People have been saying that PC gaming is going to die for a long time. Ever since the rise of console gaming in everyone’s homes people have been calling an end to PC gaming. Since then we’ve seen a change and an explosion in the kind of gaming offered on PC. Services like Steam and Good Old Games offer fantastic experiences at low cost and we’ve seen an explosion in casual and social gaming on PC. I believe PC gaming never died and I think it never will.

When I asked my friends why they were PC gamers one answer stood out from the others as something they all thought. “Because I’m always on my computer anyway.” Computers have become such a huge part of our culture, in this age of information that almost everyone is on their computers for a huge portion of their day. So it’s easy for gamers to transition from the other things we do on our computers, like web browsing or work, to gaming and back again.

Because of that casual games have really exploded on PCs. We’ve all seen and played games on Facebook and kongregate but I think PC gaming is also great for a form of gaming that isn’t quite casual and not quite hardcore. Where players can take a break from working on their computers for a game of League of Legends or World of Tanks and then get back to work. It’s not always productive but it’s something you can do on a PCs that you can’t on a console.

PC gaming is extremely open to independent developers and gamers alike. If you want to get started making games there are plenty of tools available for the indie developer. Even tools like Scratch allow people with little to no programming experience to get started making a game. Perhaps above all else PC gaming is indie friendly. There are very few gatekeepers standing in your way to publish a game on the PC and companies like Valve have shown huge support for the indie community on PC.

I love how customizable PC gaming can be. It’s like driving a standard car versus driving an automatic one. You can have control over a lot in a PC game that you wouldn’t have over a console game. You also have control over the performance of your machine and for most of us gamers that means that you’ve built your own computer or at least spent quite a bit of time working on it. We all love that feeling of putting together a computer and starting it for the first time. It’s your own machine and nobody else in the world has one like it.

Lastly and probably most importantly I love the online gaming community on PC. It’s the kind of community that you just can’t get anywhere else. It’s born of years of online gaming experience and tempered with games like World of Warcraft. If you’ve ever played an MMO, MOBA or any other online game you probably know the community I’m talking about. There are a huge amount of forums, fan sites and blogs dedicated to online gaming. Conventions like Blizcon and EverQuest Con are totally dedicated to bringing together their online PC gaming community.

That’s why PC gaming can never die. It might have changed over the years to
accommodate a different demographic. It may have become a little more casual, a little bit more social or a little more online but it’s this adaptability that makes gaming on the PC so strong. We shouldn’t be thinking about whether or not PC gaming will die, we should be thinking about what it’s next big change will be. It may have changed a little but PC gaming will never die.