What holds you back from PC gaming? Price, Patience, Friends?

[fight_professor]

Ease of use issues.

PC games have to be installed and then controls set up etc. PS4 (or any console) is largely plug and play.

I made a thread about gaming PCs previously - I do consider it esp with the growth of Steam.

[Ryn0]

I have a 'gaming' laptop, I used it to play games like Anno and Witcher 2 on high with everything other than ubersampling (seriously who put ubersampling there) but I will only ever use it for exclusives. Mostly because I love trophies, I don't hoard them but I just like them on my little playstation account.

The other thing is exclusives last gen and likely at some point this gen there were a huge bunch of games that only came to consoles and if they came to PC they came way too late. GTAV is coming out far too late to matter, Valkyria Chronicles came out like a decade later, Halo anything that comes out of sonys first party studios like Infamous, Uncharted.

Also none of my friends bother with PC gaming, Its likely never something I will get into unless people predominantly use PCs. I play stuff like Football Manager on my PC regularly but I would never pick a AAA game to play on a PC over a console. Also developers optimize for consoles, PC games are notoriously finicky for example. Bought Witcher 2 started it up with FRAPS on and was running like 15 fps on low settings (despite the fact I know it could run fine on high) had to go into documents-witcher2-config-user and delete the file there and download a user file off a forum to get it to run properly this took a day and a half because there were a number of problems running witcher 2 on PC from a lot of people so I had to figure out which one was mine, I thought for a while that Witcher was using my intergrated graphics card rather than my dedicated.

These sort of things frustrate me to no end, despite the fact Witcher 2 now looks beautiful.

[D-MiZe]

I'm a professional Runescape player, come at me bro.

[gamefrk]

If I gotta play with my friends, all I need to do is take my controller to their house & 4 guys can have loads of fun while being at the same location. This helps you to party/drink together etc..makes it a lot more fun. I can't do that with my PC.

With a console I don't need to worry about upgrading time & again. I can run games at the same settings as millions of other PS/XBox users.

Console gaming is more practical if you wanna save up space.

[-Kev-]

A barebones PC with a high end graphics card will run the most graphics intensive games at 1080p on ultra settings with no problem.

I know that with a 5k gaming rig you can run games at 4k Resolution, 120+ FPS with multi screens and 3d, but those kinds of setups are overkill. It's completely unnecessary for the amount of money you're spending.

I built my little cousin a bare-bones PC with the minimum components and a Radeon R9 280x Graphics card(on sale) for a total of about $550 and it runs all modern games on ultra settings with no problem. Ranging from 60 FPS to 90 FPS.

Btw the difference between Ultra settings and a PS4/Xbox 1 are not that huge. It's not that humongous of a difference.

I know there are 4k resolution displays but I honestly don't know what you need them for. I am completely happy with 1080p. I don't need to throw away so much money for such an insignificant difference.

It's like being married to a girl that's a 10 who blows your mind every night, and then you find out that the scale goes higher and that there are 15's and 20's out there. I'm happy with my ten lol

1080p is good enough for games, I'm not sure where I mentioned 4K in this particular thread. Definitely didn't say anything about dropping $5k dollars on a gaming PC. That's absurd, that's not even ultra high end, that's just stupidity. The best graphics card out there is about $550-600, best CPU is about $400, after that you spend several hundred more dollars on a motherboard that can play 4K, psu, hdd, sdd, cooling, case. But to spend $5k dollars, you really have to try your best to buy the most unnecessary items possible. I remember the most expensive gaming pc I wanted to build, with like super high end stuff, was about $2k and I backtracked on that, it would have been stupid. I know this really hardcore pc gamer at work that spent $3k on his, that's already overkill. But $5k is not even realistic to be honest. Why would any one want to spend $5k on a gaming pc unless it comes with a spaceship.

[Ryn0]

Well, you don't have to be a hardcore gamer to care about graphics. "Next gen" consoles main point of sale is the graphics. That's how they get casuals and hardcore gamers alike. Otherwise, if it was really just about games and no one cared about graphics, Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo would just keep putting out PSOne/X Box/N64 games and people would keep buying it right?

Not really right, This generations graphical jump from PS3 to PS4 and so on hasn't really been incredible not like it was from PS2 to Xbox/PS3. It's more in the smaller things like Lighting,better textures, amount of NPCS etc. At no point have I really been wowed by anything this generation (including PC) the way I was when I put the first batch of PS3/360 games compared to PS2.

I think the selling point this gen will be the tech allowing you to do things that old hardware didn't. I can imagine open worlds becoming much bigger, online functionality within games expanding etc. rather than being sold on draw distance, textures and the like. It is always about the games, you point is moot because with tech games get better therefore greater technology = better games = better sales = more incentive for sony and developers to create a next generation.

I can imagine this console cycle being the last one though, I see Sony and Microsofts investment into cloud based tech like Gaikai/Playstation TV so all the games are streaming through the internet. Stuff like OnLive came a generation too soon without developer backing behind it.

Also whoever said you can build a PC to run games on ultra for the $550 or £350 would be near impossible in the UK a r9 280x could set you back £250 by itself. A case/cooling system/Hard drive and CPU (my I5 duo isn't good enough anymore I will likely need a Quad I7 to stop from upgrading for a few years) would set you back well over £350.

[hayZ]

The cost to buy a quality PC that will run everything on ultra will set you back quite a bit. The good thing is that gaming on a PC, is as good as it gets. Going to console, feels like it's going backwards. Playing with better graphics, better controls, better voice communication due to programmes like Mumble/Teamspeak is the shizzle on PC.

I'm definitely bound to get a console next year but i'm not in any hurry.

[M Bison]

Not everyone has the patience and money for that, considering some graphics cards alone costs more than the consoles, or about as much. $350+(R9 290x), $520-$650+(GTX 980). The Intel CPU recommended to run these cards are at $220-350. The power supply needed would run you another $150-300. Motherboards could be anywhere from $80-$400. Easily $1,500+ with all other components like liquid cooling(optional), SSD cards(optional but recommended for high end pc's), gaming keyboard/mouse, soundcard, dvd/BRay player for those who have Blu Ray collections they want to play, hard drive 1-3 TB.

You choose, that^ or just buy a PS4 and call it a day?

But what holds other people back? The exclusives? A lot of games that come out for consoles come out for Windows as well, especially everyone's favorite top selling titles like CoD Advanced Warfare, GTA 5, Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed Unity, Dragon Age Inquisition, Watch Dogs, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Dark Souls II, The Elder Scrolls, MGS V Ground Zeroes, FIFA 15, NBA 2K15, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Evil Within. The list goes on.

Is it the people? You want to play with your friends but they are not PC gamers and you can't convince them to be?

Why do people choose to game on console is a hard one to answer but why do I choose it over the PC gaming?

First off to get the epitome of ultra gaming graphics you're going to want to spend a fortune on your gaming rig (high end GPU, PSU, Monitor, multi-core processor, motherboard then all the other hardware aspects = a lot of £££) and whilst you may choose to do that you wont necessary get the maximum out of the most up-to date hardware because simply most developers and gaming publishers are favouring the console platform over the PC for the simple reason they know what hardware they're working with and they know they're selling to a bigger community (in terms of triple A title gamers).

You can pretend to me that the triple A titles sell well on the PC but we all know that is subjective (piracy is more ripe on the PC) Far Cry 4 and Ubisoft prime example, the games where the PC makes it big bucks is the strategy games, mmos. rpgs and so on (WoW, LoL, Dota, SC1/2) and those are games I do not like.
The triple A title in terms of exclusives for the PC is just dead, yes there were titles for the PC many years ago and sure they still make some exclusives today but they're nothing of the same scale of an Uncharted, Halo, Last of us and the many more exclusive games that are for the consoles.

I mean the PC lost its biggest exclusive in Half Life, you don't see that happening as much with the consoles look at how long the PC gamers had to wait to get GTA 5 and they're still waiting atm lol.

So I say to you why pay all that money for something that isn't going to be utilized correctly?


Right I'll just bullet point the reasons why because I could go on and on and on why I don't see any point on playing on the PC -

• Lack of exclusives which I care for
• The setting up of all the hardware is time consuming
• The overall cost of building a top end PC could buy you a car
• Hackers are more prevalent on the PC
• Piracy is more prevalent on the PC
• Most sporting games feel much better on consoles
• Graphics nowadays are just great, when you start from the commodore you'll understand why some people don't care as much about graphics.
• The community overall with consoles is bigger and better, you'll find most of your friends will be playing on consoles (I know only a handful who play on PC which is rare considering I'm a computing student)

[M Bison]

Ease of use issues.

PC games have to be installed and then controls set up etc. PS4 (or any console) is largely plug and play.

I made a thread about gaming PCs previously - I do consider it esp with the growth of Steam.

PS4 does utilize PnP but they definitely do installations now and they do take up a good 20/40GB of disk space, whereas with the PS3 it was just a case with most games to just put the disk in and you can play.

I don't think installation of games on PC would have been a put off, it's literally so easy a child could do it.

[SlySlickSmooth]

I just don't see the point in paying $350-400 for a console. Then if you like online gaming its generally $50 a year. Then you need to buy the $60 game.

I can build a $450 PC, and play online for free. I can play games like Tomb Raider or Borderlands with any controller I want. Also the game you want will almost ALWAYS go on sale that you want. Last time I bought a game for more than $40 was The Master Chief Collection for my Xbox One which I'm going to sell because 343 ****ed up the game for far too long.

If you want the exclusives like Destiny then a console makes sense, but you can build around a R9 270x GPU and outperform consoles.

I'm pretty sure I'll still be using my 760 GTX by the time next-gen consoles come out.