Enlarge / Playing Starfield on the Steam Deck does not feel like reveling in mankind's great capacity for wonder and discovery. (credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

Starfield , Bethesda's epic planet-hopping first-person RPG , is now widely available, and that includes on handheld gaming PCs. Both Valve's Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally picked up recent system updates that made it possible to play the game without crashes.

I can confirm the game runs on both systems, having experienced early access crashes and now a bit of normal gameplay today. But I don't think there's much point to playing locally on either system. Streaming remotely with Game Pass, or locally with Moonlight or Xbox Remote Play , is a better option, presuming you can do so without much input lag.

If you do try to force Starfield to load on your handheld, the graphics and frame rates will range from muddy to just acceptable, the battery life will be quite bad, and your experience with perhaps the best part of Bethesda RPGs—the sense of wonder and discovery in wide-open spaces—will be severely limited.

CES introduced an OLED PC monitor with quantum dots. (credit: Scharon Harding)

At the turn of the millennium, it was easy to define what a PC game was: a game programmed to run on a machine with x86 hardware, booting (in most cases) a DOS or Windows operating system, and controlled by a keyboard and mouse. The answer is less clear today, though. Most console games are ported to the PC. Many PC games are ported to console. And the most popular new PC gaming device of 2022, the Steam Deck, doesn’t even have a (physical) keyboard.

I’m all for more choice in how gamers choose to play, but something is lost when a PC game is forced to fit within the design constraints of console hardware and gamepad input. Fortunately, some titles (and franchises) still take a PC-first approach.

In the wake of a series of high-profile bad ports from consoles, a years-long GPU shortage, and other challenges for PC gaming, I took a dive back into my Steam library to identify recommendations for anyone who remembers the golden age of PC gaming fondly and wants to recapture some of that magic. Of course, some games are part of classic franchises, but others are fresh takes on the genres that characterized that lost era.

Enlarge / Intel GPUs, ultra-wide monitors, and a vague sense that it's time for some gamers to refresh: These are some of the factors that have one report showing industry growth for PC gaming. (credit: Peerapon Boonyakiat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

PC gamers may be concerned about losing their jobs in 2023, but not so much that they can ignore a glut of new GPU and ultra-widescreen monitor options.

That's the elevator-pitch version of Jon Peddie Research's report on PC gaming hardware sales and costs . At a high level, it suggests that while mid-range gaming will see only gradual growth from 2023 through 2025, both entry-level and high-end hardware should see notable upticks through 2025. The market should recover more than $5 billion overall from its 2022 drop-off, with the high end taking $3.92 billion and entry level $2.29 billion.

PC gaming market figures from JPR.

Reading exactly which bits of PC hardware fit into which segment, and getting more detail on how JPR put these numbers together, costs even more than a 40-series Nvidia card, at $27,500 per year for access. So we're left to wonder which cards, monitors, chips, and other gear fit into entry-, mid-level, and high-end. But JPR does suggest a few factors moving the numbers around:

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