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Find anywhere on the internet where anyone is saying anything positive about console gaming and chances are you’ll find a PC master racer “informing” them about how much better PC gaming is and that they should stop being a console pleb because PCs can run games at 8K 120fps and can be built for cheaper than a console and… Yup. Step aside Xbots and Sony Ponies, PC fanboys are the new worst kind of gamers.
Before I go any further, I feel it’s important to state that I almost exclusively game on PC. I don’t have a current gen console and the only reason my 360 sees any playtime at all is because Diablo 3 on console is digital crack. My PC is pretty damn decent and cost me a small fortune, but I still think consoles are the best way for the average gamer. Here’s why:
Building a PC takes effort
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Want a proper gaming PC? You’d better be ready to put some work in. Sure, you could get an incredibly overpriced gaming laptop, but that isn’t going to get you the “cheaper than console” experience posts like this and the image above promise, or a beast of a machine at a fair price.
When I decided to build my PC in November last year, I left putting the build together up to other people. I consider myself relatively tech savvy but our very own Marco and Wesley from NAG are lot more experienced with this kind of thing, so I made use of their expertise. After giving them my budget of R14 000 (just over $1000) and around 2 weeks of back and forth using Google Sheets I wound up with this.
The graphics card arrived 2 days after I ordered it, while the other parts trickled in over the next week and a half. Eventually I had everything I needed, but I’d never actually put together a PC myself. I’d opened one up before and kinda knew what went where, but I definitely put in a few hours of hard Googling and made sure I had people available on Whatsapp to help me if I ran into issues.
4 hours later I’d put everything together, and not long after that I had Windows installed.
Now let’s compare that to when I got my 360 back in 2008: I bought it in the store, plugged it into the TV when I got home, and started playing Forza 2 not 5 minutes later.
Sure, the current gen consoles have a couple more roadblocks like forced updates and game installs, but that doesn’t change the fact that buying a console is easy. Building a PC is not.
Any PC port in a storm
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It’s 2015 and game studios are still managing to screw up PC releases. Batman Arkham Knight remains a broken mess, while Mortal Kombat X, F1 2015 and many others released in nearly unplayable states. Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, meanwhile, tries to confuse the shit out of people by having two differently priced versions depending on if you’re able to run DirectX 11 or not.
Bad ports is a blight that PC gaming just can’t seem to get rid of. Developers/publishers seem intent on treating PC as a second-rate platform and while it’s not the gamers’ fault, it is our problem. If someone asks me whether they should get Arkham Knight on PC or console, I’d say console in a heartbeat.
Bullshit fringe hardware issues
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Earlier this year, I decided I wanted to play this little game called The Witcher 3. After waiting for all 30GB of it to download and a good 30 minutes spent tweaking graphics settings, I finally got to hop into it. I played through the tutorial and got into the first combat instance when…
Crash.
Figuring this was a one time thing, I loaded it up. The game hadn’t saved so I had to play through the tutorial again. No big, I thought, it probably wouldn’t crash again. I saved as soon as I could anyway, and as soon as I had to fight those first few Ghouls…
Crash.
At this point I realised I should probably update my graphics drivers so I went to AMD’s site, started the download and began reading through the update notes when I stumbled upon this line:
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Yup, The Witcher 3 had an issue with just my graphics card. I eventually got it sorted thanks to some guy on some forum who had found a fix for it (something about there being fixed DLLs in the beta Windows 10 AMD drivers that I could copy into my game folder) but that was one of the moments I really regretted choosing to game on PC.
A console is a console. Nobody’s going to have different hardware to you, so developers can easily optimise games to run well across the board. You’ll never have issues like the one above, or games like Dying Light running well on Nvidia graphics cards but terribly with AMD, or any number of issues developers run into with the millions of possibilities there are for PC configurations.
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What PC master race advocates don’t seem to realise is that everyone already knows PC is a better platform. Everyone knows high-end PCs can run games at better framerates and mindblowingly high resolutions. Everyone knows that Steam sales means PC gamers can buy games for next to nothing if they’re patient. Everyone knows PC has entire genres that will just never work on console. Here’s the thing though:
Nobody cares.
Not everyone has the time, energy or money to put into building and maintaining a monster PC. Most gamers would rather buy a console and play video games on the damn thing than spend hours fiddling with .DLL files and overclocking to squeeze an extra 5 frames per second out of the newest PC killer. Sure, that might be your thing, but stop trying to convert people to your cause by replying to anyone who says they’re happy with their consoles because – and this might come as a shock – they’re happy with their consoles.
Keep your zealotry to yourselves and let others enjoy the things they enjoy about gaming.
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