The year 2025 is the victory lap of computer games

Sometimes failure is just a good idea at a bad time. Consider the steam engine.

In 2013, at the height of the console gaming era, Valve, owner and operator of Steam, the largest digital video game store for PCs, announced an attempt to mainstream PC gaming with a “console” experience – and convert millions of consoles along the way from gamers to buyers on Steam. At the time, consoles were booming, home to exclusive titles and the assumed first stop for 90% of AAA releases.

The Steam Machine wasn’t a literal machine, but a conceptual design for gaming PC makers to create cheaper, miniature PCs that would fit comfortably under the TV in the living room.

Players could surf video game libraries on an operating system that looked less like the Windows desktop and more like the Xbox interface. To do this, they used a special controller that combined console controls from the past with laptop trackpads from… well, also from the past.

Despite the hopes of many industry analysts, the Steam Machine project, which promised all the benefits of PC gaming without any of the hassle, has resulted in a paltry lineup of mid-range gaming PCs. Valve suspended this strategy in 2018.

Of course, this is not the end of the story. Not at all.

Even though the equipment died, the sleep continued. The steam engine has inspired further changes in the industry in his death than most video game consoles in your life. Valve’s primary goal was to bring its storefront to more screens, but it was Steam Machine’s secondary function – popularizing PCs – that made the biggest splash.

Ten years ago, according to A chart by Visual CapitalistPCs have achieved parity with consoles after years of eating their dust. However, by 2022, PC games will reach $45 billion in revenue, 50% more than their console cousins. And in 2025, ten years after Valve released the first Steam machines, PC gaming will triumph, thanks in huge part to another piece of Valve hardware.

Here’s how gaming went from hardcore to mainstream, and why we should expect gaming culture to continue to grow in the coming years.

PCs are no longer intimidating because they look (and work) like Nintendo Switch

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, people who preferred console gaming had an truthful and repeatable criticism of PC gaming: you’d spend as much time fighting the machine as you would playing the game. Gaming on PC, critics would say, meant a lot of tinkering, while consoles – for all their limitations – just worked.

Now you can experience the lion’s share of what PC gaming has to offer via Steam Deck without worrying about specs, GPUs or CPUs, and never seeing a Windows blue screen of death – or Windows at all. Steam Deck combines many of Valve’s best ideas from Steam Machine into one affordable, portable device – which, of course, can also be connected to a TV via HDMI.

Steam Deck looks and feels like Nintendo Switch, but offers all the freedom and benefits of established PC gaming. For example, mods no longer require lengthy setups from sketchy websites; they can be added to the game directly from the Steam Workshop. For those who want to tinker beyond elementary mods, the Steam Deck also includes a Linux desktop. A cottage industry of YouTubers, writers, and developers creates a steady stream of guides and tools to simplify once-complex processes, like setting up a dozen or more emulators or accessing things like Xbox Game Pass.

Ten years ago, PC makers struggled to translate Valve’s vision for Steam Machine into a viable commercial product. They needed to see what success looked like if they ever hoped to achieve it themselves. Today, the Steam Deck is a actual example of how accessible and marketable a console-like PC experience can be. Companies like Asus, Alienware, Lenovo, Logitech, and Ayaneo have been flooding the market with Steam Deck competitors over the past year, and the 2025 launch calendar is already packed with significantly more portable gaming PCs.

My colleague Sean Hollister wrote at Edge about how this change could allow Valve to take some kind of pliable control over the PC gaming space, that other hardware makers could move to SteamOS, and Valve itself could return to Steam Machine-era living rooms, now in a position of strength. And that’s it power become. But while Valve has a history of controlling the PC digital storefront market, it has been notoriously tardy (if not downright reluctant) in growing into something that could compete with Sony or Microsoft.

All right. Even if Valve simply stays the course, Steam Deck has already turned PC gaming into a snowball rolling down, getting bigger and bigger. It can’t be stopped. And the entire industry will be better for it.

Exclusive “AAA” deals have become too financially risky

Dragon Age: Guardian of the Veil it was developed for nine years. “smaller” Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 was created for almost five years. Major video game publishers – focused on creating games that consume dozens, if not hundreds of hours – have ever-expanding teams that spend more time creating fewer games. As a result, “AAA” games are more pricey to produce than at any time in history.

Therefore, the survival of high-budget video game studios depends on each major production reaching as many audiences as possible.

Xbox has even started moving many of its releases to competing hardware like the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5, hoping to recoup its budgets (and improve its spirits). ever vigilant FTC).

However, for games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and sell, the total console player base is still not sufficient. That’s why almost every publisher, substantial and tiny, is porting their games to PCs – often releasing them the same day they hit consoles.

This is a radical change from 15 years ago, when many game publishers avoided releasing games on PC due to widespread (and in hindsight clearly unfounded) fears of piracy. And this is from 10 years ago, when PC games were locked behind byzantine publisher-owned applications.

Now you can browse Steam and browse games from EA, Ubisoft and Activision, as well as Microsoft and Sony. The biggest obstacle is Nintendo, which is busy struggling to emulate its games on PC hardware.

Video game publishers need to break out of this cycle of scale. But until they do, the best way to break even (let alone make a profit) will be to expand their customer pool to millions of PC gamers.

People expect to be able to consume multimedia anywhere and anytime – not just on the sofa

Remember Xbox One, a colossal failure from which Microsoft never fully recovered? Its architects envisioned Xbox as an entertainment center. People would route their entire media diet – from streaming apps to their cable box – through Xbox hardware, making it the centerpiece of the living room. The “One” home entertainment device that rules them all.

Microsoft missed one fatal fact: the average person no longer spends their free time in the living room sharing a TV. With the development of smartphones and laptops, people now consume media wherever and whenever it is most convenient and convenient. When Microsoft imagined families gathering around the TV in the living room, parents and children separated to enjoy media on the screen of their choice. Four years later, Nintendo went in a different direction with the Nintendo Switch, a video game console that could be removed from its dock and played anywhere children and parents went.

But PCs have long allowed for casual gaming in the living room. Because PC owners can choose from hundreds of variants — or build their own gaming PC altogether — computer games have appeared in storefronts and digital libraries that follow players from one device to the next. So if you want to play computer games on a console-like system, you can do so. You can also do this on a gaming laptop, mobile device, or established desktop computer.

Following the failure of Xbox One, current Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has charted a multi-year path to make Xbox a brand available everywhere, not just on console. The company’s “This is an Xbox” advertising campaign – which shows Xbox games running on the Xbox console, but also smartphones, laptops and portable PC gaming devices – is a clear culmination of these efforts.

But what took Xbox almost a decade to achieve was possible all along with PC gaming.

What even is a console at this point?

For decades, consoles have been the obvious choice for most gamers. They were cheaper, had comparable graphical power at launch, required minimal technical knowledge, and were the only way to play some of the biggest games of the year. Now all of these arguments apply more to portable computers like the Steam Deck than to consoles.

The PS5 Pro launched a few months ago for the staggering price of $700. Its visuals still cannot be compared to top-shelf computers. The system’s biggest exclusives eventually make their way to PCs, where they often perform better and sell for less. Meanwhile, The latest Xbox ad spends more time viewing Xbox games on devices other than your own console. PCs also offer a wider selection of indie and multiplayer games than consoles.

In March 2024, Spencer told Polygon that he would like to see PC game store sites like the Epic Games Store and Itch.io work on Xbox hardware. Last month, there were rumors that Steam might be coming to Xbox.

This scenario – if it happens in 2025 – is the end scenario. PCs won’t outperform consoles; consoles will become desktop computers.