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Comment by TheCapn | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone ever believe PC gaming was dieing besides those who wrote hype headlines? CounterStrike/Starcraft have been dominant eSports for over a decade and that was when PC gaming was "strong". They gave headway to the MOBA genre with LoL and DotA but they never really dwindled. Year after year gaming grew but so did the other platforms. People assumed PC gaming was dieing because console/mobile markets flourished? Its not a 0-sum market

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I think a lot of people really did believe it, but they vastly underestimated how much Steam was displacing vs. consoles displacing in the major stores like Best Buy and whatnot. Like, you'd go to the store, see rows and rows of PS3 & XBox 360 games and practically nothing for PC games. It's not a big leap to say pc gaming is dying based off of that, as obviously stores are going to sell what people are buying.

Digital distribution is obvious NOW but back in the day there were a loooot of people scoffing at paying the same price for the digital version and making fun at people for not getting the obviously superior physical version.

My friends and I were very excited when we could start a download to get a game instead of have to go to a physical store. None of us thought of this as a change for the worse.

Digital distribution was obvious back then; it took about half a decade for them to get it right though. Steam was plagued with all kinds of issues, and in the early 2000's broadband wasn't quite ubiquitous in the speed we expect from it today. I remember it took a full day to get Half-Life 2 downloaded.

StarCraft was only ever big in Korea, StarCraft 2 is more so the opposite but that didn't come out until 2010. Counter Strike died in the mid 2000s and only in the last 2-3 years has made a big comeback.

eSports historically has gone through bubbles and we are currently in the 3rd one. No eSports has ever been dominant for a long period of time.

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