RPGs are king, and 6 other things the PC Gamer Top 100 tells us about the state of PC gaming

Our PC Gamer Top 100 selection process may not strictly be scientific, but it involves math, and that's close enough, right? With aid from an Excel sorcerer, we transmogrify votes from PC Gamer's 30-plus editors and contributors into Objectively Correct Opinions™, weighing Quality, Importance, Hotness, and Playability. The output—an ordered list of 100 excellent PC games—provides a picture of the tastes of PC gamers in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Or at least, the tastes of PC gamers who write about PC games and hardware for a living.

We always have fun making the case for our favorite games and arguing out the order of the list on a game-by-game level—there's still some upset on the team that we included Diablo 2 rather than Diablo 4—but here I've pulled out from the trees to look at the forest and find out what our collective tastes can tell us about PC gaming today. Here are my seven main takeaways.

1. Despite everything, PC gaming has flourished in the 2020s

Almost 30% of the games on this year's list released in the 2020s, even after I exclude Kentucky Route Zero (whose first act released in 2013), Counter-Strike 2, Resident Evil 4 Remake, the System Shock remake, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition for not really being of the present decade.

There are some obvious biases at play here. Not everyone on the PC Gamer team was alive in the '80s, but as we employ absolutely no three-year-olds, all of us have been alive for the entirety of the 2020s. Our selections therefore lean toward newer games that more of us have played, and our process also purposefully gives weight to present-day accessibility and community vibrancy alongside historical importance and quality.

I don't think we can completely dismiss this result as recency bias, though. There are plenty of excellent games from the 2010s and prior that we could have included instead of more recent games like Crusader Kings 3, Doom Eternal, Balatro, Total War: Warhammer 3, and Elden Ring, none of which felt like surprising or controversial picks. Despite the pandemic, the fall of E3, the acquisitions, the layoffs, the studio closures, and all of the other 2020s turmoil, many of our all-time favorite games released within the past four years.

2. Sorry, '90s kids: Our time is over

Only three '90s games made the list this year: Doom, Thief: The Dark Project, and Planescape: Torment. If you count the System Shock remake, it's a whopping four. As someone on the verge of 40, I feel a little sad for the decade I spent my most significant childhood years in, but I'm not disappointed. 

As much as I once enjoyed The Secret of Monkey Island, Quake 2, and Command & Conquer: Red Alert, I don't think it'd be a great sign for the health of PC gaming if a list of the best PC games as of 2024 were mainly stocked with 30-year-old games. PC gaming became mainstream, and our list reflects that.

3. But wait, our favorite developers still hail from the '90s

The games industry is so known for its volatility, especially during the 2020s so far, I sometimes forget how many examples of stability and continuity do exist. Valve is the Top 100 champion, with five games on the list: Half-Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike 2, Left 4 Dead 2, but it's hardly the only 20-plus-year-old developer with multiple games on the Top 100:

• Capcom (1979): Resident Evil 4 Remake, Monster Hunter: World
• FromSoftware (1986): Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
• Firaxis (1996): Civilization 5, XCOM 2
• Blizzard (1991): StarCraft 2, World of Warcraft, Diablo 2
• Id Software (1991): Doom, Doom: Eternal
• CD Projekt (1994): The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077
• Remedy (1995): Alan Wake 2, Control, Max Payne
• BioWare (1995): Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Dragon Age: Origins
• Larian (1996): Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate 3
• Valve (1996): Half-Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, CS2, Left 4 Dead 2
• Rockstar (1998): Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption 2
• Bethesda Game Studios (spun-off in 2001): TES 3: Morrowind, TES 5: Skyrim
• Obsidian (2003): Fallout: New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Pentiment

That's 33 games—a third of the list!—from just 13 developers, and that's despite mostly not including games in the same series (we made exceptions for the Dooms and the Elder Scrollses).

4. PC gaming is heavily siloed 

The big esports games are some of the most played and viewed videogames today, but you have to slide all the way down to Counter-Strike 2 at #35 to find one of them on our list. League of Legends and Dota 2 didn't make the cut at all. What gives?

One explanation is that there's a category mismatch here: If you ask someone what their favorite TV show is, they're more likely to say The Sopranos than "basketball," regardless of how many NBA games they watch in a season. There's such a gulf between what Baldur's Gate 3 is and what Counter-Strike 2 is that it's arguably silly to put them on the same list at all. 

But that silliness highlights something else important about PC gaming today: that it describes an astonishingly diverse number of experiences and lifestyles, some of which probably have very little overlap. Is a 5,000-hour League player enjoying the same hobby as a 5,000-hour Fortnite player? And how useful are concurrency numbers when Dota 2 can have 500,000 daily players, but a group of PC gaming generalists would rather talk about Ultrakill and Pizza Tower?

5. RPGs are king

Our top three games are all RPGs, and there are five of them in the top 10. And these aren't 'everything with numbers in it is called an RPG these days' RPGs: They're Baldur's Gate 3, a turn-based D&D game that follows BioWare's CRPG classics, Disco Elysium, a literary adventure based on a homebrew D&D campaign, and Elden Ring, an action RPG from the present master of the form. Also in the top 10 are Persona 5 Royal and The Witcher 3, and I expect Metaphor: ReFantazio to be in the discussion for one of these top spots next year.

It isn't quite enough to say that enchanting stories and characters stick with us, because we didn't also fill the list with visual novels or Telltale games. The RPGs on the list are about exploring big or dense worlds and trying on virtues and defects to see how the world reacts, experimenting with ethics, relationships, and two-handed weapon builds.

6. We think the CRPG renaissance is just beginning 

To arrive at the Top 100, our voters scored each nominated game in multiple subjective categories which were combined to determine each game's position. I find it interesting that, if we reorder the list according to just the Importance score, leaving out Quality, Hotness, and Playability, both Baldur's Gate 3 and Disco Elysium show up in the top 10, close to games like Doom, Minecraft, and Half-Life 2.

Without attributing too much psychic ability to our team, it's clear that our collective expectation is that the CRPG renaissance has not peaked, and that the next decade-plus will be heavily influenced by those games and their tabletop roots. (Unless everything gets sucked into the Fortnite metaverse.)

Here are the top 20 games if the list were ordered by Importance alone:

1. Doom (1993)
2. World of Warcraft
3. Minecraft
4. Half-Life 2
5. Fortnite
6. Baldur's Gate 3
7. Deus Ex
8. Stardew Valley
9. StarCraft 2
10. Disco Elysium
11. Dwarf Fortress
12. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim
13. Portal
14. Team Fortress 2
15. The Witcher 3
16. Diablo 2
17. Halo: The Master Chief Collection
18. Elden Ring
19. Grand Theft Auto 5
20. Persona 5 Royal

7. Collections are a loophole

Mass Effect Legendary Edition (18th) and Halo: The Master Chief Collection (30th) are the two game packages on the list, and it's both understandable and perhaps a bit unfair that they ranked so highly. Halo managed the 18th highest Importance score, which isn't a crazy thing to say for the franchise at large, but in literal terms, I don't think most people would call a collected edition that released in 2019 historically important to gaming.

But in the eyes of many of our voters, these packages obviously got generic, nostalgic credit for their entire series. Though rare, the presence of collections has us thinking about our rules for the Top 100, but in this case we hope it's a springboard for interesting debate: most music nerds probably wouldn't say Neil Young's Greatest Hits is his best album (it's Harvest), but it does, yes, collect all of his best songs.