No matter how many times they’ve declared PC gaming dead over the last 30 years, it’s kept on kicking

I’d like to begin this article by talking about Warhammer 40,000. Orks in 40k are possessed of a collaborative psychic power: If enough Orks believe something is true, with enough fervour, it will become true. This manifests in simplistic examples, such as go-faster stripes on the side of vehicles that actually increase their speed. And, more relevantly here, in the God-Emperor of Mankind. There’s a theory that the Emperor should be long dead, and it’s only the collective terror of the Orks, for whom he represents something of a boogeyman figure, that keeps him alive. 

It’s much the same with PC gaming. According to the examples below, our hobby has been dead or dying since the 1990s. It’s natural to surmise, then, that it’s only our gestalt consciousness preventing PC gaming from slipping inexorably into the vile black nothingness of oblivion. Each PC Gamer list feature buys us another day; each Steam sale a month. Henry Cavill alone accounts for around 246 days of PC gaming for the masses. And so, in an act of promethean arrogance, let’s laugh at all the times that PC gaming was declared dead and survived, purely because we willed it so.