Search the Community

A community discussion about what you've been playing (any PC game old or new). Some suggestions: Why did you decide to play the game? Are you enjoying the experience? Is the PC performance good? Link to the relevant wiki article No spoilers please.

I would like to invite community to predict what major PC gaming changes will happen over the next decade, please comment below if you have any thoughts. My own predictions are rather dour, I can see the 'end of PC gaming' as we currently know it will happen at some point in the future, but will it happen in this decade or in 50 years from now? Current year 2020: Microsoft releases Xbox Series X and xCloud. Sony releases PlayStation 5. Future: Microsoft Xbox sales higher than Sony PlayStation spelling the beginning of the end of Sony’s gaming division. Xbox Game Pass and xCloud merge to become thede facto game subscription system on their unified console/PC platform. Steam release Steam Cloud, a desktop streaming service where you can play all your Steam games streamed directly from their content delivery network ala Stadia. It becomes a popular option for PC gamers that competes with Xbox Game Pass. Stadia shuts down in 2023 due to lack of consumer interest which is overshadowed by Xbox Game Pass and Steam Cloud. Microsoft release Xbox Series X Desktop, a new hybrid console and light PC that runs Windows X, a stripped down Windows OS that can only play Xbox games and run Microsoft Store apps and OneDrive/Office 365 and is designed to be used with keyboard, mouse and monitor. The next Xbox ‘console’ will run Word and Excel and kids will get them to do homework on. At the end of the decade, light PCs emerge as the dominant new product range in general - with locked down operating systems and heavy cloud integration but with good enough gaming capabilities. Think Chromebooks but with passable GPUs and frictionless access to game streaming services and cloud services. PC hardware begins to become relegated to enterprise and hobbyist pursuits. DRM like Denuvo becomes less relevant as games and consumers move to convenient subscriptions or streaming services. Game ownership question becomes far less important to gamers (see what happened to ‘music ownership’ once Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube became popular). PC games become far more consumable, one-time use products and general users stop caring as much about game preservation. Ultrawide resolutions rise from <2% to 25% adoption rate due to popular use in enterprise, replacing the 16:9 aspect ratio. 4K adoption languishes as computing performance begins to plateau and convenience of streaming takes over where 4K streams are heavily compressed. Oculus releases another all-in-one successor Oculus Quest 2 and discontinue all other product lines ie Oculus Rift. Overall sales of VR games still do not dominate. VR games will only peak at up to 20% of the market, and it will be focused on the all-in-one product line and not PC VR. Despite the short term success of Half-Life: Alyx, Valve Index sales slump and Valve step out of production of VR hardware due to low sales ala Steam Controller but still push SteamVR as the platform neutral choice. Third parties still compete on low cost VR headsets but Oculus Quest 2's Android platform will be the de facto place for VR gaming.