The PC’s beginnings as a gaming platform couldn’t be
further from /r/pcmasterrace rhetoric – playing games on a
desktop machine in the ’90s was actually a subversive
experience that turned our multimedia centres into
something almost unintended. They looked like the desk
furniture of any office, but there they were running
Command & Conquer for us while we could still ostensibly
be doing our homework. By contrast, games consoles
trimmed away all the multimedia fat and delivered
something wholly for gaming. As a value proposition, that
made them the more decadent, trickier
to ascertain consumer item.
For many of us, much of the
fondness for the PC as a platform is
couched in that setting. Not simply a
box below the telly, the PC was
somewhere you devoted some
significant part of an entire room to.
Indeed, your hand was forced – by the
time you’d stuffed a bulky CRT screen, a
desktop tower the size of a hatchback, a printer and a mouse
and keyboard into one place, little else would be taking place
in that room. Playing on the PC meant going off to a private
little nook of the house, ensconcing oneself in beige and
escaping to a virtual world.
The idea of cutting out this nostalgic and outdated
middle-man, then, seems like some kind of affront to our
interest on a fundamental level. There’s no longer any
mandate to keep a corner of our home just for gaming, since
all a cloud gaming service needs is an internet connection, a
screen, tablet, or smartphone and some kind of input device.
There’s no need to have a clearly defined RGB colour
scheme. And if you’re living with the tiny fidelity and latency
compromise of GeForce Now, you might as well chuck out
that esports-grade mouse and n-key rollover mechanical
keyboard and just use a wireless Surface mouse and
keyboard instead. Why does this feel like reciting bible verse
backwards over an animal sacrifice?THE HARDCORE WINS
Probably because in the years since we brought those first
PCs into our homes, a certain subset’s elitist posturing has
tarnished the platform with noxious ideas about ‘true’
gamers being the ones privileged
enough to invest thousands on a hobby.
And perhaps the best thing about
GeForce Now, and Xbox Game Pass, is
that it’s disruptive to that culture. PC
gaming is now accessible to anyone
who can afford a monthly subscription,
a fast internet connection, and a
compatible device. Not a trifle of a
minimum spec set, but certainly a much
lower barrier for entry than the outlay required to run
Cyberpunk 2077 above 10fps.
The games industry is booming right now, and traditional
gaming has almost nothing to do with that revenue surge.
Instead it’s mobile gaming in emerging markets – people
previously kept at arm’s length from gaming by budget and
availability, proving they’re just as passionate as someone
with a curved 144Hz IPS. Cloud services make PC titles part
of that boom, since they’re suddenly playable on
smartphones, and for PC gamers who’ll never ditch their
towers, that’ great news too. Suddenly developers have a far
bigger market to reach, and greater profits to reap.
Phil IwaniukDREAM SETUP The money-no-object streaming rig
HEADPHONES
Audiophile-grade headphones with the
spare change from the above so you can
really hear the online heckling.WI-FI
A Wi-Fi 6 router and receiver to keep
those frames coming in at a sprint, and
so you don’t complain about lag.CONTROLLER
An Xbox Elite controller for the final,
unnecessarily decadent touch. Put those
levers to good use.MONITOR
An incredibly lavish monitor, since you
don’t need to buy a GPU. Heck, you could
even splash out on an ultra-wide one.FAR LEFT: (^) GeForce
Now wants to disrupt
PC gaming. And if it
does, we all win.
LEFT: (^) Custom
cases and cooling
systems are the
real victims here.
PLAYING ON THE PC
MEANT GOING OFF TO
A PRIVATE LITTLE
NOOK OF THE HOUSE
Image credit: Nvidia
Tech Report
HARDWARE