The_Liquid_Laser said:
Yeah, there have been several other years where computer/PC games didn't get a lot of votes. It really has to do with how strong the console games are that year, although I think 1993 was a particularly strong year for PC games with both Doom and Myst. One thing you have to realize is that a lot of forum users are younger than you or I. That means the 90's was actually ahead of their time, but they might go back and try some games on the Virtual Console or SNES classic or whatever. The games they are most likely to play are earlier versions of series they love, especially Mario and Zelda. Final Fantasy 4 and 6 have also done fairly well in the polls, so Playstation fans may be throwing votes at these games which were actually before their time. PC games tend not to have long running series like these. Adventure games aren't popular anymore, and really they don't make RTS games anymore either. Maybe Diablo will get some votes, because it's still going. Who knows? Younger gamers don't go back and visit earlier PC games like they do for console games. And once we get out of the 90's the popularity of PC games will start to wane. History is written by the winners, and in gaming that means Nintendo and Playstation. PC games did well in the polls against Genesis games, because Sega hasn't won in the long run. But the PC has basically lost too. It's best years were in the 90's. It's not the platform that it used to be. When I was going through the 80's some very popular Arcade and Atari games were overlooked for Nintendo games of that era. The Arcade and Atari have lost. That's why they didn't get votes. Younger gamers view gaming history through the lens of Nintendo and Playstation instead of the other platforms. |
I always considered that many Home/Personal Computer IPs were forerunners of what's to come - a lot, if not most, of what we're playing today has roots in some computer IP whose ideas got noticed by other developers who went on to tweak them for a mainstream audience on consoles...or more recently PCs as well. And given that home/personal computers were always at least 2-3x more expensive than consoles, it is given that market was smaller, hence usually game production budgets were significantly lower than on consoles.
But indeed, the 90s saw PC boom, and PC game budgets started to rise - there were new genres that simply didn't work well on consoles and people were noticing that and getting interested in getting PCs. I'd say 90s and early 00s are peek of PC games. Ultimately, we all know how that ended, most publishers decided to switch to consoles due to bigger profits (piracy was really rampant back in those days). Then eventually Steam saved the day.
So yes, most of the old PC IPs are either dead or dormant. Those that are alive and kicking are mostly the ones that made the transition to consoles at the right time (fun fact, how many CoD players know that it started as a PC exclusive). And yeah, a lot of younger folks know very little about gaming history in general, apart from maybe IPs that directly interest them, but, that's really how we all work, more or less. The more instances where dormant IPs get to live again, the more interest in those older games there will be (like with BG3 lately). I did manage to hammer into my kids, to a various degree, interest in older games, so they can both enjoy a lot of the great ones from the past and have better perspective on new games.
But I think, eventually, PC actually won, since consoles really became PCs in the box, so, porting games between systems became quite easy, so these days pretty much everything is everywhere (bar Nintendo, but Switch emulators are astonishingly good). I'd say that's one of the reasons why we're seeing some of the bigger "PC first" developers doing really well since 8th gen and their IPs becoming universally known and liked.
