Oh, wait, no its not. Quite the opposite, in fact.

It's been a common refrain for years... no, literal decades. I think I
first read those words back in the Playstation 1 days. "Gaming on PCs
is dead. Consoles are the big thing. It's just not profitable to
develop for PC." The meme has been quiet for a while, but it still
pops up now and again.

It's never been true, of course. But it's less true these days than
ever before. A recent GDC report* shows that at least two thirds of
developers are directly targeting the PC platform. The second most
popular - the Playstation 5 - garners only a 35% target rate.

Of course, given the nature of this newsgroup, I doubt this surprises
anyone. PCs may rarely have dominated the gaming market as much as it
does these days, but it was always a viable platform, and even in its
weakest days only looked infirm when compared to console sales in
cumulative. It was always the platform with the most games, even if it
rarely had the hot exclusives (usually those financed directly by the
console manufacturers themselves). And the platform was, historically,
not without its issues. From a players perspective, it was a much more
fiddly and expensive machine, while developers had to worry about
compatibility and piracy. But make a good game and PC gamers would buy
it. It was always somewhere you could make money.

It's just more so today than in the past. And it's nice to have
studies that show this more definitively.

(that said, as much as I love PC gaming, the real money remains -
sadly - in developing for mobile. Costs of entry are so low - and the
returns so high - that it absolutely dwarfs console and PC profits
combined. )

---------------------
* read about it here:
https://www.pcgamer.com/pc-is-the-most-dominant-its-been-this-decade-as-two-thirds-of-devs-say-theyre-targeting-the-platform/

On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 10:17:21 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

>clickbait

Et tu, Spalls?

--
Zag

No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had
spent more time alone with my computer.' ~Dan(i) Bunten

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>
> Oh, wait, no its not. Quite the opposite, in fact.
>

The only thing I see dying is PC AAA games, if they keep insisting in
raising the prices of GPUs and prioritising the AI crowd over PC gamers.

At this rate developers will have to start targeting Intel HD built-in
graphics if they want their games to sell on PC