computers for the average at-home consumer. Cloud is pushing everything to the server. 

    Business is going to push Microsoft out of PC gaming and everyone seems to see it coming, except the consumer. Xbox is making a harder push into console gaming, with a smaller investment into XCloud, their Cloud gaming service. Valve has invested into the development of Proton, a method of taking a Windows executable package and translating it into a Linux package for use on Valve's Steam OS, which comes pre-installed on Valve's Steam Deck hardware. Epic is spending large amounts of money to fight Google and Apple for more direct access to money spent on Android and I-device applications. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are fighting for AI Cloud business. The largest names in PC gaming are investing in securing money outside PC gaming.

     Consumers would do well to avoid any further large investment in PC gaming equipment in the foreseeable future. It may seem like there is hope through Valve and their push to make PC gaming penguin-powered. However, the success of a move to Linux depends highly on how developers move. Developers tend to want an easier option over the most effective option. It doesn't matter if sales are higher on the Steam Deck if the publisher believes they could be higher on Xbox and PlayStation. Portability, or the lack thereof, killed the far more effective CELL architecture as developers opted for the easier, aged X86 with power-hungry GPUs and overloaded busses. Now, with the already near negligent levels of effort in optimizing PC ports, compounded reliance on technologies like ray tracing, Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and the sub-optimal performance of Proton as it exists, it seems really unlikely that developers will support a move to Linux gaming, especially with the threat of Steam's user review system and the impact of review bombing.