2025 is the victory lap for PC gaming

Sometimes failure is just a good idea with bad timing. Consider the steam engine.

In 2013, at the height of the console gaming era, Valve, the owner and operator of Steam, the largest digital video game store for PC, announced an effort to mainstream PC gaming with a “console-like” experience – and millions of console games convert gamers into Steam shoppers on the go. At the time, consoles were thriving, home to exclusive games and the supposed first stop for 90% of AAA releases.

The Steam Machine wasn’t one literal machine, but a conceptual blueprint for gaming PC manufacturers to make cheaper, tiny PCs that fit comfortably under a living room TV.

Players surfed through their video game libraries in an operating system that looked less like a Windows desktop and more like an Xbox user interface. And to do that, they used a special controller that combined the console controls of the past with the laptop trackpads of… well, also the past.

Despite the hopes of many industry analysts, the Steam Machine project, which promised all the benefits of PC gaming without the headaches, led to a paltry series of mediocre gaming PCs. Valve shut down the strategy in 2018.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Far from it.

Even though the hardware died, the dream lived on. The steam engine has inspired more industrial changes in his death than most video game consoles do in life. Valve’s primary goal was to get its store onto more screens, but it was the Steam Machine’s secondary function – popularizing PCs – that resonated.

Ten years ago, according to a chart from Visual CapitalistPCs had reached parity with consoles after years of eating their dust. However, by 2022, PC gaming accounted for $45 billion in revenue – 50% more than its console cousins. And in 2025, ten years after Valve launched the first Steam Machines, PC gaming will take its victory lap, thanks in large part to another piece of Valve hardware.

Here’s how PC gaming went from ‘hardcore’ to mainstream, and why you can expect PC gaming culture to expand even further in the coming years.

PCs aren’t intimidating anymore now that they look (and feel) like a Nintendo Switch

In the 1990s and early 2000s, people who preferred console games had an honest and repeatable criticism of PC gaming: You spent as much time fighting the machine as you did playing a game. PC gaming, the critics would say, involved a lot of tinkering, while consoles – for all their limitations – just worked.

Now you can experience the lion’s share of what PC gaming has to offer through a Steam Deck without having to worry about specs, GPUs, or processors, and without ever seeing Windows’ blue screen of death – or Windows at all. The Steam Deck packs many of Valve’s best ideas from the Steam Machine into a single, reasonably priced, portable device – which of course can also be connected to your TV via HDMI.

The Steam Deck looks and feels like a Nintendo Switch, but with all the freedom and benefits of traditional PC gaming. For example, mods no longer require lengthy setups of sketchy websites; they can be added to a game directly from the Steam Workshop. For people tempted to go beyond simple modifications, the Steam Deck also includes a Linux desktop experience. A cottage industry of YouTubers, writers, and programmers are producing a steady stream of guides and tools to simplify once-complex processes, like setting up a dozen or more emulators or accessing things like Xbox Game Pass.

Ten years ago, PC manufacturers struggled to translate Valve’s vision of the Steam Machine into a viable commercial product. They needed to see what success looked like if they ever hoped to achieve it themselves. Today, the Steam Deck serves as a tangible example of what an approachable, marketable “console-like” PC experience can be. Companies like Asus, Alienware, Lenovo, Logitech, and Ayaneo have flooded the market with Steam Deck competitors over the past year, and the 2025 release calendar is already filling up with many more portable gaming PCs.

My colleague Sean Hollister wrote up The edge about how this shift could allow Valve to take some sort of soft control over the PC gaming space, that other hardware makers could move to SteamOS, and that Valve itself could return to the living room hubs of the Steam Machine era, now in a strong position. And all that power to happen. But while Valve has a history of controlling the digital PC retail market, it has been notoriously slow (if not downright reluctant) to grow into something that could rival Sony or Microsoft.

That’s fine. Even if Valve just stays the course, the Steam Deck has already turned PC gaming into a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It cannot be stopped. And the entire sector is better off for it.

‘AAA’ exclusives became too financially risky

Dragon Age: The Veil Guard was nine years in development. The “smaller” Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 was in development for almost five years. Major video game publishers – fixated on making games that take dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to complete – are constantly expanding their teams and spending more time making fewer games. As a result, ‘AAA’ games are more expensive to produce than ever before in history.

The survival of big-budget video game studios thus depends on the extent to which each major release reaches the largest possible audience.

Xbox has even started moving many of its releases to competing hardware, like the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5, in hopes of recouping its budgets (and humor and ever-vigilant FTC).

But for games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create and market, the cumulative number of console players is still not enough. And so almost every publisher, big and small, ports their games to PC – often releasing them on the same day they appear on consoles.

This is a radical change from fifteen years ago, when many game publishers avoided PC releases due to the widespread (and in retrospect, arguably unreasonable) fear of piracy. And from 10 years ago, when whatever games arrived on PC were hidden behind byzantine apps owned by the publisher.

Now you can check out Steam and check out games from EA, Ubisoft and Activision, along with Microsoft and Sony. The biggest obstacle is Nintendo, which is busy battling the emulation of its games on PC hardware.

Video game publishers need to break this cycle of scale. But until they do that, the best way to break even (let alone turn a profit) is to expand their customer base to include millions of PC gamers.

People expect to enjoy their media wherever and whenever they want – and not just on the couch

Remember the Xbox One, the colossal failure from which Microsoft never fully recovered? The architects envisioned the Xbox as the center of entertainment. People ran their entire media diet – from their streaming apps to their cable box – through the Xbox hardware, making it the focal point of the living room. The “One” home entertainment machine to rule them all.

Microsoft has overlooked one fatal fact: the average person no longer spends their free time in the living room sharing a TV. With the rise of smartphones and laptops, people consume media where and when it suits them best. So while Microsoft envisioned families gathering around the living room TV, parents and children split up to consume media on the screen of their choice. Four years later, Nintendo went in the opposite direction with the Nintendo Switch, a video game console that could be undocked and played wherever the kids and parents went.

But they are PCs that can play games untethered from the living room for a long time. Because PC owners can choose from hundreds of variants – or build their own gaming PC – PC gaming exists in stores and digital libraries that follow players from one device to the next. So if you want to play PC games on a console-style system, you can. Or you can do this on a gaming laptop, handheld device, or traditional desktop computer.

After the failure of the Xbox One, current Xbox CEO Phil Spencer set out on a years-long path to make Xbox an all-purpose brand rather than just a console. The company’s “This is an Xbox” ad campaign, which showcases Xbox games on the Xbox console as well as smartphones, laptops and portable PC gaming devices, is a clear culmination of that effort.

But what took Xbox almost a decade to achieve has been possible all along with PC gaming.

What even is a console at this point?

For decades, consoles were an obvious choice for most gamers. They were cheaper, had comparable graphical power at launch, required minimal technical expertise, and were the only way to play some of the biggest games of a given year. Now all of these arguments apply more to portable PCs like the Steam Deck than to consoles.

The PS5 Pro launched a few months ago for an eye-watering $700. The visuals still don’t compare to those of high-end PCs. The system’s big exclusives eventually end up on PC, where they often work better and sell for less. In the meantime, Xbox’s latest commercial spends more time showing Xbox games on devices other than their own console. And PCs also offer a wider selection of indie and multiplayer games than consoles.

In March 2024, Spencer told Polygon that he would like to see PC gaming stores such as Epic Games Store and Itch.io run on Xbox hardware. And over the past month, rumors have been swirling that Steam could arrive on Xbox.

This – should it happen in 2025 – is the endgame scenario. PCs won’t surpass consoles; consoles will become PCs.