Treblaine said:
Modern consoles (and even it appears, the Wii-U) are not capable of Hardware tesselation.
The Xbox 360 can do it just fine and plenty of ATI cards could also do it for years as well. Of course neither has really been used in games, but the capabilities have been around for a while. So wake me when it actually becomes a major part of most games, not just a technical curiosity used by only a tiny handful of games.
-unlicensed platform mean developers can release games without a fee, Minecraft collects 100% of revenue.
This is the one big advantage PCs have, no question.
-higher competition per system. GoG, Steam and now Origin compete on one PC while Xbox locks you into XBLA there is only detached competition with PSN
Meanwhile Steam games are locked to Steam, allowing them to do price fixing and kill the used game marked, leading to the console version of Orange Box for example actually being cheaper then the PC version.
Steam in general is also heavily overpriced, so is GoG and Origin. The only thing those services have going for them are their sales, their regular pricing just sucks, its most of the time cheaper to order stuff right from Amazon.
-Far more flexible controls with mouse + keyboard but also more importantly gamepad, or wheel, whatever appropriate
And half the time that stuff fails to work. For example with gamepads you basically have two kinds of games these days: The new ones, that require an Xbox360 gamepad and do not support older gamepads (due to lack of XInput driver) and the older ones that only support old gamepads properly, as the official Xbox360 DirectInput drivers are so shitty that they allow no configuration and merge the triggers into a single Z-axis, making them unusable for most games.
Now of course there are workarounds, custom drivers, XPadder and a whole lot of other hackery, but getting a usable configuration with non-standard hardware is often more effort then it is worth it, when it is possible at all (can't turn a mouse driven UI into one tuned for a gamepad).
Consoles are far less flexible, but they actually have a default configuration that is consistent across all games and just works without any need for tweaking.
-games 100% install makes them far easier to patch and follow major ongoing updates like TF2's continued evolution
100% install also means that it takes forever to get to actually play the game you want to play, also add in layered DRM for extra fun. Nothing better then having Steam games require GamesForWindows on top.
-Modding is a major creative force that has kept CS alive and strong for 12 year now,
And aside from CS players nobody cares. As nice as modding sounds in theory, the actual number of useful mods is rather slim and essentially getting smaller and smaller as games get more complex. Doing a level for Doom1 that was similar in quality to the original wasn't that difficult, doing one that competes with stuff seen in modern games, not so much.
Right now PC seems to be the only platform actually making progress, it's been 6 years since Xbox 360, graphics have moved on a LOOOONG way since then.
And yet all you get are shiny tech demos and no actual games. And that is where the crux is, you can proclaim all day that a modern $1000 PC is technically more powerful then a console, but the sad fact is that this $1000 PC essentially boils down to playing the exact same games as the $200 console. It might get more resolution and anti-aliasing, but not actually different games.
