Pc gaming will always be prefered by serious gamer no worries. Phones are already the most popular ones by casuals. Every gaming group has its place. Phone people prefer the free to play stuff

I didn't mean that. I meant that video cards that can acheive something close to photo realism exist, but creating a fully fledged game that utilizes those graphics is too expensive for anything but the biggest publishers. I think the future is going to see a lot more games with Fortnite/Valorant/Overwatch style stylized graphics because of this.

The cloud is not meant to replace serious gaming. Serious gamer wont flock to it because it takes away the freedom you have with local hardware. Fact is it can co exist what you see with flight simulator and you also have an offline version. It will be like amazon where you can buy and download it or just watch it but not every platform will offer a streaming service like now. Microsoft also said selling games will always be a core thing for them. But I see Microsoft more on the casual side because they want to get all the phone gamers but im pretty sure they wont reach the amount of gamers they imagine because there will always be plenty of people which don’t care about gaming at all. The triple a companies will suffer because of their greed with nfts and microt. etc and indies will become mainstream that’s what i think. There will be good triple a companies as well but only a small group. People need options and streaming isn’t for everyone because you don’t need it. The future will be colorful every group will have its stuff and if streaming goes away one day or gets niche im fine with that as well

Pc gaming will be even more popular in 20 years than now. Mobile phones will always be the most used devices which is already the case for many years but that’s a completely different target audience and compared to mobile, consoles and pcs are very niche already

And they've been saying that PC gaming will become a niche, but hey. Who else has access to every game from 1970 onwards? Chess for the Intel 8088? Sure!

Try slamming a copy of Color TV-Game 6 into your Nintendo Switch, I dares ya.

Define "serious gamer." It will absolutely appeal to the "an hour or two of Assassin's Creed after the kids go to sleep and before I go to bed" gamer, which is a huge portion of the AAA market.

This was true years ago. Not anymore. At the school I work at, the vast majority of kids play video games on consoles, phones and tablets, and when I engage a conversation about their gaming hobby, they sure spend a lot of hours playing. I personally can't stand tablets (nothing beats the keyboard/mouse combo), I don't care for the games they play either, but those kids are just as "serious gamers" as we are.

People have to understand that nowadays, kids don't use PCs anymore at school, they use either laptops or tablets. Unlike us, PCs are not part of their lives, they don't grow up using them like we did, therefore, they have no reason to own one at home.

I sure hope that PC gaming will still be around in 20 years, but I don't think it will be even close to dominate the gaming world.

That's just the mobile gaming market is now feeling much better than the PC and console markets. And there is a lot more money in there. And if you remember that companies create games not out of altruism, but for the sake of profit, it becomes obvious that the focus on mobile markets will be more and more. The AAA market is no longer in the best shape, in many ways the PC market is saved by all sorts of successful indie projects. And big studios are increasingly showing interest in "money suckers" instead of full-fledged games. So it is very difficult to hope for a bright future for the gaming industry. The mobile market, despite the abundance of all kinds of garbage, will take a large number of users, money, and, consequently, developers

thats sad :(
current kids are so lame

The mobile market dominates the casual gaming space for years now but its a different market and target group. Yes a lot of kids play on phones but they switch when the are older. i also started with a game boy. In 20 years pc gaming will be much bigger than now but it will never be the dominant market and it doesnt have to do that. every group got its toys
Maybe bad worded but i mean the most options you can get. For example modding and tweaking settings etc

20 years from now we'll be in the games and not realize we're in them. You'll have to find someone who is still conscious of the fact that they're in a game so they can tell you to take off your headset. Then you'll be able to come back to reality.

I gotta be honest, I'm not so good at making predictions. Back in 2013, I figured that we would all be playing on Steam Boxes and that traditional PC gaming and consoles would be a thing of the past "in ten years." It seems I may have been a bit off.

That said, I think we will all be playing on Steam VR sets in 20 years.

That's always a possibility.

It doesn't matter, it still fun to pretend.

Sure but that's a niche concern.

I think once streaming feels reliable and smooth the mainstream gamer will flock to it like cows to grass, and subscriptions too, just like they did with movies and music. However I also think competitive gamers and "hardcore" gamers will always want a local version. So the question becomes, like DVD or vinyl, how long will that enthusiast option last?

The main reason I want a game locally at all is ownership.

If you remove that and the internet connection becomes dependable enough that it makes not practical difference (we're not that far off, I'd give it another decade or two at most), I'd switch to streaming the game in a heartbeat with a rental model like Netflix.

For a guy like me, the alternative to a drm-free store like GOG is not some weird hybrid that doesn't really know what it wants to be like Steam or Epic, but a rental-driven client-server architecture with a very thin client. To put it plainly, I'm not interested in installing/managing gigabytes of stuff I don't even own on my machine if I can help it.