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.