this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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This is why the last Nintendo I used was a Nintendo GameCube. The last Playstation I used was a PS2. I just started to game on a PC. Console gaming might become a thing of the past if people get tired of this type of thing. You can hook a laptop or PC up to a TV now if you want.
Consoles will never go away. Even Xbox, effectively a pc, exists.
I suspect it’s because of controllers, ease of use, and cost.
Yeah, notice how I used "might" in my comment. That's a modal verb of "maybe maybe not." PC Gaming is just as easy to use as a console. PC Gaming, however, looks expensive. It isn't, if you math geek yourself out and realize that instead of buying consoles multiple times, you can pretty much stick with the same PC in the same time period. With my gaming PC, all my stuff connects to it by Bluetooth. It's ready to go when I switch it on. I can play most of the games on it that are available on whatever console, except the few that are exclusives tied to a particular console. Even better, I can play games to my heart's content. I have a library to choke a horse and it will be viable probably until I'm dead. The problem is when we talk about money. To have a nice gaming PC or gaming laptop, you have to shell out double what a console costs. What a lot of people can't think about is: You shell out more on the gaming PC, but it is viable longer because it is not subject to the whims of console makers. Sure, you can just shell out 400 bucks or whatever on a Nintendo Switch instead of shelling out 1000 or so on a gaming PC or laptop (some of them are 2000 or more). However, the computer, if you know how to take good care of it, is viable twice or three times as long as the console, so in the end, you've made a good investment and you don't have to worry about changing consoles when the company that makes the console decides to produce a new product. This is what I was talking about. People don't understand it perhaps because they don't think about it, but they really should because it's a money saver in the end. Plus: You can play your old games just fine for as long as you want.
PC gaming is not cheaper than console gaming.
If you bought a state of the art PC during the PS4 era, it was more expensive than the PS4.
Then when the PS5 was released, if you wanted to upgrade your PC to be on par with the PS5 it costed more than the PS5.
I love PC gaming, but except for the cheaper games, it's absolutely not cheaper than consoles.
Except when the console maker decides to make a new console and decides what games will no longer work on the new console and what will. Or, perhaps the console maker decides that you can play some of your old games on the new console, but decides that to do so you have to buy a subscription, or you have to buy the games again because they had to make a new version of the old games that work with the new console. A PC will outlast that. You can buy two or three consoles, or buy one PC. Doesn't look cheaper to me. Then, I'll add to my comment: When it's finally time to buy a new PC, which for whatever reason you have decided on your own because nobody cancelled your PC, you take your whole collection of games to the new PC and they work just fine on the new PC, plus you can have the new games that your new PC can run.
I agree that PC gaming has a lot of benefits, and it's also my preference, but if you want to keep a rig that plays current games at their best its not cheaper.
That's the trade off. If you think you have to have the latest, greatest, fastest hardware you are going to have to shell out the big bucks. More often than not, a game looks the same to me whether its played on this year's graphics card or last year's graphics card or even the year before last's graphics card. At some point speed and memory size are numbers that don't need to go beyond a certain point to give you decent software performance. People will disagree with this and I think that's fine. Maybe my eyes are wonky. Who knows? My wonky eyes save me money. The graphics look about the same to me using this or that graphics card.
Cloud gaming is the future. For $20/month and 35ms lag, I render my games on an RTX 4080 rig and stream it to my living room tv
What do you mean by "this"? That companies release new versions of consoles?
Yes. It's a money grab more than anything else, designed to make people buy new stuff. In this case, a new console, new games, new peripherals, subscriptions, etc. I like my PC because of the freedom from this type of stuff it affords me, it is in fact cheaper to use a PC if you're a careful shopper. If you're the type of shopper that buys things as soon as they come out or you're impulsive, well then, yes, PC gaming can get very expensive. But it's like anything else in this capitalist world of consumption. Jeans can be affordable or outrageously expensive. So can hamburgers. I'm the type of shopper that never pays full price for ANYTHING and I never buy things on a whim. I study stuff, think about it, and wait. I do my own upgrades on hardware, too. Opening a PC tower and sticking things into slots is not exactly complicated.
I'm fully well aware of the benefits of PC gaming (I've not bought a console for a decade and I run a community for free PC game giveaways!), but you can't really get mad at a console company releasing a new version. The point of a console is to be a fixed, known piece of hardware that children can use without needing to tinker with settings, and obviously they're going to want to up the version of things every few years as technology progresses!
Oh, I guess my comment looked like I was mad at the console companies? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound angry. I just don't like using consoles because sometimes it feels like there is a forced obsolescence placed on them like just about everything these days. I feel like investing in a console is submitting myself to the whims of the console maker, who will decide for me when it's out of date and how I'll be able to use the games for it in the future. You know, I have an iPad 2 that works just like it did when it was brand new but it's not useful for very much because software updates on it were stopped a few years ago. Now it's a digital picture frame. If the iPad was a person, I think it would shout at me and say, "I still work great! If somebody would just let me, I'd show you web sites! Why are you just using me as a silly digital picture frame? I'm way better than this, you fool!" I think if people like using consoles they should feel free to use them. I don't like them for me because I like to have all my games in one place and usable in the future. I see a PC as a better use of my money (again, for me, not for everyone) and I'm glad I made the decision to stop buying consoles years ago. If I had kids, they would learn how to game on a PC or not play games at all, I guess! Anyway, I was mostly talking about money, but there are other good reasons to use a PC over a console. For example, you can upgrade a PC with newer hardware as needed, so that's less wasteful, don't you think? Anyway, no anger from me. Console companies will do what they see fit to make money. That's how the economy works and that's just the way it is. That being said, I refuse to participate in that system and I think if somebody reads this and decides not to, well I did something useful and helpful today.