pc game computer game redirects here for video games in general see video game for other uses see computer game disambiguation part of a series onvideo games platforms arcade game console game game console home console electronic game audio game electronic handheld handheld game handheld console mobile game online game social network game pc game linux mac genres action beat em up fighting platform shooter survival actionadventure stealth survival horror adventure interactive fiction interactive movie visual novel roleplaying action roleplaying tactical roleplaying simulation construction and management life simulation sports vehicle strategy multiplayer online battle arena realtime strategy realtime tactics turnbased strategy turnbased tactics massively multiplayer online lists arcade video games bestselling video games bestselling video game franchises highestgrossing video game franchises mostplayed video games by player count mostplayed mobile games by player count highestgrossing arcade games video games considered among the best game of the year awards video games notable for negative reception development game ai game design interaction design game programming level design video game art video game design video game graphics video game music vte pc games also known as computer games or personal computer games are video games played on a personal computer rather than a dedicated video game console or arcade machine their defining characteristics include a more diverse and user determined gaming hardware and software and a generally greater capacity in input processing and video output home computer games became popular following the video game crash of 1983 leading to the era of the bedroom coder in the 1990s pc games lost massmarket traction to console games before enjoying a resurgence in the mid2000s through digital distribution newzoo reports that the pc gaming sector is the third largest and estimated in decline with the consoles second largest and mobile even smartphone gaming sector alone biggest and across all platforms as of 2016 22 billion gamers generate us1011 billion in revenue ie all numbers exclude hardware costs and digital game revenues will account for 944 billion or 87 of the global market mobile is the most lucrative segment with smartphone and tablet gaming growing 19 year on year to 461 billion claiming 42 of the market in 2020 mobile gaming will represent just more than half of the total games market china expected to generate 275 billion or onequarter of all revenues in 2017 pc is considered synonymous by them and others with ibm pc compatible systems while mobile computers smartphones and tablets such as those running android or ios are also personal computers in the general sense the apac region is estimated to generate 466 billion in 2016 or 47 of total global game revenues note not only pc games china alone accounts for half of apacs revenues reaching 244 billion cementing its place as the largest games market in the world ahead of the uss anticipated market size of 235 billion china is expected to have 53 of revenues from mobile in 2017 46 in 2016 the uncoordinated nature of the pc game market and its lack of physical media make precisely assessing its size difficult history history of video games early growth spacewar developed for the pdp1 in 1961 is often credited as being the second ever computer game the game consisted of two playercontrolled spaceships maneuvering around a central star each attempting to destroy the other bertie the brain was one of the first game playing machines developed it was built in 1950 by josef kates it measured more than four meters tall and was displayed at the canadian national exhibition that year although personal computers only became popular with the development of the microprocessor and microcomputer computer gaming on mainframes and minicomputers had previously already existed oxo an adaptation of tictactoe for the edsac debuted in 1952 another pioneer computer game was developed in 1961 when mit students martin graetz and alan kotok with mit student steve russell developed spacewar on a pdp1 mainframe computer used for statistical calculations the first generation of computer games were often text adventures or interactive fiction in which the player communicated with the computer by entering commands through a keyboard an early textadventure adventure was developed for the pdp11 minicomputer by will crowther in 1976 and expanded by don woods in 1977 by the 1980s personal computers had become powerful enough to run games like adventure but by this time graphics were beginning to become an important factor in games later games combined textual commands with basic graphics as seen in the ssi gold box games such as pool of radiance or bards tale for example by the late 1970s to early 1980s games were developed and distributed through hobbyist groups and gaming magazines such as creative computing and later computer gaming world these publications provided game code that could be typed into a computer and played encouraging readers to submit their own software to competitions microchess was one of the first games for microcomputers which was sold to the public first sold in 1977 microchess eventually sold over 50000 copies on cassette tape as with secondgeneration video game consoles at the time early home computer game companies capitalized on successful arcade games at the time with ports or clones of popular arcade games industry crash and aftermath see also video game crash of 1983 as the video game market became flooded with poorquality cartridge games created by numerous companies attempting to enter the market and overproduction of highprofile releases such as the atari 2600 adaptations of pacman and et grossly underperformed the popularity of personal computers for education rose dramatically in 1983 consumer interest in console video games dwindled to historical lows as interest in games on personal computers rose to enhance the immersive experience with their unrealistic graphics and electronic sound early pc games included extras such as the perilsensitive sunglasses that shipped with the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy or the science fiction novella included with elite these extras gradually became less common but many games were still sold in the traditional oversized boxes that used to hold the extra feelies today such extras are usually found only in special edition versions of games such as battlechests from blizzard the north american console market experienced a resurgence in the united states with the release of the nintendo entertainment system nes in europe computer gaming continued to boom for many years after during the 16bit era the commodore amiga and atari st became popular in europe while the pc98 sharp x68000 and fm towns became popular in japan the amiga x68000 and fm towns were capable of producing near arcadequality hardware sprite graphics and sound quality when they first released in the midtolate 1980s growth of ibm pc gaming among launch titles for the ibm personal computer pc in 1981 was microsoft adventure which ibm described as bringing players into a fantasy world of caves and treasures from mid1985 however what compute described as a wave of inexpensive ibm pc clones from american and asian companies such as the tandy 1000 caused prices to decline by the end of 1986 the equivalent to a 1600 real ibm pc with 256k ram and two disk drives cost as little as 600 lower than the price of the apple iic consumers began purchasing dos computers for the home in large numbers while often purchased to do work in evenings and weekends clones popularity caused consumersoftware companies to increase the number of ibmcompatible products including those developed specifically for the pc as opposed to porting from other computers bing gordon of electronic arts reported that customers used computers for games more than one fifth of the time whether purchased for work or a hobby with many who purchased computers for other reasons finding pc games a pretty satisfying experience by 1987 the pc market was growing so quickly that the formerly businessonly computer had become the largest and fastestgrowing and most important platform for computer game companies dos computers dominated the home supplanting commodore and apple more than a third of games sold in north america were for the pc twice as many as those for the apple ii and even outselling those for the commodore 64 by 1988 the enormous popularity of the nintendo entertainment system had greatly affected the computergame industry a koei executive claimed that nintendos success has destroyed the computer games however did not disappear by 1989 computer gaming world reported that the industry is moving toward heavy use of vga graphics vga gave the pc graphics that outmatched the amiga increasing adoption of the computer mouse driven partially by the success of adventure games such as the highly successful kings quest series and high resolution bitmap displays allowed the industry to include increasingly highquality graphical interfaces in new releases further improvements to game artwork and audio were made possible with the introduction of fm synthesis sound yamaha began manufacturing fm synth boards for computers in the earlymid1980s and by 1985 the nec and fm7 computers had builtin fm sound by 1990 dos was 65 of the computergame market with the amiga at 10 all other computers including the apple macintosh were below 10 and declining although both apple and ibm tried to avoid customers associating their products with game machines the latter acknowledged that vga audio and joystick options for its ps1 computer were popular in december 1992 computer gaming world reported that dos accounted for 82 of computergame sales in 1991 compared to macintoshs 8 and amigas 5 in response to a readers challenge to find a dos game that played better than the amiga version the magazine cited wing commander and civilization and added that the heavy msdos emphasis in cgw merely reflects the realities of the market by spring 1994 an estimated 24 million us homes 27 of households had a personal computer 48 played games on their computer 40 had the 486 cpu or higher 35 had cdrom drives and 20 had a sound cardnew games such as myst included many more assets for a richer game experience many companies sold multimedia upgrade kits that bundled cd drives sound cards and software during the mid1990s but device drivers for the new peripherals further depleted scarce ram which used unreal mode contemporary gaming by 1996 the growing popularity of microsoft windows simplified device driver and memory management the success of 3d console titles such as super mario 64 and tomb raider increased interest in hardware accelerated 3d graphics on pcs and soon resulted in attempts to produce affordable solutions with the ati rage matrox mystique s3 virge and rendition vrit the faster graphics accelerators and improving cpu technology resulted in increasing levels of realism in computer games during this time the improvements introduced with products such as atis radeon r300 and nvidias geforce 6 series have allowed developers to increase the complexity of modern game engines pc gaming currently tends strongly toward improvements in 3d graphics unlike the generally accepted push for improved graphical performance the use of physics engines in computer games has become a matter of debate since announcement and 2005 release of the nvidia physx ppu ostensibly competing with middleware such as the havok physics engine issues such as difficulty in ensuring consistent experiences for all players similarly many game publishers began to experiment with new forms of marketing chief among these alternative strategies is episodic gaming an adaptation of the older concept of expansion packs in which game content is provided in smaller quantities but for a proportionally lower price titles such as halflife 2 episode one took advantage of the idea with mixed results rising from concerns for the amount of content provided for the price platform characteristics fidelity in highend pc gaming a pc will generally have far more processing resources at its disposal than other gaming systems better hardware also increases the potential fidelity of a pc games rules and simulation pc games often support more players or npcs than equivalents on other platforms the pc also supports greater input fidelity thanks to its compatibility with a wide array of peripherals openness the defining characteristic of the pc platform is the absence of centralized control all other gaming platforms except android devices to an extent are owned and administered by a single group the advantages of openness include reduced software cost prices are kept down by competition and the absence of platformholder fees games and services are cheaper at every level and many are free increased flexibility pc games decades old can be played on modern systems through emulation software if need be conversely newer games can often be run on older systems by reducing the games fidelity andor scale increased innovation one does not need to ask for permission to release or update a pc game or to modify an existing one and the platforms hardware and software are constantly evolving these factors make pc the centre of both hardware and software innovation by comparison closed platforms tend to remain much the same throughout their lifespan but there are also disadvantages including increased complexity a pc is a generalpurpose tool its inner workings are exposed to the owner and misconfiguration can create enormous problems hardware compatibility issues are also possible game development is complicated by the wide variety of hardware configurations developers may be forced to limit their design to run with suboptimum pc hardware in order to reach a larger pc market or add a range graphical and other settings to adjust for playability on individual machines requiring increased development test and customer support resources increased hardware cost pc components are generally sold individually for profit even if one buys a prebuilt machine whereas the hardware of closed platforms is massproduced as a single unit and often sold at a smaller profit or even a loss with the intention of making profit instead in online service fees and developer kit profits reduced security it is difficult and in most situations ultimately impossible to control the way in which pc hardware and software is used this leads to far more software piracy and cheating than closed platforms suffer from mods mod video gaming the openness of the pc platform allows players to edit their games and distribute the results over the internet as mods a healthy mod community greatly increases a games longevity and the most popular mods have driven purchases of their parent game to record heights mods can compete with official downloadable content however or even outright redistribute it and their ability to extend the lifespan of a game can work against its developers plans for regular sequels as game technology has become more complex it has also become harder to distribute development tools to the public modding has a different connotation on consoles which are typically restricted much more heavily as publicly released development tools are rare console mods usually refer to hardware alterations designed to remove restrictions dominant software although the pc platform is almost completely decentralized at a hardware level there are two dominant software forces the microsoft windows operating system and the steam distribution service microsoft introduced an operating environment named windows on november 20 1985 as an addon to dos in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces guis microsoft windows came to dominate the worlds personal computer market with over 90 market share overtaking mac os which had been introduced in 1984 valve does not release any sales figures on its steam service instead it only provides the data to companies with games on steam however stardock the previous owner of competing platform impulse estimated that as of 2009 steam had a 70 share of the digital distribution market for video games digital distribution services digital distribution in video games pc games are sold predominantly through the internet with buyers downloading their new purchase directly to their computer valve corporation released the steam platform for windows computers in 2003 as a means to distribute valvedeveloped video games such as halflife 2 it would later see release on the mac os x operating system in 2010 and was released on linux in 2012 as well by 2011 it controlled 70 of the market for downloadable pc games with a userbase of about 40 million accounts the period between 2004 and now saw the rise of many digital distribution services on pc such as amazon digital services gamestop gfwl ea store direct2drive gogcom and gamersgate digital distribution also slashes the cost of circulation eliminates stock shortages allows games to be released worldwide at no additional cost and allows niche audiences to be reached with ease however most digital distribution systems create ownership and customer rights issues by storing access rights on distributorowned computers games confer with these computers over the internet before launching this raises the prospect of purchases being lost if the distributor goes out of business or chooses to lock the buyers account and prevents resale the ethics of which are a matter of debate pc gaming technology an exploded view of a modern personal computer displaymotherboardcpu microprocessorprimary storage ramexpansion cards graphics cards etcpower supplyoptical disc drivesecondary storage hard diskkeyboardmouse personal computer see also gaming computer hardware modern computer games place great demand on the computers hardware often requiring a fast central processing unit cpu to function properly cpu manufacturers historically relied mainly on increasing clock rates to improve the performance of their processors but had begun to move steadily towards multicore cpus by 2005 these processors allow the computer to simultaneously process multiple tasks called threads allowing the use of more complex graphics artificial intelligence and ingame physics similarly 3d games often rely on a powerful graphics processing unit gpu which accelerates the process of drawing complex scenes in realtime gpus may be an integrated part of the computers motherboard the most common solution in laptops or come packaged with a discrete graphics card with a supply of dedicated video ram connected to the motherboard through either an agp or pciexpress port it is also possible to use multiple gpus in a single computer using technologies such as nvidias scalable link interface and atis crossfire sound cards are also available to provide improved audio in computer games these cards provide improved 3d audio and provide audio enhancement that is generally not available with integrated alternatives at the cost of marginally lower overall performance the creative labs soundblaster line was for many years the de facto standard for sound cards although its popularity dwindled as pc audio became a commodity on modern motherboards physics processing units ppus such as the nvidia physx formerly ageia physx card are also available to accelerate physics simulations in modern computer games ppus allow the computer to process more complex interactions among objects than is achievable using only the cpu potentially allowing players a much greater degree of control over the world in games designed to use the card virtually all personal computers use a keyboard and mouse for user input other common gaming peripherals are a headset for faster communication in online games joysticks for flight simulators steering wheels for driving games and gamepads for consolestyle games software computer games also rely on thirdparty software such as an operating system os device drivers libraries and more to run today the vast majority of computer games are designed to run on the microsoft windows family of operating systems whereas earlier games written for dos would include code to communicate directly with hardware today application programming interfaces apis provide an interface between the game and the os simplifying game design microsofts directx is an api that is widely used by todays computer games to communicate with sound and graphics hardware opengl is a crossplatform api for graphics rendering that is also used the version of the graphics cards driver installed can often affect game performance and gameplay in late 2013 amd announced mantle a lowlevel api for certain models of amd graphics cards allowing for greater performance compared to softwarelevel apis such as directx as well as simplifying porting to and from the playstation 4 and xbox one consoles which are both built upon amd hardware it is not unusual for a game company to use a thirdparty game engine or thirdparty libraries for a games ai or physics multiplayer multiplayer computer game local area network gaming see also lan party multiplayer gaming was largely limited to local area networks lans before costeffective broadband internet access became available due to their typically higher bandwidth and lower latency than the dialup services of the time these advantages allowed more players to join any given computer game but have persisted today because of the higher latency of most internet connections and the costs associated with broadband internet lan gaming typically requires two or more personal computers a router and sufficient networking cables to connect every computer on the network additionally each computer must have its own copy or spawn copy of the game in order to play optionally any lan may include an external connection to the internet online games online game online multiplayer games have achieved popularity largely as a result of increasing broadband adoption among consumers affordable highbandwidth internet connections allow large numbers of players to play together and thus have found particular use in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games tanarus and persistent online games such as world war ii online although it is possible to participate in online computer games using dialup modems broadband internet connections are generally considered necessary in order to reduce the latency between players commonly known as lag such connections require a broadbandcompatible modem connected to the personal computer through a network interface card generally integrated onto the computers motherboard optionally separated by a router online games require a virtual environment generally called a game server these virtual servers interconnect gamers allowing real time and often fastpaced action to meet this subsequent need game server providers gsp have become increasingly more popular over the last half decade while not required for all gamers these servers provide a unique home fully customizable such as additional modifications settings etc giving the end gamers the experience they desire today there are over 510000 game servers hosted in north america alone emulation emulator emulation software used to run software without the original hardware are popular for their ability to play legacy video games without the platform for which they were designed the operating system emulators include dosbox a dos emulator which allows playing games developed originally for this operating system and thus not compatible with a modernday os console emulators such as nestopia and mame are relatively commonplace although the complexity of modern consoles such as the xbox or playstation makes them far more difficult to emulate even for the original manufacturers most emulation software mimics a particular hardware architecture often to an extremely high degree of accuracy this is particularly the case with classic home computers such as the commodore 64 whose software often depends on highly sophisticated lowlevel programming tricks invented by game programmers and the demoscene controversy video game controversy pc games have long been a source of controversy largely due to the violence that has become commonly associated with video games in general the debate surrounds the influence of objectionable content on the social development of minors with organizations such as the american psychological association concluding that video game violence increases childrens aggression video game addiction is another cultural aspect of gaming to draw criticism as it can have a negative influence on health and on social relations the problem of addiction and its health risks seems to have grown with the rise of massively multiplayer online role playing games mmorpgs computer games museums see also video game museums there are several computer games museums around the world in 2011 one opened in berlin a computer game museum that documents computer games from the 1970s until today the museum of art and digital entertainment in oakland california also exhibits pc games in its general collection the video game museum in rome is dedicated to the preservation of videogames and includes pss games in its collection the computer history museum in mountain view california holds a collection of pc games and allows visitors to play spacewar the first computer game on a restored original pdp1 video games portal arcade game console game game studies handheld video game mobile game list of pc games computer game museum in berlin vtevideo game genres listaction beat em up hack and slash fighting maze pacman clone platform shooter firstperson thirdperson light gun shoot em up tactical survival battle royale actionadventure grand theft auto clone immersive sim metroidvania stealth survival horror psychological horror adventure escape the room interactive fiction interactive movie visual novel mmo mmofps mmorpg mmorts mud roleplaying action roleplaying dungeon crawl roguelike tactical roleplaying simulation construction and management business city government life simulation dating sim digital pet god social simulation sports strategy 4x multiplayer online battle arena realtime strategy tower defense time management realtime tactics turnbased strategy turnbased tactics wargame vehicle simulation flight simulator amateur combat space racing kart racing sim racing submarine simulator train simulator vehicular combat other genres artillery breakout clone digital collectible card game eroge exergame incremental music rhythm nongame party programming puzzle sokoban tilematching related concepts aaa game advertising arcade game art game audio game casual game christian game crossover game educational game fmv gamification indie game multiplayer video game nonlinear gameplay open world nonviolent video game online game browser game multiplayer online game online gambling socialnetwork game pervasive game serious game toystolife twitch gameplay video game clone 