adamtm said:
There is a standardized PC platform, its called a Mac. The last time i looked the game market for Macs was horrible. My friend just recently was totally excited to finally play Call of Duty on his Mac, Call of Duty 2 that is.
There is no "future of console gaming".
As is, we do not have a next nextgen console generation on the horizon. We just don't.
The WiiU is 4 year old hardware, it still runs DX10.
The future of console gaming is having more of the same. Instead of an open-world Dragon Age, instanced corridor missions with re-used assets. Because theres only so much you can cram on a DVD and just so much processing power available to display it.
The next generation of consoles will need to go with DX11 at minimum, meaning it is only -now- being developed with current-gen PC chipsets, you won't see one for at least 2 years if its even developed at all.
The future might still release faulty hardware, all systems have glitches, even Macs. The console stability myth is as flawed as the Mac stability myth.
AFAIK Fallout 3 is one of the buggiest games on Xbox. There is no "better" or "more stable".
Consoles are just really good at one thing: Plug and Play
I.E. convenience
Perhaps a bit of exaggeration, but I would think mostly on the ball. However...
What do you mean "no future of console gaming"? Sure there is. There's tomorrow, the next two weeks, the next six months and whatever Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft do in the next couple of years. It may not be the same console we're used to seeing, but it won't be a desktop computer or a laptop either, I'm betting.
Not all consoles use DVDs. PS3, as you well know, uses Blurays that hold far more data than DVDs. Current consoles will continue to use discs, but as we skew more and more towards full digital, storage capacity of discs won't matter. On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised to see games eventually showing up on solid state storage devices with massive amounts of memory. I've got a 500gb drive in my PS3. In a few years they'll be able to cram that memory into something the size of a PSP memory stick.
Console and Mac stability are definitely overrated, but that being said, I've had far, far less problems with a Mac and a PS3 than I ever had with a Windows based PC. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I've not got any complaints about my PS3 (the Mac yes, but for entirely different, unrelated reasons). I gave up PC gaming years ago, because I found it was becoming impossible for me to play newer games without investing money- money I didn't have at the time. I don't have that issue with my console.
Fallout: New Vegas is the buggiest game I've encountered on my PS3. Almost unplayable at this point. Fallout 3, oddly enough, hardly gave me any problems. Go figure.
I'm not saying you are, but people seem to look down on "convenience" like it's a bad thing. Why is that? What's wrong with making something easy? That's why Macs and iPhones had such a popularity surge. The closed systems of those, and consoles too, make it much easier for more people to just use a device. As neat as it is to know how and why things work and be able to tinker with them to your liking, there's also much to be said for products that just
work. Work as advertised, work when you want them to and work throughout the products lifetime. I'm not saying PCs don't, but they do have a reputation for a reason. It's why we have IT departments and computer techs and, yes, Mac stores too. Shit happens and not everyone can or even wants to know how to fix it. Just like cars. How many people know how to fix their own cars? Not most people. They just want a nice, reliable, comfortable car, and that's sort of what a console is. PCs are like racing cars- you need a bit more knowledge, time and money to drive them, but when you get it running right, the Fords and Toyotas just don't compare. But there's nothing wrong with Fords and Toyotas and, in fact, some of them are quite nice, go pretty darn fast and look good too. But nobody is bitching that cars are "convenient". No one cares, because in the end, they mostly work for most people.
Personally, I think both PCs and consoles have their benefits and their downsides and that each person should be free to choose one or the other without someone else calling them an "elitist" or being looked down upon because they don't want a gaming computer.
