DOOM: The Dark Ages PC launch has been dismal, but not because it's a bad game — I'm not surprised if player counts are lower

We recently reported on DOOM: The Dark Ages underwhelming player counts on Steam for PC. While this is only a single metric, it's always a useful one to help the wider audience understand what's hot right now.

One question is whether the "Game Pass effect" is affecting it. After all, a month of Game Pass is cheaper than buying a game on Steam. But I really don't think it's just that, even if there may be some element of it at play.

I think one of the bigger issues to talk about is that the PC launch of DOOM: The Dark Ages has been horrible.

NVIDIA is king on the desktop, and its drivers have scuppered DOOM

I'd love to have played DOOM: The Dark Ages before writing this post, but the truth is I can't. I can't because I'm playing on PC, I have an NVIDIA RTX 5080, and the NVIDIA drivers have completely hosed the game.

I could plug my Xbox Series X back in, but that's not a solution to an unacceptable problem that shouldn't exist. Whether it's NVIDIA's fault, Bethesda's fault, or they each have their own part to play is irrelevant. These companies need to work together to make it work.

When I launch DOOM: The Dark Ages, the game opens, and then disappears into the background. It's there, I can see it in Task Manager, but I can't play it.

This is one of the "known issues" apparently related to Alt+Tab use, but that's not the experience I've seen. I simply can't play, and if I'd bought the game at full price, I'd have refunded it.

That's not the only issue some are seeing with DOOM: The Dark Ages, but I can't begin to comment on others first-hand, because I haven't been able to see them.

I had to roll back the driver for an unrelated issue, too. Not content with making the latest DOOM game fail to launch, the same driver introduced frequent crashes to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

It is unreasonable to expect drivers that are supposed to make a thing work, actually work? NVIDIA is the biggest player in PC graphics by some margin, and when their stuff breaks, it affects a lot of people.

Launches like this are why consoles will always have a place

My Xbox Series X has been disconnected for at least six months now. Not because I don't like it anymore, but because I have a gaming PC that is significantly more powerful and has all the same games I want to play. Mostly from Game Pass.

But launches like DOOM: The Dark Ages are living proof I feel as to why the console will always have a valuable place. There's less hardware to target, and it's extremely rare you'll have a new release that flat out won't launch.

By contrast, I'm using the latest generation NVIDIA graphics on my PC, something that should, by all accounts, give me a stunning experience in DOOM: The Dark Ages. But I can't touch the game at all without some kind of workaround.

As I write this, I see a new game ready driver from NVIDIA dated today, May 19. It may apply the fixes I require, though if it does, it's not explicitly mentioned in the patch notes. Those are all about the RTX 5060 and the next batch of new games.

But with bad graphics drivers, I'm not necessarily surprised the numbers we can see on PC are lower than perhaps expected. I know this stuff is hard, but a mess like this is totally unacceptable.