While I agree with most of what you've said WalkingDisaster, I do have some issues withe the following statements.

Or it could be the fact that there are console exclusive games that are actually worth playing.

How are they non-subjectively better? Sure there are more gems to be found in the PC gaming industry, but for every good PC game, there are a thousand other worthless ones, just like consoles.

This is just bullshit. PC games are almost always ahead of the curve in terms of graphics, but that's about it. Everything else that matters in a game can only be determined through a case-by-case basis.

That seems to be the case for your views on the Xbone vs PS4 debate, but not so much when it comes to the issue of PC vs Console gaming. Are modern PC's better machines than consoles in every way that matters? Yes. Is the case same for PC games vs Console games? No. When you look at each game individually instead of just lumping them into categories like 'PC games' and 'Console games', you'll see that both consoles and pc's have a ton of great games to offer.

 

What are you talking about?

The difference between the hardware is gdd5 vs gddr3 ram. Everything else is minute one way or the other and down to how developers utilise the hardware.

Also, you built a pc 8 years ago for less than $1000 that's better than the ps4? Today, buying budget parts comparable to the ps4's components will set you back around $800 (mainly due to the gddr5 ram). Again, that's today.

You can argue that PC gaming is cheaper and more accessible than ever (an indication of the market), but it still can't compete with price, peace of mind and comfort while gaming. Valve is aware of this, hence the steambox (which'll, at minimum, be several hundred dollars on top of your pc just to stream, and more expensive still for a standalone).

No one is denying that PCs are better, but they also cost more and don't cater to 'idiots' (which are a vast majority of the market).

At the end of the day, it's not an argument the PC camp can win. The numbers speak for themselves.

 

Well yes, but no-one would be developing for expensive-to-develop-for consoles if PCs weren't traditionally a difficult gaming venue to get into. These days it's much easier but it's taking time to grow.

Fair, but I'd still argue that a good PC Game > a Good Console Game. Console games are almost always overly simple and highly limited. The fact that consoles are more expensive to develop for only damages the games further compared to PC games.

Still, the statement was overdone. Conceded.

I'm sorry, but no. Any developer who knows what they're doing can do far, far more with a PC game than they can with a Console game. Because anything you can do on a console, you can do on a PC, but there are many things you can do on a PC that you cannot on a console. The variety of option customization notwithstanding, PCs offer superior control schemes, less restrictions on developers (since PC gaming is less subject to the whims of giants like Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo), less cost, and more transparency for the players.

The ONLY thing Consoles have going for them is that they're generally easier to use than installing and playing a game on your PC. But with the Advent of things like Steam, that gap is fading at a moderate pace.

Still, you're missing the point. PC Games are superior because they can do everything that any console game can do. You can easily stick a control pad into your PC (and have greater control over what does what than you do on an actual console, most of the time) if you want to. But you can't take your keyboard and mouse and have pinpoint-fine micron-acurate aiming on a shooter on a console. Nor can you offer console players the same wide range of utility/customization/options that you can offer PC players.

Consoles have plenty of great games, I'm not saying they don't. I own several PS4 games and a couple Xbox 360 games myself. But in terms of pure potential, PC gaming is superior.

I could, however, have clarified that in the original post. But as you've no doubt noticed, it's late/early, and my word choice was faulty.

Five years. Not eight.

5 =/= 8

Except the part that it's been stated several times from different sources that Sony has been hugely friendly and willing to work with developers, both big and small. Whereas Xbone came out with a massive anti-consumer and semi-anti-developer policies that they were forced to change by massive backlash. They're still significantly more difficult to work with than the PS4.

Also, that RAM difference is Big. Huge, even. Lots of folks are downplaying the difference, but you can see it in the fact that the PS4 runs games at 1080p with ease while the Xbone is forced to run most games at the outdated 720p.

The Xbone's hardware has been upgraded since it's announcement, though, so the hardware differences are not as large as they were before. Still, the differences are clear, both on the hardware side of things and on the ease-of-developing for side of things.

Price:

Most people already have a PC, and making it Gaming CApable (if it isn't already, lots are), certainly costs a LOT less than a new Xbone or PS4, I work in the PC upgrade and repair industry for a living. Most folks with an average PC these days can find themselves gaming comfortably (with better-than-console graphics ) for at max a couple hundred dollars, if they don't have to pay someone else to do the upgrading for them.

Peace of Mind:

ROFL. You forgot all about the RROD, didn't you? How about the Eating-Your-Disk-Error of the Xbone, or the BBLOD of the PS4? The consoles have been out for an incredibly short period of time, and already they are showing their unreliablity. I don't think that counts as 'peace of mind'.

Comfort:

That is purely subjective, as comfort is an emotional state and not one quantifiable easily through numbers. I'm perfectly comfortable in front of my PC, and less comfortable in the public 'troll cave' in the house I live in. Whereas I know others who have moved their PCs into their front rooms/public areas so that they can be more comfortable there, effectively mimicing a console. Or even people who move their console into their personal room. This isn't an area where we can call either side superior because neither has an inherent advantage or defining characteristic that lends to their victory.

 

You did not build a PC as powerful as a PS4 or Xbone for $1000 five years ago. That is not even possible. As I understand it, the PS4's graphics card is roughly equivalent to a mid-level nVidia GeForce 600 series card. Those cards didn't even hit the market until last year. Memory as fast as the PS4 and Xbone use also weren't available to consumers, and I find it fairly hard to believe you found a CPU as good as the PS4 and Xbone use five years ago, especially for a total price of ~$1000. Even at $2000 I still find it fairly hard to believe.

Plus, there's no guarantee that your average consumer's now gaming PC (presumably they just bought a mid-range graphics card and called it a day; maybe they picked up some more memory too) will still be capable of playing games in five or more years. Hell, for that matter, there's no guarantee that developers will continue to put in the effort of making quality PC ports of console games.

Even then, for most games the control schemes available for consoles are at the very minimum acceptable. Outside of a first-person shooter or a flight sim, you really don't need (or in many cases even want) to use a mouse/keyboard setup instead of a pad anyway.

Also: consoles - or any high-end electronics - arriving DOA is perfectly normal as long as the number of units arriving DOA comprise a reasonably low number of the overall units produced. When asked, Sony said that the number of failed units was about 1% or less, but who knows how reliable that is (it's also the only number I've actually been able to come across.)

In short: is it a good idea to pick up a PC instead of a console? Probably. Is it anywhere near as cut and dry as you're making it out to be? Hell no. There really is something to be said for being able to just buy a completed box and plug it into your TV, knowing it will most likely do its job for a number of years (barring weird outliers like the RROD.)

 

Newegg, Overstock.com, hours and hours of searching, and some Fantastic fucking black friday/christmas deals, my friend. That's all.

Anyway, when I say 'just as powerful', I mean that I can run games at just as high (PS4) or higher(Xbone) resolutions than the Xbone or PS4 can run them, which really surprises me, considering my box has gone through some pretty rough times, and the technology is fairly outdated.


Will the PS4 and/or Xbone eventually outperform my box as the technology is utilized better? Yes. Even so, as it is right now, I could run Forza 5, or Ryze better than the Xbone could.

Perhaps not the PS4.

Simply because PCs are easier to develop for. -shrugs-. Not because my Box is superior to them hardware wise. A LOT of the hardware differential (and it IS there) is made up by the fact that it's far easier to develop and optimize code for a PC than for either the PS4 or the Xbone.

But when the PS4 eventually outstrips my machine ('dat ddr5 ram. Sweet momma) I'll be able to drop a couple hundred dollars, and sit comfortably knowing that I'll still be able to out-perform them graphics wise. Instead of having to drop 400 or 500 + proprietary online pass.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-360-failure-rate-542/1100-6215590/

So much for 'weird outliers' like the RROD. More like 'incredibly common events in the case of one of the major consoles', and semi-common in the case of the other.

Hell, we have three xbox 360's in this house. Two of them RROD'd, the third is still running. And the person who owns them is OCD about making sure they're treated right and taken care of.

While PCs often have problems, today they rarely just 'brick' spontaeneously. A PC taken care of by someone who knows what they're doing is far less likely to become a 'giant paperweight' than an Xbox 360 or (to a much lesser degree) PS3 was. Even so, if the PC did stop working, they're generally far less expensive to repair. As long as you didn't end up with massive damage, you could replace the part that was down and out an just keep on chugging. Not being forced to buy and entirely new PC because one proprietary part failed.

 

You misunderstood what I meant by "weird outlier." The 360 was a massive piece of shit with an incredibly high failure rate. That is what is a weird outlier. The PS3 didn't break like that, the PS2 didn't break like that, hell, the original Xbox didn't break like that, to speak nothing of the almost impossibly reliable Nintendo hardware.

Also: I wasn't suggesting that a PC would just spontaneously brick. Rather, I was suggesting that as time goes on, thanks to the rapid advancement of hardware and software requirements, your PC would be less capable of playing video games as well as a console could. For example, I built my PC in early 2008, and SR4 was almost unplayably broken; it would spontaneously stop responding because it would start using the entirety of my CPU or none at all, if the task manager is to be believed. When I played Batman: Arkham Origins, while the game never outright crashed, it did pause semi-frequently in the overworld because it had to load the city. And my PC was very, very strong for the time!

Note how they're both PS3 games, not even PS4/Xbone games. My computer probably can't even run those.

 

I think a big part of the difference is that I built mine in Late 2008 (there were some major technological advancements over the year), and took advantage of humongous sales/savings. Whereas you built yours early during the year, and (this is an assumption) paid retail prices?

Anyway, I have to admit that it's still more expensive of a process to start PC gaming if you don't have a PC at all. But how many people do you know in the U.S. who DON'T have a computer? I'd bet with (reasonable) certainty that it's a small number. The average PC today has 4+ gigs of DDR3 natively, a quad or six core CPU, as well as the other things like a HD with reasonable spin (or even a HSSD/SSD). Drop a couple hundred on a gaming card and the price you're paying for the specfic ability to play modern games with competitive or superior graphics is much less than you'll pay for a modern console.

 

RROD occurred in around 30% of launch xbox 360s, true. It was a massive fault in the system's design.

I recall Microsoft also dropping over a billion dollars to replace all those units.

On another note, I've had my PS3 since launch, around seven or so years ago, which is a fraction of the investment I put into my PC over the same amount of time (to be fair, I have high end stuff on my PC, cooling alone cost more than my PS3. It's a hobby). Last of Us is better than any PC game I've played in that time (to me), that's not to mention the other gems.

Seven years this console has last me, the PoS has a 60gb HDD and is louder than an A380 when it gets hot, but the big bastard has yet to let me down. With a new FFXIII (practically a new subgenre on it's own now -_- ), Persona 5, Xillia 2 and Dark Souls 2 coming? This thing will probably last me another two years.

I cannot build a PC for the price I paid for my PS3 that'll last me nine years. No way.

EDIT: This 720p business, btw, is only true for third party games AFAIK. Ryze is 900p and Forza is 1080p. I get the feeling the third parties got the consoles too late and struggled to get around the larger load on the system the xbone's OS demands.

It's also widely reported that Ryze (POS game that it is and looks) is the prettiest launch game of the new gen, and it isn't even 1080p. I doubt that is entirely true, as these budget scrubs are looking at these games on 40" TVs instead of something like my 110" projector screen, lol, but there you go.

 

If you don't have internet, Forza 5 drops to 720p and/or 30fps. Much of the game is run from cloud-servers when you have internet. Allowing the Xbone to run Forza at 1080p. If your internet goes down, if you've used all your bandwidth (for my Non-US friends who have limited bandwidth, sorry bros), or if you just don't have net at the moment, it can no longer do that, thus you end up at 720p when using ONLY the Xbone.

As for Ryze, it may run in 900p. But a LOT of it is pre-baked, and while it was super-pretty during the E3 show off, the graphics took a major hit before release and they do NOT look as good as it did during E3, people who are saying it's the 'prettiest' either don't know what they're talking about or are lying, from what I understand. Unless they're talking about art style/direction. In which case that's entirely subjective.

 

I built my computer using parts found on Newegg and at MicroCenter, which has prices roughly equivalent to Newegg. And yeah, my timing could have been a little better.

Here's a question: there's no doubt that most people considering hopping into either one of the new consoles or PC gaming has a computer of some sort. That's pretty much a guarantee. But how many of those people have Windows PCs? For that matter, how many of them have desktops, specifically? Upgrading a laptop is a whole different animal than upgrading a desktop, and there's very little you can do if you're on a macbook, even a high end one.

 

The vast majority of PC users still have desktops running windows. The most common OS I see is 7 ( most everyone hated Vista), though 8 is gaining popularity.

As for Laptops, they actually can be upgraded, though it's more complex and depends upon the laptop. Some can and some can't. This isn't the days of yore when Dell kept every fucking thing in their laptops proprietary (still hate Dell with a burning passion, if you can't tell).

I refuse to touch macs unless I'm getting shit for business. I hate them and every thing they stand for.

Laptops are becoming more and more common, but lots of them have mid to high end graphics cards in them already, since often enough people who use laptops use them for work.

Even so, RAM can be upgraded on laptops much more easily than years previous, and that can make up a lot of the slack from a crappy GPU in your laptop.

This is all getting way off topic, so if you want to continue, feel free to drop me a PM.

 

Nevermind that, my PS2 still runs fine after about 12 years of abuse. Say what you like about performance and whatever, but consoles definitely win in longevity.

Also Red Faction 2 is still better than any shooter in the last 10 years.

 

Lying? I don't just read forums and websites and based my opinions solely on what they write. I heard Ryze was the best looking game of the nextgen, I was curious so I figured I'd suss out my friend's copy.

It's boring as shit, it also IS the prettiest nextgen game I've seen, better than AC4 on PS4, Killzone and even Forza. They skim on the details, like there being basically five different enemies throughout the entire game that are split up based on what weapons they use - each category sharing a model. Every bowman looks the same, as does every axeman.

Resolution is just that, resolution. It's not the end-all for what makes a game look nice.

The game just came out, so I doubt you've played it yet, judging by the way you're talking about it. Why even argue the point without having seen the game for yourself? Does it anger you that an xbone game is the best looking one at launch despite the hardware differences?

If that's the case, calm down. Infamous will blow it and Titanfall out of the water in that regard (and every other, imo...). You can rest easy. Uncharted 4 will also probably be the best looking game ever made when it comes out - I give it two years since it was just teased, plenty of time for ND to get some serious work done with the PS4.

 

Reasons I play on consoles:
Controllers
Big TVs
Hanging out with friends
Some fun exclusive

I get that PCs will usually have the edge in graphics and performance, as well as nice things like mods, but at the end of the day I'd rather lay in my bed or on the couch, stare at TV and play a few games with my friends. It's hard to argue that PCs are better equipped for that(although I'm sure someone will try).

 

If you want to set up a living room pc, the only thing stopping you is you.

I will grant that local multiplayer is almost always better on console though.

 

Fair, Sree. Sorry about that. Since I was a main perpetrator.

On Topic:

Xbone Banning People for Swearing on Skype and Upload Studio

Better watch your mouth, boys and girls. Xbone is watching, and listening. Cussing is bad, so don't do it, or Microsoft will stop you from using the service you pay for, on the console you just dropped hundreds on, in order to protect their reputation.

 

That news is seriously some of the funniest shit I've heard all week. The Xbone is a fucking trainwreck.

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


Oh Xbox ...

 

Supposedly, if you swear at 2k14 and have the ps camera connected, you give away a technical foul.