The Glorious PC Gaming Master Race

[Signa]

But I think you need to see this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G_f8YBy39M

That video is awful by the way. It's points are full of logic holes, and he rambles far too long. He doesn't explain anything, he just thinks that he's right and there's no argument because he worked at Game once.

 

[DSP_Zulu]

Agreed about that video being awful. As well, the entire argument presupposes that every person who purchased the game used would have purchased it new if they could not have purchased it used.

This argument is terribly flawed. I'm primarily a PC gamer, but i have both a PS3 and Xbox 360 and games for both - ALL used other than Halo: Reach. I'd never have purchased any of the games other than Lego Starwars: The Complete Saga new (and the only reason i got that used, honestly, was the store i was at didn't have it new but did used). The other 15+ games werent worthwhile enough to have purchased them sight-unseen at a new-game price.

So, the developers didn't lose 15 new game sales because i bought used - i was never going to buy them new. I was not a "lost sale" - i was a "never sale". Much like piracy (a touchy subject) i think that the research would show that most people who buy used simply *are not* "lost new game sales" - they were "never gonna buy that game new anyway".

Couple that with game prices being so exorbitant and no demos... and i dont blame them.

Re: the actual topic.

PC Gaming is no more expensive than, or significantly cheaper than, console gaming.. and this will continue to be true in the next generation. Especially with Haswell just hitting the market (and, thereby, IvyBridge being marked down significantly) you ca build a pretty top-shelf gaming PC for right around 700$. As others have said, as well, you were going to have a computer anyway, so you can assume that you'd have spent money on a PC anyway if you had a console, so what your real out-of-pocket is is the difference between the cheap-ass PC you'd have bought with a console, and the price of the gaming rig.

I just built myself a new gaming PC. It isn't what a lot of people refer to as "top end" - because that now means gaming at 2560x1440 at high framerates, and not at 1920x1080. 1080p is just fine for me, however.

My rig cost me less than 700 - would have been slightly over but my Hard Drives are still totally functional so i didnt need to spend 90$ on a new one. Everything else was new (because i gave the old PC to my wife with an older, smaller drive in it). And for that 700$, i overspent on the case (A Bitfenix Prodigy, roughly 90$) and went with a better mITX Motherboard than i needed to (a nice 150$ Gigabyte model, 50$ off for bundling with Ivy Bridge CPU) so i could overclock in the future if i wanted.

I ended up with:
Core i5 3570k - performs fine for even a top-end rig, as the only real difference between the i7 and the i5 is that the i7 has Hyperthreading enabled, so clock for clock, they perform identically in games)
16GB of Corsair DDR3-1600
GeForce GTX 660Ti
DVD-R DL (LG)
BitFenix Prodigy mITX case
Nice Gigabyte mITX z77 Motherboard with 7.1 surround, dual wifi, and lots of other goodies.

All for under $700. And, if i needed it to be, it's screaming fast for daily use (i dont need it to be, i use a Mac for my daily computing/doing real computer work), but if i needed it to be, it'd be very usable.

So, sure, that's likely to be 300$ higher than the Xbone and PS4 will be at launch. It's also a lot more useful, and already outspecs them. It runs every game i throw at it at 1080p at max settings and 60fps (i havent had any desire to play Crysis 1/2/3, which would probably throw at least *some* hiccups at the system) - which is plenty "high end" enough for me.

However, the 300$ difference in cost between the Xbone/PS4 and my rig i've already saved on Triple-A games that i didn't pay sixty dollars for.

Yes, the cost of the console is cheaper than my PC, but gaming on a console, particularly the Xbone, which is going to surcharge used games, as a total, isn't any cheaper than PC gaming, and over the long run, gaming on my PC is actually significantly cheaper than gaming on a console. My PC will play most games at max or medium-high settings for the next 4-5 years... and if i need to, ill be able to extend that by simply upgrading a single component and replacing it with another mid-range part. I might even be able to get more life out of it, because, honestly, my PC is already more capable than the next console gen, and as a lot of games will be limited to what the consoles can match, that means my PC's life will be extended significantly.

 

[Giftmacher]

Just to chip in, apologies if this has been said already; I didn't see it when I skimmed the thread. Anyway, so far as gaming on any platform is concerned I'm a big advocate of building or buying a low spec-ish PC, forgetting about the AAA titles and looking to Indies.

The majority of engaging games I've played lately wouldn't tax a system built in the last 6 years or so... actually most are probably available for the current gen of consoles too; stick with them until something seriously compelling appears for gen 4 hardware.

 

[MrBoBo]

Pc gamers are generally speaking, better.
It's just the way is.

 

[DSP_Zulu]

The games on Steam only sell for that price because they're cheap indie games or some similar situation. That's good for small time developers and all but it still doesn't change the fact that those can only last so long.

That's just not true. Premium titles go on sale at steam all the time.

The reason the prices are low is because they have competition. Not only are there other delivery services, games can often be downloaded directly from publishers, purchased retail (new or used) from brick and mortar stores, or purchased on retail websites, amazon, ebay...

Competition drives lower prices. Always has. Always will.

Agreed. I paid ~40$ for Borderlands 2 within two monts of the game being released. And 8$ for the regularly 20$ season pass.

I paid less for the whole enchilada than the base game cost on the consoles.

i'd hardly call that a cheap indie game.

 

[Adon Cabre]

snip

Well, you've got some conviction; but, honestly, I don't see the point in spending $800 to make a machine that soars in energy bills; that's noisy, and that requires game set-up configurations, and hardware settings configurations/multiple updates. So your energy bills will actually even out the discrepancy in cost with console -- it may even cost more for you. But overall, desktops are antiquated. Haswell has told us that the market is gearing portability, reduced energy costs and expanded battery life.

SONY understands this, and which is why they modded out an 8-core Jaguar AMD CPU to sub 2GHz. It makes the machine smaller, with a smaller fan -- there-bye generating less noise and heat. But the experience is still high-end, and will be adequate for servicing a creative director's vision for years to come; and that's all that really matters.

PC community = bad influence

The focus on PC forums almost always reverts back to technical discussions; in other words, the mods, 30-60FPS observations, anti-aliasing settings (and using games to compare graphics cards) -- these trump the pc community by a vast margin. Console consumers, on the other hand, busy themselves with the artistic facet; the story and mechanics of a title, because that's all that they control and observe.

 

[DSP_Zulu]

snip

Well, you've got some conviction; but, honestly, I don't see the point in spending $800 to make a machine that soars in energy bills;

With the advent of metered plugs, this is clearly provable as untrue. I run a ~600w PSU, and sure, it uses more energy, but the monitor it is plugged into uses about 10% of the energy as my energy-star compliant HDTV that any console would be plugged into. This is so much smokescreen.

that's noisy,

My PC is almost completely silent. It certainly is NO louder than either the PS3 or Xbox 360s sitting in the entertainment center. And that's with the stock cooler that came in the box. I could go totally silent for about 30 bucks.

and that requires game set-up configurations,

You mean, like consoles?

and hardware settings configurations/multiple updates.

You mean, like a console?

So your energy bills will actually even out the discrepancy in cost with console -- it may even cost more for you.

Hardly. Like i said, my PC/monitor uses roughly the same energy as a console + HDTV. You seem to have a really strange idea of how much energy things use. I can leave my PC on day and night (i dont, but i have i the past) - it uses roughly .30 cents of power if i do that. So.. 109$ if i leave it on all day, every day, for an entire year. I haven't measured the console, but i have measured the TV (my wife and I have been experimenting with using remote-switched plug covers to completely de-power things that have standby modes, which suck up a lot more energy than you think, so we got one of the metered plug covers to see which ones really needed it). The HDTV alone (an Energy Star device) runs ~.17c a day. It's a complete wash, and the fact that i've saved the cost of the console in sales for AAA/desireable PC games still offsets this. And that's just this year. Ill save that much again next year. And the year after. If not more.

But overall, desktops are antiquated. Haswell has told us that the market is gearing portability, reduced energy costs and expanded battery life.

Which is why there are no desktop Haswell CPUs. Oh, wait! THere are! And hardly antiquated. No laptop, however nice, can perform as well in games as a far cheaper desktop. It's the nature of the platform.

SONY understands this, and which is why they modded out an 8-core Jaguar AMD CPU to sub 2GHz.

You can get a Haswell i7 (laptop part) that will draw 22w TDP and run rings around that Jaguar, which, going by the stock parts (the only thing we have) has almost twice that draw at 2ghz. I seriously doubt that the Jaguar in the PS4 is somehow magically twice as power efficient. So this is just fanboy fiction.

It makes the machine smaller, with a smaller fan

There are Haswell laptop designs that are fanless. There are Haswell ultrabooks that are 1/4" thick or less and have fans imeasurably smaller anything on the PS4. There are entire computers which will outperform the PS4 (midrange ultrabooks) that are 1/10th the size of the PS4.

-- there-bye generating less noise and heat. But the experience is still high-end, and will be adequate for servicing a creative director's vision for years to come; and that's all that really matters.

Except that by the time they come out, the experience will only be high-end for about a year. They will already be running low-midrange parts at launch. Within 18 months, 80$ performance GPUs and a 90$ budget CPU will outperform it across the board, and once again, the limitations of the consoles will hold back what "high end" can be because anyone who isnt developing exclusively for PC will use the weak performance of the consoles as the max baseline because theyre going cross-platform.

PC community = bad influence

The focus on PC forums almost always reverts back to technical discussions; in other words, the mods, 30-60FPS observations, anti-aliasing settings (and using games to compare graphics cards) -- these trump the pc community by a vast margin.

Not that the entire population of the PC forum is even one thousandth of a percent of PC gamers, any more than console forums are a sizable percentage or truly representative of the console market. Nature of internet forums.

This last one is just hillarious, trying to portray console gamers as this enlightened higher race of game-auteur that is only concerned with artistic value. This is where i *knew* you were trolling. If that were true, then 85% of console sales wouldn't be of games that also come out on PC and are better on PC - you know, games like Skyrim and Call of Modern Battlefail - or sports games.

Console consumers, on the other hand, busy themselves with the artistic facet; the story and mechanics of a title, because that's all that they control and observe.

Yeah, just cant take that seriously.