If 2024 proves anything, it's that mainstream success hasn't made PC gaming any less weird—and thank God for that

GamesIf 2024 proves anything, it’s that mainstream success hasn’t made PC gaming any less weird—and thank God for thatWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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One thing was undeniable: PC gaming is still extremely weird.

After decades of being told over and overthat PC gaming had died, there’s a real pleasure in seeing it flourish more than ever before. Being taken seriously as a platform means more major games, with even PlayStation exclusives now reliably making their way to PC, and more support given to the PC experience of those games.

Yet earlier in 2024, I had the pleasure of being a guest onPCG’s official podcast, Chat Log—I was pulled in to discussSteam’s top wishlist charts, and what they say about the current state of PC gaming. Looking down that list of 100 of the most anticipated games on the platform, one thing was undeniable: PC gaming is still extremely weird.

Weird and wonderful

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Cooking a steak no a portable stove in Abiotic Factor.

That’s reflected in the shape of this year. When we look back at the biggest stories and the most important games of 2024 for us as a site, it’s a motley list. This is the yeara survival game full of knock-off Pokémon found 25 million players in two months. One of the most celebrated and talked-about games wasa poker roguelike. Stalker 2, a sandbox FPS developed literally under siege, finally actually came out, and waseven jankier and more compellingthan we could have hoped. A new Valve gameleaked, started building an active playerbase before the developereven admitted it existed, and became one of the most popular and hotly discussed games of the year without ever actually being released.

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Our Game of the Year awards conversations were surreal, as we debated the merits ofa game about a little Yorkshire lemon hanging out with Matt Berryversus one where you and your friends try tosurvive in the depths of Half-Life’s Black Mesa. Significant time was devoted to discussinga primarily text-based dungeon crawlerwhere you can fight quantum lampreys and make friends with a psychic gorilla. We spent as much of our meetings trying to nail down what genres games could even be said to belong to, so we could put names to categories, as we did evaluating their quality.

All of which is to say: PC gaming is, somehow, both more mainstream than ever, and weirder than ever, at the same time. It’s an eclectic local band propelled to superstardom, but still as fiercely dedicated to trumpet-based acid folk as ever. (We liked them before they were cool.)

(Image credit: Stray Fawn Publishing, Strayworks)

Dungeon Clawler

And every now and then, out of that soup of strangeness, a genre thought dead will suddenly rise from the ashes to become the thing everyone’s talking about again—if you predicted that in 2023 the thing everyone would be excited about would bean isometric RPG, you’re a more potent psychic than I. Other times something totally new will blindside us with an idea suddenly obvious in retrospect. Of course,a dungeon crawler based around arcade claw machines, why didn’t I think of that?

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Weird and wonderful#

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Weird and wonderful

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