"Our" youth? Whippersnappers maybe. Pong and Atari VCS were the games of my youth. Didn't have a decent PC until much later. Yanno, maybe what goes around comes around and what's old is new: Before PC gaming kind of branched off into its own entity, I recall my Commodore 64 essentially ran ports of regular console games, like Atari-type games. Even used the same controller. Now we're more or less back to that point. Maybe in 10 or 20 years it'll go back the other way.

There's a silver lining: Thanks to stuff like Roblox, Minecraft, Terraria, etc, today's generation isn't going to grow up thinking graphics > all else like the 90's children did. Much like your niece, my daughter understands already that how a game looks doesn't necessarily reflect how much fun it is or isn't. I don't know how much use studios will make of that cultural shift, but the opportunity is there.

Danth

(Can't edit in RnF)

Part of the reason for the convergence of PC and console/mobile gaming is that the thing PCs do best--simulations and virtual worlds--have gone out of fashion. Beyond EQ and its ilk, the 90's were a glorious era for flight sims of all types, space flight pseudo-sims, you name it, lot of folks wanted realism or at least the trappings of realism that couldn't readily be accomplished on a console. That's not so much the case these days. Maybe the whims of fashion will come back around, maybe not.

Oh its not just the whims of fashion, there is a whole lot more to it brudda