[bluescrn]

Is there any future for the gaming/enthusiast PC segment? Feels like it's dying. Becoming an ever-smaller niche.

High-end gaming PCs became vastly more expensive over the last few years, between general post-Covid inflation and the chip shortage allowing high-end graphics card prices to be pushed well into 4-figure territory.

Other than those very expensive GPUs, performance improvements elsewhere have come slowly. And on top, Microsoft is doing their best to push people away from Windows. And the VR bubble has deflated.

AAA game development is a seriously struggling industry with little tolerance for risk/innovation, fewer releases, and many high-profile failures. And most of the really popular games can be played well on a 10-year-old PC or a console.

[izacus]

> Is there any future for the gaming/enthusiast PC segment? Feels like it's dying. Becoming an ever-smaller niche.

This meme of "dying PC gaming" is being repeated since like 1998 while the actual sales numbers show consistent growth of that market over last years.

[yread]

Dont forget integrated GPUs actually working quite well for 80% of gamers

[vineyardlabs]

I don't think it's dying I just think things are shifting. More realistically, I think we're watching console gaming die right now (other than Nintendo).

Neither Sony nor MS are doing strict console exclusivity anymore, with MS going as far as to put out their own IPs on Sony consoles.

MS claims there's going to be a next Xbox, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's basically a computer with some custom version of windows with a console-tailored UI.

So in some ways, PC gaming is healthier than it's ever been as it is gaining a growing market share as the console market share shrinks.

I think what's happening in the PC space is that we've reached a kind of Moore's law for graphical fidelity where we're deep in the diminishing returns part of the curve. Look at Read Dead Redemption 2 for example. It's 6 years old and still goes toe to toe with games coming out now. By contrast compare Crysis (2007) to anything that came out in 2001. Halo, for example. It's a night and day difference. So yeah the highest end hardware (specifically GPUs) has gotten crazy expensive but it's also gotten crazy overkill. A lot of new games are playable on low to mid settings on older and/or more budget hardware, and low settings still look fantastic on many games.

Add to that there's a general distrust right now of AAA studios to actually make a decent product, really great stuff coming out of AA/indie studios, and a lot of people playing only one or two live service games like CoD or Fortnight instead of playing lots of different AAA games and there's less dollars to get thrown at every new 100 million dollar budget game that comes out.

I think we're close to the point where the AAA publishers wake up and realize that it's not tenable for every game that comes out to have 100+ hours worth of content and cost 100+ million dollars, and the industry will be better for it.

[jajko]

> basically a computer with some custom version of windows with a console-tailored UI

I presume you mean PC, but still this is situation for past 2 decades. PS used to run on Unix, I guess they still do, on very much a PC hardware, just not the exactly same chips you can buy on PC.

Xbox even more so, its ridiculously expensive to come up with your own cpu & gpu, all use amd/intel and amd/nvidia and definitely not the top of the ranges. OS should be skinned Windows with maybe some non-core parts cut off (but I presume telemetry remains).

The only one building non-PC consoles is Nintendo, which uses which uses very much cell phone hardware (but more custom IIRC).

[vineyardlabs]

I'm not talking about hardware. I mean perhaps the next Xbox will literally be a windows PC with a console-focused interface and the Xbox binaries and PC binaries of games will literally be the same. In the same way that a Steam Deck is actually just a PC.

[kouteiheika]

> By contrast compare Crysis (2007) to anything that came out in 2001. Halo, for example. It's a night and day difference. So yeah the highest end hardware (specifically GPUs) has gotten crazy expensive but it's also gotten crazy overkill. A lot of new games are playable on low to mid settings on older and/or more budget hardware, and low settings still look fantastic on many games.

You can actually play the original Crysis maxed out at 60 FPS on modern integrated GPUs. Crazy.