Every videogame showcase is a PC gaming show now
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor
This week: Between obsessing over the trailers for Mandrake and Innkeep, I’ve been trying to finish Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. And failing.
I was watching the Frosty Games Fest, a showcase of upcoming games from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand—where it’s currently cold as balls, hence the “Frosty” part of the name—and realized that, out of more than 50 games I saw there, only two weren’t coming to PC. And that’s because one of them already was on PC, and was just there to announce its mobile port.
The Frosty Games Fest may not be a PC-centric show, yet it has a dedicated Steam page to help you track down the game where you’re a thief with really long arms, or the visual novel where you romance Dracula.
Obviously the PC Gaming Show is 100% PC games, and it’s no big surprise the Xbox Games Showcase is also full of games coming to PC. (Not today, at least, though it wasn’t that long ago that Xbox still did console exclusives.) And it was interesting that the Xbox handheld turned out to just be a ROG Ally that is “bringing together the power of Xbox and the freedom of Windows” according to Sarah Bond, Microsoft’s president of Xbox. And also that Pokémon studio Game Freak’s next game is coming to PC.
What is surprising is how much the central tentpole of this overwhelming annual game-a-palooza, the Summer Game Fest, has become a PC show by default. We had to wait years for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game to come to PC, but Scott Pilgrim EX touts a PC launch from its very first reveal, as does Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver. (I’m still waiting for 1999’s Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style to get a PC port, though.)
Everything from Diablo-but-you’re-SpongeBob to the Lego-themed multiplayer party game is coming to our platform of choice, and when a rare game doesn’t tell you it’ll be launching on Steam it’s only because, in the case of End of Abyss and Out of Words, they’re coming to Epic. At least, for now.
When a game like Stranger than Heaven shows up at the SGF with a trailer that doesn’t tell you what platform it’ll be on, or indeed much of anything except that it’s a noir take on Yakuza, once upon a time we might have sat on it while we hassled PR people for confirmation that it would release on PC, too. But now, when Yakuza 0 puts in regular appearances in the PC Gamer Top 100 every year, it’s hard to imagine it won’t.
Back when E3 was still a thing, it often felt like a celebration of big-budget games and console hardware, with everything else a secondary consideration relegated to the fringes. Which is why we set up the PC Gaming Show in the first place. Now, when E3 has a stake through its heart and a mouth stuffed full of garlic so it can’t rise again, PC gaming and the variety of games it supports gets to be at the forefront of our show, and every show—where it belongs.
