Ive been having a lot of fun with the post I wrote a couple weeks ago, "is PC gaming dead?". I noticed I had a lot to say in my comments in response to a few comments that were made but Jeff from Jeffflowers.com made a short simple comment that made me think.

This may sound cynical, but was it ever alive to begin with???

Im not sure what angle Jeff was coming from with that comment, but it is a good question. Was PC gaming ever alive to begin with? I was pretty much done with commenting on that post but started typing up a reply to Jeff’s comment. middle of the way through, I just decided to put my reply in a post, hopefully to see what others think.

Was PC gaming ever alive?

That depends. To me, PC gaming has always been a niche function, a bonus feature of owning a PC. PC games were never advertised on TV. People only knew about PC games from other PC gamers, or if they took it upon themselves to look for the information.

To the typical console gamer, that played Atari 2600 then NES, then super NES, then PS1 then PS2…PC gaming was never alive. Its always been about console gaming only. I still remember showing people Quake 2 on my PC and they had no clue what it was, never heard of it but thought it was cool. PC gaming ended at solitaire and/or text adventures for them. They didn’t know, or cared to know about PC gaming. "Thats nerd stuff" they thought.

PC gaming is getting a lot of attention from console gamers right now. Mainly because features and ideals that have been native to pc gaming for years are finding their way on consoles. Those PC gaming features and ideals have pretty much reshaped console gaming.

Online play, High end graphics, FPS’s… pretty much anything that isn’t traditionally Japanese gaming have had roots on the PC. Many of todays hottest console games, and game developers have PC roots. Console gamers know this, and frankly, many are threatened by it. Remember, many console gamers have strong brand and platform ownership issues. They have to always feel justified in their decision and remain insanely loyal to that decision to no end (its in the console gaming handbook).

PC gaming has always been a pretty fickle market, with spotty release schedule, slow times, spurts of excitement here and there. Not like Console gaming where there is always the push to release "super hyped game X" by holiday season "X". Because of the competition in console gaming, it always a circus. PC gaming doesn’t have that platform competition so games are released when they are released, most of the time with nothing more than word of mouth advertising.

So consoles have added all of these PC-like features and ideals. Gamers begin to brag about them to only hear some guy say "I use to do that 10 years ago on my PC". The console guy looks it up and find out, yea this was done 10 years ago on PC. Then they look into PC gaming, expecting there to be a big competition between PC and Consoles, like there are when it comes to Xbox vrs Sony vrs Nintendo. And there isn’t. The circus isn’t there. In fact, they find out PC gaming is a pretty crappy hobby if you don’t know what you are doing.

So to that person, I do think PC gaming was never alive.