The only regions were PC gaming truly thrives are the ones were consoles have been historically banned like Korea, unavailable like east Europe and Russia, or made prohibitively expensive by harsh import taxes like Brazil. Everywhere else, consoles reign supreme in hardware sales and particularly in game sales. Consumers vote with their dollars and they almost always vote for consoles over PC.
Pound for pound, PC's are the least efficient devices every conceived for playing games. They just are. A 700 dollar RTX 2070 Super can't even sustain 30 FPS with ray-tracing on at 4K in games like Control, and can barely maintain it at all with it turned off in Borderlands 3. Forget about it. A 700 dollar graphics card absolutely trounced by 500 dollar consoles, while consoles get dragged through the mud constantly for making reasonable compromises to performance and resolution.
I've been down the premium PC gaming path enough to know it's pitfalls and frustrations: inconsistent performance, compatibility issues. HDR support is a mess, an absolutely litany of different competing distribution platforms, often shoddy 3rd party device support, any gaming monitor above 1440P is crazy expensive, GPU's are always being hoarded by bitcoin farms, decent mice and keyboards are ludicrously expensive, windows is a near-constant irritant/tornado of hours-long updates that often bring new problems to troubleshoot. And on top of that, you get zero of the quality of life improvements new consoles have made: no instant suspend-resume of any game, much less multiple games, no automatic updates in sleep mode for anything, no portability of the Switch, and monstrously huge GPU's that need even bigger PC cases that aren't exactly easy to fit anywhere except a space uniquely dedicated to a giant gaming PC.
It's so impractical and dated, I can barely imagine putting together another gaming PC in a post PS5 and XSX world. And if the next Switch can put up even slightly decent performance numbers.....that's where I play all of my indie games. Not on the PC, not for the past few years. Especially since every time I check in on Steam for a big sale, I already got all the games I wanted previously and for less money on a PS store flash sale. PC gaming doesn't even have the best sales anymore. No wonder 80-90% of multiplat sales go to consoles. If you haven't been playing PC games for over 30 years, don't even respond because that's inferior experience to mine anyways. Like I said, take it from someone who walked that road for decades. It's not worth it anymore. So what's left? Piracy is still huge, despite what alot of people say. And there are indeed quite a few bad-faith console ports of PC games who just want the publisher money, and resent supporting the platforms at all. And these endlessly touted mod communities that often are exaggerated or don't exist at all, especially for small or old games.
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