Christopher Livingston

Christopher Livingston is a senior editor at PC Gamer who covers PC games through the lens of survival challenges, systems-heavy simulations, and the small details that define how players live inside their worlds. He has been playing PC games since the 1980s and writing about them professionally since the early 2000s, joining PC Gamer’s staff in 2014 after several years as a regular freelancer. His author bio highlights a love-hate relationship with survival games, a fascination with the inner lives of NPCs, and a strong interest in mods and offbeat simulations, and those preferences consistently shape the stories he chooses and the angles he takes.

Survival games and expectation-setting

Livingston returns to survival games frequently, focusing on how developers communicate scope, progression, and difficulty rather than simply amplifying marketing claims.

In a recent piece on a highly wishlisted Steam release, he highlighted the studio’s warning not to expect a huge survival game with hundreds of hours of main progression, framing clear expectation-setting as central to the launch story. His coverage of Valheim follows the game from early success to ongoing refinement, reporting both its milestone of crossing six million sales and teasing its first major update, and later examining changes that let players remap key actions after five years of accumulated feedback. Across these survival pieces he concentrates on what updates mean for day-to-day play, how progression actually unfolds over dozens of hours, and how studios react when their survival games grow faster and larger than initially planned.

Updates, expansions, and live-game changes

Updates and expansions for live games are a major part of his news beat, and he treats them as concrete changes to ongoing player experience rather than generic announcements. He covers new content for city-builders, RPGs, and online worlds, including a fishing-focused expansion for Cities: Skylines that sends the game out to sea, a surprise early launch for the Steel Dawn expansion in Fallout 76, and a new mode for Plague Inc. that flips the premise so players try to save the world instead of infecting it. In each case he explains what is new, how it alters the rhythm or stakes of existing play, and why timing or framing matters, whether an expansion arrives ahead of schedule or recasts a familiar game in a different light.

His articles in this area use straightforward headlines and tightly framed copy that give readers enough context to understand both the specific update and its place in the broader life of the game.

Mods, tools, and player communities

Livingston’s interest in mods and tools leads him into the contested space between players and publishers, where community creativity and corporate control often clash. He has written about a GTA 5 machinima that depicts Rockstar and Take-Two killing the OpenIV modding tool, using the story to show how enforcement actions land with modders and dedicated fans.

Follow-up coverage of OpenIV receiving an update that signals development will continue traces how the tool’s fate affects the wider modding scene and suggests the resilience of those communities even under pressure. He also reports on technical overhauls such as the Definitive Edition remaster of the original Age of Empires, framing them as renewed support for influential titles that still anchor active player bases.

Across these stories he keeps the practical impact on modders and long-term players in view, clarifying what tools remain available, what has changed, and how those changes ripple through the ecosystems built around long-running games.

Offbeat simulations, retro stories, and NPCs

Outside headline blockbusters he gravitates toward offbeat simulations, stylised indie RPGs, and character-focused retrospectives that align with his stated fascination for NPCs and unusual game worlds. He covers titles such as anime mech RPG Wolfstride, narrative adventure game The Last Campfire, and graphic-novel-styled shooter Foreclosed, highlighting their genre blends and distinctive presentation rather than treating them as niche curiosities. In his piece on dungeon crawler Loot River, he describes the game as if “Diablo and Tetris had a baby,” using that comparison to underline its hybrid of action-RPG combat and shifting, puzzle-like environments. His work on retro and cult games includes revisiting Phantasmagoria 2 through the memories of its lead actor and reporting on a Skyrim artist who modeled the look of the game’s giants on his father, both examples of stories that bring the creators and characters of older titles back into focus. These articles zoom in on how characters are conceived, performed, and remembered, treating digital figures and their human counterparts as central subjects rather than background scenery.