The stats I could find compared pc and current and last gen consoles so ps4 and ps5 era and the split was basically 50/50. But if you think about it that’s not a fair comparison because pc has people who running on hardware worse than a ps3.
I mostly take issue with the smug tone of the article acting like it’s over for consoles just because they didn’t meet expectations and decided to bring some games to pc. Consoles are still extremely popular and far more powerful than the average pc according to steam hardware survey. They will still be around and successful no doubt about it.
Focusing on PC more than ever isn’t exactly a high bar. Consoles (maybe not xbox) are still doing extremely well and consoles are more popular than PC by quite a big margin. I expect Sony and Nintendo to continue to grow their userbase even if the sales on the latest platform drop a bit.
You said you don’t play many online games with Randoms because there aren’t games that moderate their communities. But there are plenty of games that moderate their communities so how is that hindering you from playing? It seems you just prefer to play single player or multi-player with friends. Which is fine but you are speaking about distrastically changing the culture of a community you don’t even interact with on the slim chance that they entice you to join.
To your point on sportsman ship. Yeah I would prefer if every good player was not a dickhead but I care about teammate skill before team mate attitude. When you are playing competitive games it wastes everyone’s time to play dumb or play wrong. If someone joins a ranked cs lobby and tries to only knife they deserve to get flamed. As long as people aren’t breaking the rules regarding hate speech I don’t care how mean or rude players are in competitive play. I personally don’t flame but I don’t mind that others do it raises the stakes and puts pressure on players which is a good thing. When I get flamed and I feel it’s annoying I just mute the person and continue.
I’ve played games that overly moderate the communities speech and it leads to not one talking and it feels like playing single player as everyone may as well be a bot.
The money is in the users not selling the hardware. As long as Playstation has hundreds of million daily users they will continue to make insane profit. The people will move up a generation eventually.
A competitive gaming community is different. You want players who are invested in winning. It’s more fun when everyone is playing hard. I’d rather have someone yell at someone who threw a round than no one say anything and have that player throw more rounds.
People are so coddled these days they have all the tools at their disposal to avoid “toxic” behavior and yet they won’t mute the person and will complain as if there was nothing they could do to escape the harassment of words on a screen. If someone is taking getting to you then you can mute them.
As for your statement on toxicity preventing you from playing multiplayer doesn’t seem true. There are plenty of games where you will never see toxicity and you still don’t play any of them so that can’t be what’s stopping you.
Finally after many many years I have gathered my friends together and played divinity original sin 2. The first session was very fun and we all had a blast. We couldn’t complete any storylines because someone kept aggroing every npc and by the end of the night we had killed every npc in fort joy and used about 20 rez scrolls and many reloads.
After we got out of fort joy and agreed to put our muderhobo ways behind us and keep a good standing with the traders. It lasted about 5s before someone threw a bucket at the lvl 8 skeleton trader and he killed us all. After a reload to previous save we managed to sell our loot and have 1 npc who doesn’t hate us.
Honestly beating that game at such a young age shows a lot of problem solving capability. However getting angry at games is a habit you want to nip in the butt asap.