I grew up playing on a Tandy 1000, whose most notable feature was the huge amount of games that said "640k RAM required (Tandy: 768K)".

I still remember a few DOS commands, even.

That, to me, is why it's accessible for more people: for $400 you get a machine that will get you 5-8 years worth of useful life. It's a walled garden, but it's a damn big walled garden. And you don't have to worry about checking specifications, you don't have to worry about shady sites for pirating your games, you don't have to be annoyed by needing to upgrade one item to run a game. For an additional $60 you get a AAA title that should, in theory, work, plus you can pay for access to a huge backlog.

Now, that costs more than PC can for games, but in return you get convenience. For many people, that's a good trade.

Oh, the PCMR types are definitely a minority of people who play on PC. PC is definitely my preferred platform for strategy games, but anything besides that I play on console. Sitting in front of a TV with a controller in hand just feels like how I'm supposed to play shooters or RPGs.

And I think modding is really an amazing scene. Sure, there's bad mods, but in general mods as a concept, and often as an execution, are fantastic. Beyond the obvious political aspects of "who would work voluntarily under gommunism?!", they democratize the gaming experience and can make it much more cooperative between developer and players.

At the same time though, in terms of mass accessibility consoles are an achievement. They're the iphone of the gaming world - they just (usually) work. No need to download a mod manager and queue up your mods so that dragons don't spawn in your house or whatever. That's part of why Cyberpunk was such a failure: you assume a base level of playability with a game released for your console. That peace of mind was shattered.

I think that's true for a significant chunk of male gamers. There's a lot more concern about AAA titles and FOMO/FOTM, it seems. Plus there's the whole PC master race of "gotta have the latest graphics card, also please look at my $10000 'battlestation' and validate my life choices", etc.

It seems almost perfectly designed to make toxic people more toxic.

One of my neighbors in my old city explained that playing video games is how he found out he had a seizure disorder, and since that incident in the 90s hadn't played a video game.

Normal humans who play video games might respond and say "damn, that sucks. If you ever decide to give them a try, here are resources so you can avoid games that might trigger that". G*mers say "haha fuck you and your rich and fulfilling family life, you're a loser who can't play video games".

And yes, I did supply him with some info about resources for games that don't cause seizures. He said thanks, and then we went back to watching our kids play, and to my knowledge he didn't play video games again.