The Stupidest Article on The Internet

You sir, are a lucky man.

Computers have been getting more expensive. I never said PC parts didn't come with warantees.

You need monitors with a PC. A frequently-underestimated cost. You don't "need" good monitors, just like you don't need a good TV. Until it literally went boom, my old TV was 15 years old. You're projecting your own personal desires onto what is actually necessary for something to function.

You're free to not see the appeal of consoles. Everything about video games is personal preference and choice.

But your personal preference doesn't invalidate factual advantages. Give me a shout when PC games don't have half-hour install times, in a world where disc installs are getting rarer and not everyone has fibre optic.

Several console games install themselves as well.

Wat. PCs have been getting increasingly cheaper in relation to their power. Like, the rig I'm using now cost £1000 four years ago, I could make the same thing for £600 now.

Monitors are usually around half the price of a good TV. I've been looking into getting a new one recently and the price has dropped massively. We're talking £100-150 for a nice 26" wide screen. Personally I think you do need a good TV to enjoy a console. Where as even a cheaper PC monitor, like both of mine, are pretty high fidelity, even if the colours are mildly borked with age, a cheap TV will be noticeably awful. I experienced this when trying to play a PS3 on my parents old flat screen, you can barely read the text.

You make the assumption that everyone has fiber optic. I don't. I have 1.5mb/s internet. Not even considerably fast. As I said, most console games nowadays require you to update/install it before you play anyway, so the whole "stick a disc in and play" doesn't really work.

The funny thing about discs, people love to argue that "well you'll always have a disc", but in my experience, and as someone who has always taken great care with my discs, I've had more discs break, become damaged, or in one magical case become corrupted (Neverwinter Nights 2, no idea how) then I have losing any digital games. I wouldn't be able to play SupCom or FA anymore if it wasn't for the fact that I redeemed the codes on steam, the discs died a while back. Or C&C generals.. I accidentally trapped the disc in disc drive and it snapped in two. It has a powerful motor apparently.

So I mean, you're claiming "factual advantages" but I'm not seeing any. I'm literally only seeing draw backs with modern gaming consoles compared to a PC.

Try to build a PC with the hardware of an Xbox One at 349$, not confident you can do it. =L

Searching in that price range on multiple sites I saw most computers with 4GB of RAM, an HD 4000 Card, and under 3.0Ghz iirc.

I'm fact on both the one and PS4 most if not all disc based games require an install.. Kind of really annoying actually. >.<

I miss when I could just pop a disc in and play. Now I've gotta wait an hour for it to install, then even more for day one patches. ;~;

Pounds, not dollars. £300 is $460. Which is the price of an Xbox one in the UK. But as I said, I was also including the cost of a reasonable TV to play it on, which would leave me with a budget of around $750-800, considering even small (27" LED) TVs I can find are roughly £150-200.

Also yeah, you're not gunna find a pre-built PC for that price, that's why I say built. I'd build it myself. It's not as difficult as people seem to think.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/171158-can-you-build-a-gaming-pc-better-than-the-ps4-for-400

Already beaten to it. I'm just going to add this, because it's kind of important: if you build a pc like an XBone, your PC may be slightly more expensive, but you can also do *more*. Like using it as an actual pc, for non-gaming. You could use it for school stuff, word/excel stuff, internetting, watching movies, connecting to your phone, etc etc etc etc.

Yes, but most people already own a tablet PC, or work laptop/netbook/etc.. and can't afford a true gaming computer- So just buy a cheaper console that works guaranteed out of the box.

You can use a 5 year old computer to do simple word processing or surfing the web, I don't really feel that's an argument.

The Xbox one in the US is 349$

And most people already own a TV.

Well that's great, but I'm not in the US. So that's not the price for me, nor do I own a TV.

PCs have been getting cheaper. That doesn't mean that PC hardware continues to get expensive at the upper end of the gaming scale.

Monitors are usually half the price, because they're half the size, and require you to sit closer. You're comparing apples and organes and I'm not entirely sure why. There are advantages and drawbacks to both.

The difference is, as squishy pointed out, most people already have a TV in their home. It isn't an increased cost; that's an argument you're making up to make PCs seem more attractive. Monitors, on the other hand, are pretty useless without a corresponding PC of sorts (even a laptop, if you prefer it). Some people even hook up their PC to a TV! I'm pretty sure with the right adapter I could even hook up a console to one of my monitors!

I made no assumptions that everyone has fibre optic. I specifically said "not everyone has fibre optic". I know I don't always phrase things perfectly, but it seems like you're looking for an argument here when I specifically said you preferring PC was okay.

Let's go back to my original arguments for a moment.

1. Consoles are cheaper. This is an unavoidable fact. You can perhaps build a PC that in some ways compares to a console, for a similar price. But the reality is most PC games require higher specs. The specs for the PC version of the Witcher 3 is higher than what the console version technically delivers. But the experience is much the same on both, barring some high-end graphics options which you need far more than a £300 / $450 PC to unlock.

2. Consoles have no technical upkeep. Also a fact. They're plug-n-play. There's more of a waiting time these days, with games having large install sizes . . . but PCs also have that issue. It isn't a drawback when your gaming PC is doing the same thing.

3. Games are guaranteed to work on a console. Though I should probably amend this to "outside of firmware issues or configuration issues that require a patch from the console manufacturer". Which don't happen all that often.

Let's compare that to PCs. Outside of driver conflicts, raging at games developers for your own custom hardware configuration (SLI / Crossfire, water cooling, nitrogen cooling, OC'd hardware, etc), BIOS issues, framework incompatibilities (a lot of games being built for older technologies is the key reason a lot of them have issues on newer operating systems), none of your hardware issues are covered by a warantee from the manufacturer that also licenses the games sold on the system. It isn't Microsoft's fault if your custom PC doesn't run Tomb Raider. It isn't Sony's fault if Dark Souls doesn't run. It is Sony's fault if Tomb Raider doesn't run as advertised on your PS1 or PS2 (at the time).

I could go on about this all day, man. Consoles grant specific advantages. PCs grant other specific advantages.

Both of these are acceptable platforms to game on.

I'm not sure I agree with the consoles being cheaper on the grounds that most people need computers anyways. Similar to the "already owning a TV" argument, you're only looking at a difference in cost. The cost to step up to a console level usable gaming PC is around what it costs to get a console unless you're talking about handhelds. I don't think anybody in this thread is talking about handhelds.

I'm also not entirely sure what you mean by technical upkeep. You say upkeep, but then you talk about installing games. What exactly are you saying PCs have that consoles don't?

What is a true gaming computer? You can play a lot of games for a, say, 600 euro computer. You're looking at rather expensive computers before it gets more expensive than both a console and a loose PC.

Reading and typing via a "TV" monitor plugged into my computer indeed right now. Though the TV function is like a little extra and the cheap antenna I have has a horrible reception xD I seriously was looking for a monitor only to be used as a "big" screen to connect my computer to as a tv replacement and this one had everything I wanted plus that TV receiver function. So I would argue that TVs are not more expensive then good monitors indeed and most people probably own a computer monitor that has a HDMI input.
Don't all consoles by now use HDMI? I think all my screens have HDMI as well.

I am surprised to learn that consoles games seriously install themselves and need day one patches by now. So with my blazing fast SSD (does any console already have one of those?) and CPU I probably get a new game out of the DVD-box that does not require an instant patch faster to run on my computer. lol
I mean it seems consoles are just cheap fixed function computers, but the manufacturers apparently even gave up the distinct "cool" part of "it just works instantly" xD

Also @Elate your doing something wrong with your discs. I have a ton of them (well mostly not games though. Maybe the discs from consoles games are different?) and the only disc that ever broke was the first Total Annihilation disc a friend of mine had. Which was a cheap self burnt copy. It somehow went transparent after a few years and installing the campaign maps from then on did not work anymore. Maybe somebody forgot it in the sun.

Console discs are very sensitive to scratches, and the consoles themselves seem to be bad at holding the disks in place properly. Also, how can you use a TV for a monitor? My eyes hurt just looking at all of the horrid text when they're used. I'd rather use a monitor for a TV at this point!

It is more like an IPS 1080p monitor that additionally has a tv receiver (DVB-T) thingy and a scart input on top of a hdmi and dvi input. So yeah the manufacturer probably thought the same thing "make a monitor and put in some more stuff so it can function as tv".

Also right, console game discs are actually used on a frequent basis. The vast majority of my discs are DVDs with animes. Some of which I have still not even actually put into any player even once xD Very rarely used.

I've already covered all of this, twice in some cases :/

1. You can get a personal computer that has equivalent specs to a console for a vaguely-similar price in some cases.

2. This personal computer has part-by-part warranty (as it requires custom building) unlike consoles, which have a warranty that covers the entire device nomatter what part of it fails.

3. You do not need to manage a console's BIOS. Nor it's drivers. Nor compatibility issues. Nor anything beyond sticking the disc in the drive and installing the game. There are no minimum specs. There are no recommended specs. There are games that exist for the system, and therefore play on the system. Nothing else.

4. For the same game that runs (well) on a console, you often require drastically-inflated hardware to get the same game playing on your PC. The advantage of having a PC is having even better hardware will result in superior performance.

5. There are additional developer-side benefits to targeting consoles, but nobody generally cares about those so I don't usually bring them up.

I'm a PC gamer. The only console I own is my partner's old PS2. I use a PC to game because I'm aware of all of the advantages it brings, and I'm an incredibly technically-apt person. I'd even recommend PC gaming to friends.

But I wouldn't recommend it 100% of the time, and I don't view people as being somehow silly or worse than me for choosing to use a console. Because there are valid arguments for doing so.

You had covered that before, but it was where you worded things that threw me off. Thanks for the clarification.

I had been PC gaming for longer than I'd been making custom computers and I never needed to fiddle with BIOS and drivers before. I feel like the necessity of all that is kind of exaggerated.

Anyhoo. I'm pretty much a console gamer at this point. Nintendo won me back. I just wanted to make sure I was clear on everything in the thread.

Ahh, wording is an eternal problem of mine, it's quite alright

I agree that the BIOS and stuff is a rather extreme example, but so are the technical mishaps people quote consoles on (like the RROD that actually caused Microsoft to implement an unprecedented warranty coverage for that specific defect, potentially losing them millions of dollars on console replacements).

I find people sometimes get so bogged down in the details trying to prove that consoles are the worst, or that PC gaming is some kind of objective deity in the sky that we sometimes lose sight of just having fun. Just something I'm annoyed by, haha.

Certainly not playing an evening of TF2 and missing every airblast I attempt. That has no affect on my temper at all.

I bet you're playing it with a controller you filthy peasant .