ranzware
As pointed out by our own Evan Lahti earlier this year, PC gaming is mainstream now. No longer is it a niche corner of the industry—PC is a serious rival to consoles, and some of the biggest hits in recent years have been PC-first games, such as Baldur’s Gate 3.
One thing was undeniable: PC gaming is still extremely weird.
After decades of being told over and over that PC gaming had died, there’s a real pleasure in seeing it flourish more than ever before. Being taken seriously as a platform means more major games, with even PlayStation exclusives now reliably making their way to PC, and more support given to the PC experience of those games.
But there is an anxiety that comes with that too, especially if you’ve been a PC gamer for a long time. To a large extent, the core personality of PC gaming is being niche. As it grows more and more mainstream, attracting ever greater interest from major companies, there’s a fear that what makes it strange, unique, and distinctive will be sanded away. A ‘consoleification’ of the hobby sometimes feels nigh.
Yet earlier in 2024, I had the pleasure of being a guest on PCG’s official podcast, Chat Log—I was pulled in to discuss Steam’s top wishlist charts, and what they say about the current state of PC gaming. Looking down that list of 100 of the most anticipated games on the platform, one thing was undeniable: PC gaming is still extremely weird.
Weird and wonderful
Where console charts are dominated by mainly the biggest releases, PC’s most popular storefront remains a wild west. On any given day, the top 10 most wishlisted games is almost guaranteed to include:
- An extremely janky survival game
- An indie debut with an irresistible gimmick
- A very fiddly strategy game
- Hollow Knight: Silksong… still
- The latest over-anticipated multiplayer zombie game
- Something you’ve never heard of, that no games site has ever covered, that’s inexplicably unbelievably popular
Keep scrolling down the top 100, and you’ll find an incredible diversity of games, spanning all sorts of odd genres and specific styles, and all across the spectrum of scale, from indies made by one person in their bedroom to big budget games from massive teams and every step in between. It’s never easy to predict what will be on the list—seemingly obvious upcoming games will be nowhere to be found, while obscure titles from unknown studios or tiny projects with no marketing rocket to the top.
That’s reflected in the shape of this year. When we look back at the biggest stories and the most important games of 2024 for us as a site, it’s a motley list. This is the year a survival game full of knock-off Pokémon found 25 million players in two months. One of the most celebrated and talked-about games was a poker roguelike. Stalker 2, a sandbox FPS developed literally under siege, finally actually came out, and was even jankier and more compelling than we could have hoped. A new Valve game leaked, started building an active playerbase before the developer even admitted it existed, and became one of the most popular and hotly discussed games of the year without ever actually being released.
Our Game of the Year awards conversations were surreal, as we debated the merits of a game about a little Yorkshire lemon hanging out with Matt Berry versus one where you and your friends try to survive in the depths of Half-Life’s Black Mesa. Significant time was devoted to discussing a primarily text-based dungeon crawler where you can fight quantum lampreys and make friends with a psychic gorilla. We spent as much of our meetings trying to nail down what genres games could even be said to belong to, so we could put names to categories, as we did evaluating their quality.
All of which is to say: PC gaming is, somehow, both more mainstream than ever, and weirder than ever, at the same time. It’s an eclectic local band propelled to superstardom, but still as fiercely dedicated to trumpet-based acid folk as ever. (We liked them before they were cool.)
It’s still the place that pleases everybody not by hosting a handful of things we’re all expected to like, but by creating space for a million things that cover every possible bizarre interest. Whatever your kink is, it’s on Steam somewhere, with its own new innovations and a diehard community ten times bigger than you expected. Even the big console-first releases, now more common than ever on PC, just feel like part of that tapestry instead of supplanting it—another category among many to enjoy.
And every now and then, out of that soup of strangeness, a genre thought dead will suddenly rise from the ashes to become the thing everyone’s talking about again—if you predicted that in 2023 the thing everyone would be excited about would be an isometric RPG, you’re a more potent psychic than I. Other times something totally new will blindside us with an idea suddenly obvious in retrospect. Of course, a dungeon crawler based around arcade claw machines, why didn’t I think of that?
For decades, PC gaming retained its unique identity in the face of mounting adversity. It was never going to be erased by mounting success. And thank God for that—this wonderful hobby of ours is still a haven for the strange and unexpected, and every day on this job is a new and baffling surprise. Long may it stay that way—we should celebrate it becoming more accessible and more popular than ever, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep PC gaming weird.
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Kurt Indovina
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