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Comment by nathias | Hacker News Reader

Worst time so far. The problems will only increase because PC will become a small niche item for enthusiast not a common item.

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How? Sales are rising right now. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/12/pc-market-had-best-q1-since-...

Yup. PCs will mostly move into 1970s hobbyist territory but nowadays you can't build 5nm chips in your garage.

Well, not all of them, since a ton of professionals use them, but some niches like PC gaming will feel a bit like that very soon, compared to mobile gaming.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/292751/mobile-gaming-rev...

(and the trend is for mobile games to become much bigger much faster than desktop games)

Ah yes the 5nm chip hobby scene from the 70s :)

I suspect the hobby scene will be like what I see from my friend who hacks keyboards, special mod-able components. There's advantages for when a product is designed on hobby merit, and I think it'll be a longer bastion of enthusiasm.

PC gaming isn't niche. In the past few years it feels far more mainstream then it ever has before. You underestimate that there's literally a generation which has grown up on Twitch and YouTube where people predominantly play games on PC.

Sure mobile gaming is massive. But considering the current growth of PC gaming it's hardly something that negates the existence of PC gaming even if it's smaller in comparison.

I've been playing PC games since 1998 and I've played them exclusively until 2018.

They heyday of PC games from a market share perspective was in the past (probably around 2005?). At the time there were just PCs and console, I think they were reasonably close.

Now desktop games are less than a third and they will probably be around one fifth or less within a decade.

That doesn't mean that they will be bad, the overall PC game market value will grow, it's just that the mobile game market will grow much faster and become much, much bigger over time.

Mobile gaming is surely huge and growing. But I don't see how it has much bearing on the health of PC gaming. It's not a zero-sum game. I can buy that PC and Console gaming are in competition but the gaming experience between mobile and PC/Console is vastly different.

Game streaming will become more common, so people won't buy PCs but rent games to play on the cloud.

Also there are potential problems with x86 pc's not being able to match ssd->gpu streaming speeds of custom architecture consoles.

That's not an x86 bottleneck as Microsoft is bringing the tech to PC[1], and best part, it even works on Gen 3 SSDs so you don't have to burn $ on top of the line Gen 4 drives.

[1]https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/microsoft-to-share-more-de...

Look at slide 5 — they are still using system memory instead of reading directly to gpu. Although ms rep did say that direct streaming is being worked on[1]. Also we still don't know details on nvidia's proprietary rxt-io. But I wouldn't call that solved. [1] — https://imgur.com/a/fHnLLQo

It's the same story every generation. There may be some things the consoles are better at right now but give it 2 years and we'll be complaining how the consoles are holding things back again.

You underestimate pc gaming.

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