The last time I upgraded my PC was in 2015, when process of purchasing and installing a new graphics card (970), motherboard, RAM and power supply cost me a total of $700. I felt good about my purchase, despite the steep price, because the perks of PC gaming were plentiful compared to the struggling tech of the original PS4 and XB1.
Flash forward to 2019, and I'm not feeling as confident in plopping down another $500+ when it feels like so many of the PC's defining advantages as a platform have quietly eroded while it's flaws have been magnified. These days, most consoles have access to resolution and performance options, cloud saves, digital flash sales, mods for compatible games, etc. While these features are far from perfect on console, they are slowly being refined with each hardware iteration, leaving PC feeling like a less unique and appealing choice (not to mention being overly expensive by comparison).
Diminishing Advantages:
Cheaper Games: While the era of amazing flash sales on Steam was already gone in 2015, key-resellers were still going really strong. It was common to see most brand-new, AAA games on GMG and cdKeys available to preorder for $40 or less. These days, more and more big publishers like Ubisoft are region-locking their keys, and platforms like the Epic Game Store have a tighter grip on their games' prices than I've seen in the past.
Modding: This is one of the few advantages that still feels largely intact, though it's scope has always been a bit limited. Fewer and fewer games are friendly to modding, with even the most recent Bethesda and Bioware releases being always online and thus mostly un-moddable. Big publishers like Rockstar have tried to kill the massive modding scene for their top title on more than one occasion, while others like Bethesda have attempted to monetize their scene to squeeze extra profits out of other people's work.
Cheats/Customization: Separate from modding, I'd define this as using tools like Cheat Engine to edit your game in more basic and fundamental ways. Things like making enemies more aggressive in Dark Souls, removing class restrictions for skills/weapons in Dragon's Dogma or letting you play as Vergil in DMC5, greatly increasing replay value with little effort. The noose is tightening around this option, as more publishers bake anticheat measures into their games and send cease-and-desists to the creators of cheat tables and trainers (Capcom has done both with Monster Hunter World, Techland added VAC to Dying Light in 2017, etc). Customization, like modding, has also suffered from the rise of always-online games (which often feature a ton of grinding and microtransactions that you could probably skip/invalidate in under a minute with any memory editor).
Growing Flaws:
Inconvenience: Where to even start? The half-dozen different launchers to play each year's big releases? The digital Russian-Roulette of installing Windows 10 updates? I'm sure some true veteran PC gamers (I began in 2007) will say that things have never been easier, but that's more of a statement on how dismal it was in the past than how "good" it is now.
Hardware Prices: They've always been ludicrous, but I feel like the average mid-line GPU releases at $100+ more than it did in 2015. Obviously the crypto boom can be blamed for this, along with Nvidia's relative monopoly over the market, but still. At least decent RAM isn't $200 anymore, right?
Speculative Bullshit: When will we start seeing online multiplayer being locked behind paywalls on certain launchers?
So, am I alone in feeling this way? Or has PC gaming quietly lost a big chunk of its luster this gen?
