BOSTON, MA—A four-person panel consisting of industry figures Palmer Lucky, founder of Oculus VR; Matt Higby, creative director of PlanetSide 2; Chris Roberts, grandfather of space combat simulations and Star Citizen creator; and Tom Petersen, director of technical marketing for Nvidia, faced down a packed room this afternoon at Boston's PAX East conference to answer questions about the PC as a platform—where it's been, where it's going, and why it's still not just a big deal, but possibly the biggest deal of all.

The panel delved into a number of specific points for the crowded room, but the key idea—and one that they kept reiterating throughout most of the questions asked—is that PC gaming has always been a huge market presence. Even as major computer OEMs produce numbers showing falling sales, the PC as a platform (and especially a gaming platform) actually shows strong aggregate growth.

It's hard to directly measure this kind of thing, but Nvidia's Tom Petersen pointed out that the company's sales of OEM and aftermarket video cards are strong and are getting stronger—especially its enthusiast-targeted GTX cards. The panel moderator (PC Gamer US Editor-in-Chief Evan Lahti) asked if cloud gaming might have something to do with the bolstering PC gaming numbers. Petersen agreed that could be the case (as expected from Nvidia, which has its own burgeoning cloud gaming rendering service). However, Chris Roberts had a different take.

Roberts has been making PC games since the 1980s, and in developing his latest title, Star Citizen, he's exploring all platform options. One thing that he says he's been dissatisfied with is anything involving remote video streaming—he says that latency is still an issue that hasn't been overcome, and he can't see it ever working well enough to be truly playable—not for a long time, anyway.

Roberts also spoke somewhat contentiously about the search for the "perfect platform" for Star Citizen. He said that after a lot of experimentation, the only platform capable of realizing his vision for the game is the PC. He's a full-time 4K video user, and the only thing that can make Star Citizen work with all the bells and whistles at 4K resolution is a high-end gaming PC.

Nvidia's Petersen mentioned that the price point for 4K—both from a perspective of display and rendering hardware, continues to drop. This is obviously a good thing for Nvidia, since it's in the business of selling video cards.

When asked about the biggest challenge to developing on PC, the panel turned to PlanetSide 2 creative director Matt Higby. Higby pointed out that the PC's greatest obstacle is also its greatest strength: an infinite variety of configurations in hardware and software exist, and you have to build things for all (or at least most) of them. The issue is compounded because the people most likely to spend money on cutting-edge games are the same enthusiasts with the crazy home-built rigs.

Robert expanded on Higby's point: the PC has always been the biggest and best platform for developers and for gamers—it just hasn't always grabbed the biggest headlines. The "PC as a platform"—a phrase echoed by Petersen—is an absolutely massive market, but it's not always realized as such because it's fragmented between different OEMs and home-built rigs without a singular marketing effort.

Higby also spoke extremely candidly about game piracy, saying things I've heard echoed on forums before but never out of the mouth of a developer. Piracy, he said, is an availability and distribution problem. The more games are crowdfunded and digitally delivered and the less a "store" figures into buying games, the less of a problem piracy becomes. Roberts was quick to agree, and he noted that the shift to digital distribution also helps the developers make more money—they ostensibly don't have everyone along the way from retailers to publishers to distributors taking their cut from the sale.

Oculus' Palmer Lucky agreed that piracy is a problem that can be solved not through more restrictions, but through fewer—the way to kill piracy is to make it more convenient to simply download a game legitimately than to go through the rigamarole of pirating it. Higby chimed in to agree—it's more annoying to download a pirated version of a game than to download via a trusted digital delivery service.

Petersen said that the total yearly industry-wide revenue for PC games (not video games in general, but PC games specifically) is $24 billion—a number that includes initial sales, in-game transactions, free-to-play microtransactions, digital downloads, and everything else. That's a huge amount of revenue to chase, and the panel members all agreed that the money will go to the developers and publishers and makers who produce what PC gamers want, as long as they let players buy games however they want to buy them.

The platform’s the thing

When the panel moderator asked the group if Microsoft would own the future of PC gaming, the responses were mixed. "Yeah, don't you remember Games for Windows Live?" joked Luckey, referring to Microsoft's horribly broken (and rumored to be dying) social platform. The comment was clearly in jest, though; Petersen spoke up and said that he thinks it's very clear Microsoft cares about PC gaming: "They have huge amounts of resources dedicated to making PC gaming great—that's what DX12 is for," he said.

Roberts said that the biggest issue with working on a grand-scale game on the PC is programming for the parallelization allowed by multiple cores. He gave big props to the multithreading support that Microsoft has added to DX12, which takes some of that burden off of the developers. Still, he said that it's a fight to make Microsoft realize that it's not all about the Xbox—that Microsoft is actually getting much more revenue out of PC gaming as a whole than it is out of consoles.

Roberts said that Microsoft should embrace not just the closed ecosystem model, but the PC gaming community in general. Top on the list of fears he said needed to be assuaged was that gamers won't be forced into using Microsoft's app store if they don't want to. "Consumers might try to abandon Microsoft for Linux because they're afraid of being pushed to the MS app store," he said.

Speaking of Linux: Roberts reaffirmed that while Windows is the main targeted platform for Star Citizen, the game maker will also be officially supporting Linux.

VR trooper

Oculus' Luckey was then asked what remained to lock down virtual reality (VR) and make it the wonderful, immersive, seamless experience we've been promised since the 1990s. Luckey said that a lot of the development to make game frame rates higher hasn't necessarily made them faster—it's not just the quality of each frame, but the pace and regularity with which a frame is delivered. Some games with 60+ frames per second might still have more than a hundred milliseconds of latency for that frame's display due to the internal buffers in an application, programming quirks, or Windows-specific issues. VR has its own set of hardware-related latency, too. Killing latency is the key to immersive VR.

For what it's worth, Nvidia is on board with Luckey's and Oculus' quest to make VR better: Petersen took the opportunity to give a quick shout-out to Nvidia's G-sync technology, which is aimed at (among other things) reducing latency in frame displays.

Go do that voodoo that you do so well

But no panel could be complete without the closing question, which the panelists answered with aplomb. Aside from the technology that they specifically are working on, what other amazing thing do they want to see developed in the near term?

Nvidia's Petersen deadpanned, "I would like a virtual reality headset." Oculus' Luckey replied, equally deadpan, "I would like a more powerful GPU."