How PCs are the Ultimate Gaming Machine, and Consoles are Misleading

Video Games. One of the most profitable, and most popular forms of entertainment. A form of media where the most different of people can sit down and have a good time. However, nothing can be without controversy, and the catch of gaming is that before you play, you have to choose a console. Most people just blindly buy a PlayStation or Xbox just because they've the names in advertisements, and while I do admit that once described me, I have discovered that PCs are ultimately superior in every way. But why have so many people fallen into the trap of console gaming? How can so many people be oblivious to all the wasted dollars they're throwing down the drain?

                                                                                                                                                        This all boils down to anti-consumerist companies such as Sony, Microsoft, and Apple spreading false information. I won't go too in-depth into Apple, because that has already been covered by Kamran's blog, Is Apple Scamming You?. "How are those companies anti-consumerist?" you might be asking, "They bring powerful gaming at lower prices." This is exactly what these companies want you to think. You see, this is what Microsoft and Sony do,they pander to the majority of gamers. Casual players who don't want to be spending too much. They lure you in with shiny plastic buttons, and trick you into thinking this is "powerful gaming", when a GTX 760, a $150 graphics card card from 3 years ago, can out preform the Xbox one S, and the PlayStation 4 Pro, both new consoles that have only been released a few months ago

Source: CyberPowerPC.com

One of the ugliest truths of console gaming is the joke that is premium memberships. Sadly, I first learned about this just after I forked over my last twenty dollars. Basically, as multiplayer games such as Call of Duty, and Battlefield became increasingly more popular, consoles saw this, and starting charging players $10 a month ($120 a year) to play their favorite games online. While this service is completely free on PC, console gamers see no problem with this, even going as far as to defend this obvious scam, saying that money is being used properly maintaining the servers. News flash, servers don't cost anything for the companies making the consoles anymore. Companies such as Blizzard or Activision handle the servers for their games.

It is believed that consoles have more exclusives, and PCs just get the salty backwash of games that are already on Xboxes and PlayStations. This is quite the opposite, actually, as PCs have hundreds, maybe even thousands more than consoles could even dream of, and most of the time they're of a higher quality than your average Halo clone. Games on PC are also much cheaper, with services such as Steam having huge sales very frequently. Just last month I bought Just Cause 3 for $10 (normally $40). Not to mention, games on PCs drop in price much quicker, whereas console games usually linger above $40 for about a year. This doesn't even include bundles. A new way of purchasing games on PC, bundles allow you to pay a single dollar to get upwards of ten different games. I can't even count the amount of money I've saved using sites like Bundle Stars, or Humble Bundle.

The most common factor I hear spoken about when defending consoles, is the initial price tag of a PC. Most starting builds, gaming-wise, are usually going to range in price from $450-$700. Now while this is slightly more expensive than the $400-$500 of a console, PCs are much cheaper in the long run. The graph to the right (created by Andrea Brandi on stari.co), shows the total price a PC, a PlayStation 4, and an Xbox One over the span of eight years, if you buy 40 games, and eight years of an online subscription. Eight years, is also about how long it takes until a new generation console is released, so theoretically it could cost you even more to play on consoles than the graph shows, if you buy a new one each time one comes out. The same could be said for PCs if you upgrade your hardware during that time, but upgrading one small component for a PC would cost way less than buying an entirely new console.

That isn't even close to the entire story, I haven't discussed controllers, and how it's nearly impossible to use them, fauly hardware, the fact that PCs can be used for more than just gaming (work, music, and internet, just to name a few), the insanely huge modding communtiy on PC. I could go on and on about why consoles are plain bad, but in the end, what's really at fault is the anti-consumerist, all for profit ideology that's ruining companies, and the commercial market as a whole. In theory, consoles could be great for the consumer, and for the company, but after years of milking gamers for everything that they can get, consoles and their respective companies have sunk to the spot they're at now. A laughing stock for the PC community, and just flat out not worth the money