Games ended up congealing around the Sound Blaster standard, which put Creative in the centre of the sound universe. Everyone else was always just "SB compatible", which meant they were playing for the "$10 placeholder sound card" market in the Pentium days. By the time we were getting onboard audio (I think my first board with it was Socket A), it was all hidden behind DirectX, and the market became the "90 cent placeholder chip soldered onto the mobo" market, and then they're all undercut by Realtek.
Unfortunately, Creative is a mediocre steward of the premium-sound landscape. Their product matrix is complicated, support is all over the place, and the drivers are sketchy. I have an Audigy RX that I pulled out of circulation because it could crash two different boards (B550 and X570) and the general consensus was just "they're not that compatible."
I suppose that market technically didn't crush everyone else, there was still the pro-audio market, but that had entirely different needs than a typical home enthusiast. If you're building a studio PC to run specific studio software, you can put up with a narrow compatibility list and finickiness.
But it feels like there's a reasonable niche there for the "eager to throw money around" audiophile crowd. Cards full of high-markup capacitors and filters so you can claim to offer cleaner power and a lower noise floor seem tailor-made to unlocking those wallets. Where is that card? Although I suspect for that audience, they just pipe out stuff via optical to an external DAC because the inside of the PC must be full of RFI.
For the masses, the high end today is mostly encompassed by a USB headphone DAC. Headphones get you high quality in a small form factor, and a headphone DAC doesn't need a lot of power or I/O. Once you go bigger, again, physical experience takes hold. People want their vinyl collections and so forth in their listening room, and thus where there's demand for digital, it's usually outside of the classic PC form factor too - it could be an iPhone and a Bluetooth speaker, or a dedicated receiver for the home theater setup. Going this route means it can(if built carefully) avoid crashes and updates interrupting the experience.
[0] e.g. early versions of Pro Tools https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/3/27/a-brief...
If you never seen a system BSODing from the sound drivers - I'm glad for you. I've seen enough sound card drivers crashes to tell you what that WAS a problem. Along with network cards, video cards, TV-tuner cards and almost anything what needed a driver.
> After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.
Discrete sound cards became pointless because by 2001 almost every consumer motherboard had an AC'97 compatible audio coded on board.
So if you didn't need super extra fidelity 5.1235435 sound system AND didn't want to shell out additional ~$100 (SB Live! in 1999) or $2-300 (SB Audigy 2 in various variants, 2003) - you just could use the onboard one.
> having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
NO THANKS: https://youtu.be/3AZI07_qts8?t=9
And this is a Creative card! I had my share of good synthesized music (because computers couldn't yet do a proper digitized sounds yet), but the tech should had die and it did.