Huh, my friends played a ton of PC games. Pretty much anyone into gaming had played Age of Empires, and most had at least heard of the other great RTS games (Command and Conquer, Warcraft 2, etc). Even games like Diablo II were quite popular. And then there was RuneScape that everyone played on the school/library computers, plus the abundance of flash games.
Consoles were also quite popular, and there was a lot fewer cross platform games. Pretty much everyone had a computer in the 90s and early 00s for homework and whatnot. PC was the common denominator, so it’s more likely that two people would have played the same game on PC than console.
The only thing niche about PC gaming was dedicated GPUs, since those were an added cost, and parents would prefer the console to the GPU (and consoles were multiplayer).
Huh, my friends played a ton of PC games. Pretty much anyone into gaming had played Age of Empires, and most had at least heard of the other great RTS games (Command and Conquer, Warcraft 2, etc). Even games like Diablo II were quite popular. And then there was RuneScape that everyone played on the school/library computers, plus the abundance of flash games.
Consoles were also quite popular, and there was a lot fewer cross platform games. Pretty much everyone had a computer in the 90s and early 00s for homework and whatnot. PC was the common denominator, so it’s more likely that two people would have played the same game on PC than console.
The only thing niche about PC gaming was dedicated GPUs, since those were an added cost, and parents would prefer the console to the GPU (and consoles were multiplayer).