PC Gaming Is Back in Focus at Tokyo Game Show (bloomberg.com)

After taking a back seat to consoles for the past few years, personal computers are enjoying a resurgence in gaming, thanks to the popularity of e-sports, customizable machines and faster software releases. From a report: This week's Tokyo Game Show will feature a main-stage tournament for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, a hit online survival PC game that's been downloaded more than 10 million times since March. Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One consoles are heading into their fifth years, while Nintendo's Switch is in a bit of a lull before new titles are released for the year-end holiday shopping season. Spending on gaming-ready PC rigs are on track to climb an average of 6.6 percent per year through 2020, while the market as a whole is projected to decline 3.8 percent annually, according to Gartner. Revenue from PC titles will grow by 3 to 4 percent over the coming years, while console-game sales are seen flat, according to DFC Intelligence. Written off years ago for being too expensive, complex and bulky for mass appeal, gaming PCs are seeing a resurgence that could even threaten consoles, according to Kazunori Takahashi, Japan gaming head at Nvidia. "The abundance of titles and the popularity of e-sports is bringing a lot of excitement to PC gaming," said Takahashi, whose employer supplies graphic chips to PC and console makers. Even in Japan, "it's not unreasonable to think that PCs can eventually become a presence that threatens console gaming."

Comments

Anyone wondering why?

[Opportunist]

There are quite a few reasons why PC gaming didn't die 20 years ago when its obituaries were announced the first time. Or 15 years ago when it died again. Or 10 years ago. Or ever since. The reasons are simple.

Consoles had everything stacked in their favors to take over. There's really a LOT of upsides to consoles, all of which have been thrown into the gutter by their makers. Let's think back a few years, shall we? Let's go back to, say, the 1990s. PC gaming was a mess. So many different setups, no standards, drivers you had to invent and reinvent every other game you wrote, and the same shit for the ones wanting to play. Reconfigure this, memory-optimize that, IRQ settings here, DMA configuration there. Consoles were hassle-free gaming. Plug that cartridge into your NES, your Sega Master system, your NeoGeo or whatever you had and you were good to play. Easy. No fidgeting.

And no loading times! Stuff it in, turn it on, play! That was probably the first thing they lost with the advent of the first CD based consoles that made loading times from effin' FLOPPY DISKS look fast!

And the hassle free part was gone soon, too, when consoles started to become more and more fault-prone. Has there been a generation of consoles since PS1 and XBox where you could rely on them actually still working 2 years from purchase? For the sake of the all-holy copy protection, consoles have become a veritable nightmare when it comes to hardware stability.

Next thing they lost was the input advantage/disadvantage battle. Consoles used controllers, PCs used keyboard and mouse. Which of course means that certain games played better on consoles (like plattformers and arcade flight games) while others played better on PCs (like FPS, RTS and other games where point-and-click/shoot is more relevant). Now, PCs did get their console controllers quite soon. Not to mention the nearly inexhaustible supply of other periphery from flight sticks to steering wheels to ... you name it. Only very recently console makers realized that yes, there is actually a market for such input devices (with the noteworthy exception of Nintendo, who produced an incredible amount of input devices... sadly they insisted in making some NOBODY in their sane mind would WANT to use instead of producing what people would actually be using). And dropping the ball immediately again by providing only overpriced crap that you can use with THEIR product, ONLY their product and only with THIS version of their product. In other words, my PC steering wheel I bought 10 years and 3 PCs ago still works. Do you honestly expect your PS2 steering wheel to work when PS5 comes?

And I didn't even get into the area where you can actually upgrade your PC while you're stuck with whatever the console maker deems "good enough".

Personally, I think consoles dropped the ball when they insisted that they really need to have a full blown operating system that took away the key advantage these machines had over PCs: Exactly that they did NOT need that overhead and could apply their whole processing power to delivering a gaming experience.