Valve has provided a recap of what has happened with it and Steam during 2021, continuing a tradition of said reports from 2020, 2019, and 2018. While it’s interesting to see what has been happening and the growth of the platform, there’s one section we strongly disagree with. 

While sharing figures for the growth of Steam over the year, Valve provides the following:

“It’s also worth pointing out that 2021 saw the addition of some beloved formerly-console-exclusive games from our friends at Sony and Microsoft. There are no bad years to be a PC gamer, but 2021 was an especially good one. From Days Gone to Forza Horizon 5, players on PC got to enjoy an incredible lineup from some of the best first-party console studios on the planet. That explosion of fresh content is a testament to the open, competitive nature of the PC ecosystem, where players have the broadest choice of what hardware to play on, what stores and services to use, and which games to play,” the report reads.

While we understand the sentiment here the last few years – going back to the true kickoff of the pandemic around early 2020 – has been an awful time to be a PC gamer.

Sure Valve may be saying “hey, there’s a lot of great games to play” but that doesn’t really mean much if most people can’t find or afford PC components.

If any of your components died or were sufficiently old during the pandemic you were simply out of luck and had to stop playing on PC or pay outrageous prices to scalpers or even to retailers and distributors who continue to charge outrageous prices.

We won’t dive too deep into the the ongoing component shortages and vastly increased scalping going on in the industry as it’s a dead horse beat to pulp, but let’s look at just one example.

In South Africa the RTX 3050, the absolute lowest tier of Nvidia RTX GPU, starts at R7 899. We got that price from Evetech just as an example as many local PC gamers are familiar with the store, which also sells an RTX 3050 variant for an eye watering R9 999.

Before the pandemic R7 899 would get you a top tier card that you could probably use for 4K, or for 1080P at a higher than 60 refresh rate with the assurance that you could continue using it for many years without ever needing to upgrade or worrying about new games taxing your system too hard.

Hell if you were willing to do some shopping on the secondhand market you could probably put together an entire gaming PC for R7 899, and most certainly for less than R10 000.

South Africa is not alone and in many parts of the world being a PC gamer has simply become unfeasible. There could be all the great Steam games in the world and Game Pass could cost less every month and neither would mean anything without actual hardware to play these games on.

Returning to Valve’s recap of Steam’s performance in 2021, you can read the full thing here.

Below in our gallery you can also read some key statistics released as little infographics.