Giantpanda602 said:
The other day, I was debating PC vs. consoles with my friend. Being the neutral bastard that I am, I agreed that PC games were generally of better quality than their console counterpart. Still, I had to defend the consoles. I've been a console gamer my entire life (besides WoW for around 4 years). Looking back, I see a pattern in consoles that should make PC gamers happy. Its mainly this, consoles are becoming PC's. Slowly, we are seeing the push for more features on the consoles that only the PC previously had. If, all of a sudden, consoles stopped being made, then you would see a huge drop in the amount of gamers around the world. As consoles get more and more amazing tech, more people learn how to deal with everything the PC has to offer while it still is in a controlled setting.
Basically, the consoles are evolving into PC's. I predict that after the next console cycle, which will might end around 2018, everybody who can afford a good PC will have one. Everybody will know how to use it to its full potential, everybody will be happy.
On that last point, who knows if we'll even still have PCs by then? We could all be subscribing to some super fast gaming cloud on the internet, and recieve video to a monitor, transferring our inputs over the internet?
I struggle to agree with your premise, and in a world where we have this mass divide between the console and the PC, in various ways, the first and most important being cost, the more the console turns into a PC like device, if it does, the less justification there is to go out and get one.
What else does it have? Well controllers are better for some things like platformers, fighting and racing games, but with cheap enough specialised peripherals (or proper eye toy/ kinnect / other web cam software), the PC then has all the input advantages, even if it still costs more.
Ok, the console screen is usually larger than the PC screen, granted, and excluding those among us who have 50 inch televisions as desktops, we could all get fancy prjectors to save space, but otherwise I can't think of a solution the PC has there.
'If' all of a sudden, all of the console manufactuerers stopped, we know for certain, many people would only keep their consoles, whilst many others would trade in it in and buy a gaming PC. It'd be the last avenue for online game play, (it's more likely consoles will instead evolve somehow but if it did), you can bet all the developers would drop tools and gear things for PCs.
I understand what you're trying to say, consoles do provide many people with the ability to play games, which they potentially couldn't afford (at the time of purchasing the console) necessarily, to do with a PC, and I would find it hard for anyone to claim against this as being the no.1 why consoles are so successful.
But let's face it, excluding the 1-2 year blip, when a new generation of consoles are released, PCs will almost always be more powerful and a more secure option for gamers. Businesses use PCs, the general public all use PCs, so when it comes to specialised gaming PCs, you can bet one thing for certain. If anything were to go down first, in our current state of affiares, it would be the console 'as we know of it today' before the PC.
I would love for them to join forces. In my perfect world, a console would be no larger than a 5 1/2 Blu-ray drive, and you could sit it on your desk or install it in your PC, it would then defer to a minimum rated graphics card, in your PC, to do it's processing, whilst still being required to read the discs and have its own boot set up or software to install on your machine, and things would be hunkey doorey.
You could plug in your controllers when your friends came around, or, keep the mouse and keyboard for online fps, and vice versa (almost), have a controller for online racing/fighting games. Then we'd still have 'oo, you bought the Playstation console, mines better because I bought the Microsoft console' ect, but new and future games wouldn't continue to look dated 3 years after the console is released.
