For a long time, it seems we've been stuck in a dark age of PC gaming. After a point, AAA developers stopped caring about new and innovative ideas, optimized performance became a pipe dream, and GPU manufacturers started offering less hardware for more money. The budget gamer has been priced out of the market, hardware requirements are increasing with every new launch, and buying games at full price is harder than ever. Let's talk about it.

Game pricing is getting unsustainable

What's a PC gamer gotta do?

I get it: games take years of effort, especially the AAA kind. If we got half-decent titles after paying full price, gamers wouldn't be complaining as much as they are. Inflation and game development costs are rising, yes, but it seems corporate greed has overshadowed everything else at the biggest studios. If it weren't for the thriving indie scene, switching from PC to console would be the only option left.

First, they started selling $70 games, and now the $80 price point is fast becoming the norm. There are even rumors that GTA VI might touch the "magical" $100 figure. Barring a few standout AAA titles, we rarely get the complete experience after the initial $70-$80 purchase. DLCs and season passes keep drip-feeding content to gamers for years after the initial release. And are these content drops always worth the extra money? I'll let you answer that for yourself.

Premium editions, Gold editions, pre-order editions, and more are meant to gouge as much money out of gamers as possible. Steam sales exist, but not everyone can wait for months or years to buy their favorite new game when it gets discounted enough. It shouldn't be unsustainable to buy new releases at launch, but that's where we are right now. And the worst part is that the quality of titles we're getting shows no signs of getting better.

DRM and anti-consumerism are getting out of hand

Opportunism masked as improved experience

Digital Rights Management (DRM) software has been around for a long time, but its new avatars, like Denuvo, have started to become too intrusive. First, Denuvo is known to negatively impact gaming performance. Second, it's sometimes added to games long after the initial launch, at which point it is useless against piracy, but is still a nuisance for gamers. Third, its always-online nature means some titles could become unplayable if the publisher shuts down the servers.

Then we have examples of publishers rendering games unplayable in a fell swoop. Ubisoft shut down the servers for the always-online The Crew 2 around a year ago, leading to huge backlash from fans. The company promised to release an offline mode in 2025, but this goes to show that companies like Ubisoft want gamers to be comfortable not owning their games.

A Sony mandate in 2024 forced Helldivers 2 players on PC to link their PSN and Steam accounts, rendering gamers in 177 countries (where PSN wasn't available) unable to play a game they had paid for. Sony later reversed the decision, but only because it was forced to. Game companies seem to be in a race to make gamers' lives as miserable as possible.

Stable performance is elusive

Is an unbroken title too much to ask for?

You would already be familiar with the "ship today, fix tomorrow" attitude that has gripped the gaming industry in recent years. Whether it's a result of crunch culture, corporate mandates, or a race to the bottom, gamers are the worst hit. Expecting a much-hyped title to run as advertised on day one is too much to ask after paying through the nose. At this point, stable performance in a game gets a win in the reviews — unbroken titles have become unicorns.

Hardware requirements are increasing, but the degree of optimization in games is falling with every launch. It's hard not to conclude that developers are relying a bit too much on tools like upscaling and frame generation to pick up the slack instead of doing their job well. It's always been harder to optimize games for PC than for consoles due to the countless combinations of hardware, but the last five years have seen performance hit rock bottom.

Stagnation is rampant

Both hardware and software

The PC gaming industry has never felt more corporatized than it does today. Instead of being excited about fresh ideas and innovative takes on established genres, we're supposed to celebrate yet another remake or remaster. Except for a few worthy titles, most new IPs are either highly derivative to spark any real interest, or half-baked to the level of being a "gotcha game" (remember The Day Before).

This stagnation isn't limited to the games alone. PC hardware has also hit a wall in terms of generational gains. Just look at the RTX 50 series GPUs or Ryzen 9000 series CPUs to gauge how much we've progressed from the last generation. Nvidia had to resort to AI-generated frames to make its latest GPUs look worth buying. Intel seems to be going backwards with Arrow Lake, and AMD is content with a 20% uplift over the RX 7900 GRE (compared to the similarly priced RX 9070).

Even the QA standards have gone to the dogs. Intel's CPUs suffered from irreparable voltage damage that led to a class action lawsuit. Nvidia's GPUs shipped with missing ROPs, and its "improved" power connectors are still burning up. AMD's Ryzen X3D CPUs are dying on ASRock motherboards even after the BIOS update that was supposed to fix the problem. Is consumer hardware that unimportant in the AI era?

GPUs provide less value than ever before

Are we just addicts who can't help themselves?

Poor generational gains and abysmal QA standards are one thing, but gamers aren't even getting enough for their money anymore. Nvidia GPUs are objectively getting worse due to shrinkflation, providing consumers with fewer CUDA cores and lower VRAM and memory bandwidth at each GPU class. While prices are steadily breaking records, value for money has become an antiquated concept.

Another burning concern, especially in the Nvidia camp, is the trend of insufficient VRAM. Both Nvidia and AMD are still shipping 8GB VRAM GPUs, but Nvidia deserves the bulk of the blame because it does so even on its high-end cards. Gamers are not only paying more than ever for more power-hungry cards that are barely better than what came before. And that is when these products are actually in stock and at advertised prices.

Enjoying ray tracing on budget graphics cards is virtually impossible, and overpaying for GPUs is no longer considered unusual. We've been conditioned to a market where it's expected that every new product will remain elusive for months on end before we have the privilege of buying it.

Do you have hopes for PC gaming in 2026?

I know I don't; not for the next year, at least. For PC gaming to become exciting again, a multifaceted overhaul is needed. And expecting hardware manufacturers, game publishers, and developers to change course within a year is foolish at best. What we can do is try to vote with our wallets, and avoid buying overpriced components and games. How much this would help, only time will tell.