this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
143 points (96.1% liked)
Games
20996 readers
456 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I grew up in the nineties and PC gaming certainly felt like a niche hobby then, at least where I grew up. "Normal" kids were doing sports, maybe some families had a Playstation, Dreamcast or Nintendo console in the living room. But there weren't many others who played PC games and us who did were the nerds who got more or less bullied.
Okay but it's been pretty mainstream for like the last 15 years at least, if not 20.
Not really. I’d say it’s gotten more mainstream in the last decade but most people will still look at you funny if you tell them you game most nights instead of veg out in front of the tv. Doubly so if it’s a “nerdy game” like rpgs.
We're talking about PC gaming specifically, not gaming in general.
Yes. So am i.
Vegging out playing PC games on your TV is a niche of a niche. I'm already a member though.
I'd say the explosion of gaming in general through the 00s helped make PC gaming more mainstream. Consoles with online gaming helped blur the lines between platforms.
Then there was also World of Warcraft. It may have only reached ~10 million people then, but it seemed to reach well beyond those who were part of the traditional PC gaming culture.
Huh, my friends played a ton of PC games. Pretty much anyone into gaming had played Age of Empires, and most had at least heard of the other great RTS games (Command and Conquer, Warcraft 2, etc). Even games like Diablo II were quite popular. And then there was RuneScape that everyone played on the school/library computers, plus the abundance of flash games.
Consoles were also quite popular, and there was a lot fewer cross platform games. Pretty much everyone had a computer in the 90s and early 00s for homework and whatnot. PC was the common denominator, so it's more likely that two people would have played the same game on PC than console.
The only thing niche about PC gaming was dedicated GPUs, since those were an added cost, and parents would prefer the console to the GPU (and consoles were multiplayer).
Consoles dwarfed PC gaming back then, so your experience is pretty atypical.
Maybe for total revenue (including game sales), but a lot of people had access to PCs. They were still fairly niche in the early 90s, but by the early 00s, online games like RuneScape and flash games were ubiquitous, and tons of kids would play at school labs and the local library.