Summer Is Over But Why Is The PC Gaming Show CONTINUALLY The Worst Thing? And Why Are They Doing Two Shows Per Year Now?

So, PC Gamer Has Been Doing This Conference Thing Poorly For Ten Years Now

This show really has been going for over ten year now, huh?

To call this an overdue blog post would be an understatement, as my writing efforts in 2024 haven't exactly gone according to plan. I had planned to have this edited and ready to publish after PC Gamer's summer gaming conference had concluded. Unfortunately, personal matters got the better of me, and much of the punch of this topic is mainly inert, with most having let the event and conference subside into the periphery of their consciousness. However, I had an outline of what I wanted to write, and rather than let this topic die out, which is the healthier option, I decided to boot up the VOD for PC Gamer's summer spectacular a second time and watched it again; all two hours and forty-six minutes in all of its glory. With the industry and many press sites nearing their GOTY debates and us lurching to when we need to get upset about the next edition of Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards, something about PC Gamer's "The PC Gaming Show 2024" stuck with me. Overall, the event remains a punching bag, and even the most die-hard PC enthusiasts look at the event as a recurring joke. No one, and I do mean no one, takes the event seriously or as something comparable to the console manufacturer press conferences at E3 of yesteryear, even if that is the air of confidence the show's presenters often try to fan in the direction of its viewers.

Geoff Keighley is an imperfect advocate for an industry currently in crisis. He takes up social and industry-wide issues during his events, often kicking and screaming, and his shows strike a centrist editorial tone. The Game Awards feel outdated with its mix of world premiers and genre-specific awards that speak to the show's roots from when it was on Spike TV. However, Keighley has increasingly, over time, shown signs that he is, in fact, willing to listen to criticism, even if such criticism needs to be phrased a specific way or nigh universal among those who pay his bills. Nonetheless, there's no denying that he puts a mountain of effort into his showcases, and he has, in spurts and bursts, improved over time, even if the recurring issue of him needing an editor has remained. Conversely, The PC Gaming Show has always been a disaster. Part of this is due to the event trying to champion PC gaming above all other forms of video game entertainment. The event almost sneers that we presently stand here where Steam, not Xbox or PlayStation, has the greatest likelihood of swinging consumer spending habits in the industry. Also, the event feels obsolete with its penchant for whole comedic scenes and gags and love for one-off jokes and fourth-wall-breaking tomfoolery. While Keighley, especially at the onset of The Game Awards, relied on cringe-worthy celebrity cameos and stage gags, he's excised these bits massively. In contrast, The PC Gaming Show still views them as event sellers.

great. this is just... great

And goddamn, does someone at PC Gamer need to have more moderators in their chat when they stream this event on YouTube. Even before the official stream started, they had a female presenter review PC Gamer's favorite and most iconic moments from its event throughout its ten-year existence, and it was non-stop comments about her cleavage and breasts. It was just a global inundation of thirsty comments with no end. It's been worse in the past, don't get me wrong, but I have no idea why a major tentpole video game conference has allowed such a significant component of itself to fester this horribly and this visibly. PC Gamer's YouTube chatroom having less than savory comments during a live show has been a problem before, but it was downright uncomfortable this year. They have had this female presenter before, and I don't want to be shitty, but the script PC Gamer has given her every time has been terrible. The joke always involves her getting hot and bothered about male characters like Geralt, and there's nothing wrong with that; you do whatever rocks your boat, but her script, in particular, has the maturity of a Spike Game Awards skit circa 2008. If one of your core tenets is to present PC gaming and PC hobbyist culture as this all-encompassing and burgeoning section of gaming, then something drastically needs to change because this humor speaks to a bygone era when Quake Con was still known for its players streaming porn between matches or when CRPGs were dominated by machismo.

Goddamn Is This The Most Inauthentic Gaming Conference Every Year

Once you skip past the pre-show in which various editors at PC Gamer highlight their favorite memories of the past ten years, you are greeted by the PC Gaming Show's two hosts, and it is here that something immediately breaks. Whether it be Sean [day9] Plott or Mica Burton, you realize that The PC Gaming Show is attempting to emulate the schmaltz of The Oscars, with Plott donning a black suit and a bowtie and doing so while winking directly at the camera. The first recurring "joke" they hit you with is that The Oscars are for your grandparents and Boomers, and wouldn't The Oscars be so much better if they spoke to younger audiences like those that play PC games? They know you might have contrivances with Geoff Keighley; they know you hate celebrities bopping into game conferences; they know you hate fake paid stand-in actors meant to depict families playing video games together; they know all of this; they know. And yet, they repeat the same bullshit they are so apt to lampoon with one-sixteenth the budget of what they are sneering at. In the summer event's opening act, Frankie Ward shouts at the other hosts to "get to the trailers" and stop with the skits. They know that they're making bullshit, and yet, they still wallow in the bullshit.

Lisa Su during the 2016 PC Gaming Show. Real talk, Lisa Su is maybe the actual best CEO in tech when you consider she inherited a disaster and turned it into gold.

Whenever it comes to this artificial-feeling meta or self-referential gaming humor, I return to Jeff Gerstmann's point during the Quick Look for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. If your joke is to repeat something that is bullshit and all you do is subject me to that bullshit, that's not funny, and you cannot hide under the guise of "parody." And it sure is RIPE that The PC Gaming Show, of all things, is taking potshots at The Oscars. Some of you might remember the early days of this event when AMD sponsored it. During those AMD-led days, the show would completely stop so someone could announce lottery winners for Ryzen CPUs or Radeon GPUs. The product placement and hawking of goods in modern gaming conferences haven't been great, but the practice operated at a different level during the early years of The PC Gaming Show. During the AMD-sponsored days, you had Lisa Su practically throwing Radeon GPUs into the audience. Likewise, there was a period when this event was live and in front of a real audience. It had keynote speakers like Warren Spector, which the 10th-anniversary show proudly advertised but conveniently forgot to mention was a drop in the bucket and mostly an aimless ramble session. On the other hand, the current format, which is a pre-taped stage act with game trailers in between, isn't holding up exceptionally well either. It offers no discernable advantages over anything else during the summer conference onslaught.

One of the few moments from The PC Gaming Show that worked for me was when it provided a tour through Frost Giant Studios, the developer behind Stormgate. You had developers level with an off-camera interviewer about their work and why they felt so passionate about their current project. If this event cut out its skits and half of the forgettable farming simulators or survival crafting games, it could make way for more personal moments like these. However, what did The PC Gaming Show follow up this studio tour with in the next scene? That would be a joke sequence about a pregnant woman having food cravings and discussing their favorite odd flavor pairings! It also immediately aired TWO trailers for indie tactics games, which seems brutal to those small studios, considering they had to follow up Stormgate. It was also a bummer for Frost Giant Studios. You get the sense they paid a good chunk of cash to get people interested, but here, they weren't given preferential treatment as they were placed in the middle of the conference and near other genre-adjacent games, which makes it hard for them to bill their game as a unique or special proposition. Props to the indie developer behind the dancing game that introduced their trailer and name-dropped their website, because with how brief and sometimes aberrant the trailers were, that seems like the only way for any of these demos to have actionable staying power; you have to do the job of this event you are paying to be at.

The Pacing For The 2024 Conference Was Atrocious, But It Has Always Been A Problem

Why are you trying to evoke the schmaltz of The Oscars in the year of our Lord, 2024?

Something that continues to baffle me is how often The PC Gaming Show seemingly accidentally walks into memes or thematics. Last year, a massive chunk of their trailer time ended up servicing sizzle reels for farming simulators or life sims because no less than three different farming simulators with over $1,000 worth of purchasable DLC on the Steam marketplace got event time. Did the event lean into the joke when it happened, or strategically group these games apart? Nope, but PC Gamer sure wants you to remember that they gave us Geralt in a hot tub! Whoever runs The PC Gaming Show has this habit of needing to have memes connected to the event explained to them, and they always tend to recognize internet clowning on them months, and in this case, years, after the fact. Yeah, because that's how memes and internet social media-based humor work. For this year, the event's organizers chunked things up by showing three to four game trailers followed by a skit or stage routine. That might sound like par for the course with one of these. However, if I was a developer and my shit aired before or after Day9's comedic bits, as they were so distracting from everything else, I'd ask for my money back. As someone else noted, you can't gauge the value of a game based on its trailer from this year's event when you are still flummoxed about a vaguely Nordic man who was about to lecture us all on sustainable degrowth communism. And yet, that's what happened... more than once.

I go back and forth if I miss live on-stage demos, as they were always problematic and prone to chicanery. At the same time, every convention being an endless stream of trailers also has downsides. Montages and quickly edited vertical slices of gameplay footage are terrible barometers of games and what their potential hooks might be. With the 2024 PC Gaming Show, there were a half dozen open-world survival crafting games, and while I agree most of this is indicative of the genre, I can't tell you what made any of these games distinct from one another. The same goes for the half-dozen tactics games as well as the three or four pixel-based Metroidvanias that littered the event. There were so many games, and they all had little worthwhile or memorable airtime that the event felt like a blur. Nothing had a chance to stick with me or anyone watching it. I bet if I pressed the developers of those games directly, they would be more than able and willing to relay some form of clarity, but this event doesn't do anyone any favors, especially indie games. Again, it's another sign of a generational disconnect between whoever is writing or planning this conference and what possible advantages it could have from the rest of the convention field. If this is going to be oriented around PC gaming and its advantages, what exactly does The PC Gaming Showcase offer to developers of those games? By copying the conference format of the console manufacturers, sans live demos but still sporting skits; there are game genres and marquee PC titles that don't benefit from being at this event in its current format. RTS games need stage demos rather than sizzle reels and it wasn't until we saw more gameplay of Dragon Age: Veilguard that its smarmy trailer started to gel with many people.

Were there games I'm actually excited about that I discovered through this conference sure, but those games are the exception to the rule.

Instead of having developers make coherent pitches, The PC Gaming Showcase makes way for three to four sub-fifty-second trailers followed by hosts that rattle out puns as if their lives depended on it. The time and transitions for the game trailers are tight, considering it is just a smash cut to black or a banner saying "World Premier" from one trailer to the next. Worse, this event never seems to grasp the concept of pacing. It was especially a problem with this year's event as some of the biggest and most anticipated titles aired near the start of the conference, and absolute dreck aired near the end. We usually expect a crescendo during gaming conferences, where the biggest name or most anticipated announcement happens at the end, and the second biggest is near the beginning. Instead, this year, we were stuck in the fuzzy mittens indie game or pixel-based nostalgia bait phase in the first act for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Then, after showing TWO B-tier games, the event pivoted to Stormgate, the much-ballyhooed RTS title from Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne's campaign designer. Everyone else, including Keighley, has treated the game as an endnote-worthy or at least bridging that title, but The PC Gaming Show put it in the dregs of its middle act. Even worse, the games that started and ended trailer montages always got host-led introductions or explanations during interstitial moments on the stage. Anything else, particularly the games that inhabited the middle portions of those montages? They might as well be dead, and the size of the game seemingly didn't prevent this awful habit from happening. Imagine, if you would, Sony or Microsoft having a marquee indie premier, and it didn't have their stage hosts even say the name of the game once. There's no doubt that The PC Gaming Show has a lower barrier of entry than its competition because it did have a ton of trailers, but with nothing able to breathe, it dragged even worse than the most impaired we have seen from Keighley.

What is the logic or justification for an event that has Citizen Sleeper 2, Stormgate, Still Wakes The Deep, The Rise of the Golden Idols, and Tactical Breach Wizards to end with a montage that briefly name-drops Gunboat God? Why were some games with hard 2024 releases paired in trailer montages with 2025 releases or games that had already come out at the time of the event's airing? In fact, what is a game like Mullet Madjack, which had trailers at other prior competing showcases, doing here? This event has no editors, and it hurts to watch. What ultimately causes me to continue to view The PC Gaming Show as a disappointing failure is that there is something there to the core idea of the event. When it was first advertised, The PC Gaming Show was meant to be a place for PC Gamer to vet and showcase mid-tier to AA PC titles that did not feel like they would demo well on E3 stages but still warranted some sort of spotlight on them. Games like Path of Exile, PUBG, Rust, Warframe, War Thunder, Valheim, and Teraria dominate the Steam simultaneous online user charts. Still, you would be hard-pressed to find ways to slice those games vertically to get their main hooks across, as was the norm during the heydays of E3 in the 2000s and 2010s. So, there's a niche this event could fill, but its execution has been perpetually botched for now ten years straight and that sucks. Well, at least we only need to worry about this conference once a year, right?

Oh My God, You Want To Do A Winter Version?

Jesus Christ. They're going to do it. They're going to do a Winter-time version of the Summer PC Gaming Show. While I could sit here and ponder why, I'm not going to, as I already know the answer. Despite all of my performative dismay, the event draws decent to good numbers and outpaces all of the indie events in its vicinity during June. However, whether that success can translate into PC Gamer hosting an event that primarily stands by itself remains to be seen. They likely will persevere, but one of the only reasons people know about The PC Gaming Show is because it airs close to other conferences with more international cache. The Future Games Show Summer Showcase, Guerrilla Collective, Day of the Devs, Wholesome Direct, and Devolver Direct don't air within a week of the Xbox Games Showcase or Summer Game Fest because they think they have an event with games that will generate greater media attention than either. They air their conventions in Summer because the culture for consuming hour-long streaming showcases is more pronounced during that time, and there might be some trickle-down from the marque events.

However, the Winter event likely will do OK numbers and justify its existence. With less competition, it might be more straightforward to snag more compelling video game releases to demo. Keighley has The Game Awards in December, and Devolver did a non-Summer Direct earlier this year in February. The time of year might also be less of an issue if PC Gamer's objective is courting exclusive content it can report on before any of its competition. Its editors can pre-empt preview coverage or trailer reveal articles beforehand or even in advance, thanks to its conferences. The bloated nature of the event might be less of a reflection of a desire to host a watchable event and more a way for PC Gamer to continue to exert near-universal dominance in the arena of PC game editorializing, reviewing, and reporting. Some people running things might know the pacing is wrong or poor, but that's not the point. The point is to get as much as possible crammed into its airtime to have more SEO-generating content, and I'm not saying this as a slight against PC Gamer. The fact remains that this very site does well whenever its staff takes time away from its typical streaming to attend live events and engage in in-person tomfoolery. Again, I don't mention that as an attack or critique; it's just how things stand right now.

So, we're stuck with the PC Gaming Show, and apparently now twice a year. The show has a plethora of games and game genres that desperately demand the event to explore a change in formula, but that's not happening. Most games that pay to be at it will be afforded one SEO-aligned preview article on PC Gamer and a fifty-second advert during one of these conferences. To many developers, that's enough, and I can't fault any individual who snaps up the chance to roll the dice on the PC Gaming Show or any version of it. Nonetheless, we're likely stuck with this awkward lumbering Frankenstein's Monster of a conference. We're stuck with more bad cutaway gags. We're stuck with more game montages that do nothing to advance the interests and culture of PC gaming. We're stuck with fourth-wall-breaking winks at the camera that distract from indie games that deserve better. We're stuck, so buckle up because this ride will be bumpy.