The Positives of PC Gaming

[bob_far]

I tire of negativity, my brothers in arms! Let us list the beautiful positives of PC gaming!

I'll go first:
Ultimately, PC Gaming is cheaper than consoles. Let us assume that a reasonable system (including monitor, keyboard etc) costs around £1k (what I built my "top end" system for last Christmas). A bottom end 360 (not including Kinect or anything else, and at 4GB) will cost you £160.

Let's say that you save about £10 per immediately released game as compared to buying it for a console. This isn't counting the simple fact that PC games much more rapidly depreciate in value and will therefore be far cheaper in about 6 months time as compared to their console enemies.

Now, I don't know how many games other people buy within a year, but for me it is around the 50 mark, I suspect. I might be on the high end, I really have no idea.

That's £500 saved from buying PC games instead of console games from there alone. Add that to the fact that it costs £160 to buy a LOW end console (instead of one with an inbuilt 320GB (read: pathetically small) hard drive) and you come out with £660 total to be taken away from the £1k spent on your computer.

So, it costs you, over a console, £340. Within a year, I will add an extra £500 to my saved total and come out at £160 saved. This is over a two year period. A reasonable PC doesn't need to be replaced for three to five years (this is the point where it becomes ridonkulously out of date and usually will not run games) and so you save between £660 and £1660. Total.

Come on, ladies and gents. Give us some positives to PC gaming. :D

[BenWah]

consoles are good because you don't have to futz with anything hardly ever, just stick in the disc and go.
A lot of people are forgoing buying a PC of any kind these days, doing some combo of fancy phone and/or tablet/netbook instead.

I'm a die hard PC gamer, love mods and complex games that seem to be PC only or have their best versions on PC. But every person like me there's probably 10,000 console people, so the economics for making PC games have fallen apart with a few exceptions.
For me the only time I ever considered buying a console was to play red dead redemption, but nah...

The cost comparison varies wildly depending where in the product cycle you are for a console.
They replace console generations every 4 or 5 years?

If you try to get a comparable PC right after a console is released, the cost is exhorbitant.
But to get a comparable PC for a console that has been out several years, it isn't bad at all.

[Althea]

Just to nitpick. A reasonable system, including OS and monitor, should cost probably no more than £700 at most. £1k is overkill for a lot of current games. To make this comparison more fair, we need to go for the higher model 360 which I think is about £180. You need a TV for that, so let's say another £150 for a fairly average one. You're at £330. You will save that £370 difference in 37 full priced games (Assuming £40 console, £30 PC, when often it's £40 and £25) at least.

Positives to PC gaming:
You can often fix games that are broken, whereas with consoles you're often stuck.
You can multitask. I can have Bejewelled 2 running whilst monitoring TweetDeck and my e-mails and listening to music, all on one device.
Games can be modded much more easily than on consoles.
60 FPS is rarely used as a selling point.
Increased life span for a number of games. A console game might get six months of a large player base, whereas the PC can have one for decades (Unreal Tournament!)
The Settlers, Anno and Civilization. Actually, no. The strategy genre as a whole.
King's Bounty-esque games (Age of Wonders, Heroes of Might & Magic, Katauri's King's Bounty reboot)
European RPGs (Drakensang! <3)
The adventure genre.
Fewer whiny 12 year old psuedo-men with validation issues.

[archonsod]

That's £500 saved from buying PC games instead of console games from there alone.

Then there's internet. For the PC, you just pay for your ISP. For Xbox live, you pay £6 per month on top of the ISP fee to have your box connected. That's an additional £72 per year just to have your console online.

[Althea]

For Xbox live, you pay £6 per month on top of the ISP fee to have your box connected. That's an additional £72 per year just to have your console online.

Try £35 for a year.

[Whitmore]

It can emulate older consoles. Does that count?

I'd just parrot what UnravThreads said, so I'll just agree with their opinion on it!

[Oneironaut]

My absolute favorite thing about the PC is that there are no gatekeepers. Anyone can release a game on the PC by selling it from their own website. Any console game requires permission from Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo before being released.

I also really like the ability to use any kind of controller I want, and the ability to make it work through extra software if the games don't support it.

[Rii]

60% of the time it works every time.

[Xercies]

Mods, crazy patches for 10 year old games, EVE Online also creating interesting stories. You can play classics from 1980 for free sometimes! Its actually relaticly cheap nowadays especially because of consoles. Also crazy indie games with stuff that we have never seen before. And who can forget, RPS :D

[westyfield]

Mouse and keyboard. I just can't get the hang of thumbsticks - the moment a controller is in my hands I become a flailing idiot.

[Tei]

The best of PC is the control system, keyboard+mouse. Then the type of games. Best as in "what I like".
I don't think PC gaming is cheaper, It can be if all you do is play some free 2 play games, or counter-strike, and this is what some people do. But for the people that buy "all" games, and need to update graphic card often, is probably more expensive.
The other cool thing about PC is modding. The freedom to play a game like you want it. Maybe you have buy a game that you in theory likes, but is too damn hard, you can use a cheatengine to skip the most infurious parts. Freedom, as in you don't depend on the corporation to say what you can play, how you can play it, etc.

[NecroKnight]

When it comes to hardware PC's are just way stronger, sadly developers rarely use it's full power; also there is immersion. It's not the same thing if you play a horror game sitting on a couch 2-3 meters away or right in front of your PC monitor.

[squirrel]

PC gaming: high lump-sum cost, low variable cost (for the time-being, some greedy publishers start to look for means to extract more economic juice from us continuously, and I hope that they would realize how stupid they are).

Console game: very low lump-sum cost, high variable cost.

BTW, I am so amazed to read from here that PC game prices tend to drop quickly in your world. In my country, game stores do business stupidly. They tend to stock up like hell for games at launch. While the games lose their popularity due to timing, they dont have the flexibility to drop the price since the stocks were acquired at high prices. Plus, I heard complaints from those store owners that they cannot return the stocks if not sold. Yet they cannot quit this business model since they have to compete with online store. They told me if they run out of stock, gamers would simply buy games from online stores.

[Spider Jerusalem]

This super cool gold-edged, worked leather Master Race membership card.

[Taidan]

These days, the main positive of PC gaming is that I can stick in any new game and know that it'll pretty much go after a quick install, whereas with consoles...

Well, I'll just leave this timely Ars article here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...experience.ars

[Skalpadda]

My main reason for doing most of my gaming on the PC is that there are very few console games I'm interested that don't come out on PC whereas there are lots and lots of cool PC games that never make it to consoles. The freedom of the "platform", customisability, mods, indie experiments and community are also a big part of why I love the PC.

As for the price, I don't find it too bad since when you're building and upgrading your PC yourself it's more of a trickle of investments and if you play a lot of games it evens out. Not feeling the need to play absolutely everything on maximum settings in absurd resolutions helps as well.

[Xercies]

But for the people that buy "all" games, and need to update graphic card often, is probably more expensive.

There has not been a single game at all, even modern newer release games, that I've needed to upgrade anything for in about 3 years. Battlefield 3 I bet I don't really need to upgrade to get a decent medium, to high setting to be honest.

Also now a days you can get a PC for about £400-£600 that will pretty much run everythng, for I think about 5 years looking at the state of gaming and how graphics aren't really being improved that much. I love it, never had it this good!

[soldant]

These days, the main positive of PC gaming is that I can stick in any new game and know that it'll pretty much go after a quick install, whereas with consoles...

Well, I'll just leave this timely Ars article here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...experience.ars

Yes, because the PC has never had to have day-zero patches pushed by Steam or anything like that.

Not disputing that PC gaming has gotten easier in recent times but picking out an incident like that and claiming it's a major failure of consoles is drawing a long bow. At least consoles can actually get patches these days!


On topic: I'm a PC gamer for the flexibility and utilitarian use of the platform. It does everything. I have a high end system so performance and visuals are above and beyond anything on consoles, so the quality and framerate argument applies to why I love PC gaming as well. Also like others have said, if it breaks I can fix it. It might be an expensive fix if it's hardware related, but at least I can do it myself as opposed to going "Well, RRoD. Okay, back to Microsoft you go!"

That said I don't shun consoles nor do I have the weird militant hate towards them that's endemic in communities like RPS. That said I'd say that overall the console gamer's life is a lot easier than ours; there's no concerns with system maintenance, driver updates, software incompatibilities, or anything except ensuring the box doesn't overheat (and apparently most console owners are bad at that). Still I don't particularly enjoy gaming on them; it's just as well that people sit well back from their TV, otherwise it looks like a blurry mess most of the time to disguise the low framerates. Played DX:HR on a PS3? I have. Looked absolutely horrible at 720p (which is all that it'll output at on the PS3).

[metalangel]

This super cool gold-edged, worked leather Master Race membership card.

Indeed. Repeated, needless justifications of your choice of platform to fellow owners who'll all agree with you anyway is a condition of membership.

[thegooseking]

I have a high end system so performance and visuals are above and beyond anything on consoles, so the quality and framerate argument applies to why I love PC gaming as well.

The fact that the same games also work on lower-end systems and usually just don't look as nice is a massive thing in favour of the PC, though. There's no such thing as a high-end, mid-range or low-end Xbox 360 or PS3 (except in the case of how much disk space is included in the package, which of course affects the price inordinately). Consoles are "any colour as long as it's black". With the PC you have that choice.