The developers behind some of PC gaming's biggest hits discuss the state of our hobby and the biggest trends, risks and opportunities in PC gaming today.
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In this special episode of our podcast, recorded at the 2024 Game Developers Conference, PC Gamer Global Editor-in-Chief Evan Lahti sat down with a special group of guests to talk about where PC gaming is at right now. Here's who we brought together to talk about what's going on in PC gaming:
Across an 80 minute conversation, our panel of game developers talked about making "hyper-engaging" games that defy the traditional advice of appealing to as broad an audience of players as possible; the innovation in game development only happening on PC; Steam as a "democratic" platform; industry layoffs and the emerging use of AI in development; and what we should take away from the standout successes of 2024, like Helldivers 2 and Balatro, which is one of many games to follow in the footsteps of the roguelike deckbuilder space that Slay the Spire popularized.
"[Slay the Spire] wasn't intended to be a new genre-creating thing," Mega Crit's Casey Yano says. "The expectation for a card game was that it has to be PvP, and I didn't think that was true. The only way to prove anything on the internet is to do it yourself, so we just made a game."
Larian's Michael Douse pointed out that Slay the Spire, Balatro and Baldur's Gate 3 are all "completely unbothered by any notions of casualization or trying to create something for an audience beyond your own audience. Balatro's unbothered by any notion of what it 'should' be, and focused on what [the developer] wants to make. We're definitely going to see more of that in the PC space."
"We've found that the best people to draw in new players are the players themselves," said EVE Online's Eyrún Jónsdóttir. "When current players draw other players into the game, that [helps] combat the complexity. You need a bit of social support to get into it. Then players really, really enjoy it when they have that kind of onboarding."
Later in the conversation, Warframe's Rebecca Ford highlighted that PC gaming offers a kind of community access you can't find anywhere else.
"I'm a very optimistic futurist for PC as the primary platform," Ford said. "I think it's the most important for people in our age cohort, and has the greatest potential for border-crossing community building. I've connected with more people than I ever thought possible in my entire life, all because I sat in front of a PC, installed Steam, and installed Discord and played games with them. These two things together as forces are so supremely positive, even in isolation. It's a shame you can have very difficult times online, they're not sanitary by any means—but I cannot imagine a better opportunity to be a good online citizen with people connected through something like what we do.
"There's just nothing like it, and I doubt there will ever be anything like it again."
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