I was seriously considering getting a PS5 until I saw the costs of the games + hardware.
Not really my type of games, so… They can keep 'em.
Although I am quite against all that exclusivity silliness.
They are more watching than playing. All coming to pc anyway now, so could grab them super cheap eventually anyway if you really wanted.
I do have a firm policy regarding games that are and were exclusives. I don’t buy them even if they eventually come to my neck of the woods.
If they didn’t want my money then, they aren’t getting a dime now. Pretty simple.
But as I said, neither game really had any interest to begin with. So there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have picked them up anyway.
Yeah, was more the point of why even buy consoles at this point if you really enjoy gaming. Consoles are great for quick plug and play sure, but with just minimal setup you can have a much better machine that pays for itself in the long run due to the cheaper games and lack of forced online subscriptions.
I agree, I don’t think any exclusives are good enough to justify buying a specific console.
I think you are vastly minimizing the “plug and play” aspect of consoles and that the common person has a machine that can run games with a “minimal setup”. While PC gaming has plenty of benefits: I think you’re downplaying how much time, money, and energy you have to waste to PC game.
Steps to play on a console: 1) Turn on the system, 2a) Maybe if you’re unlucky and a new patch comes out the same day you want to resume playing you have to patch the game, 2b) Play game (possibly even resume playing where you left off so you’re literally instantly back into the game). Time-to-play: Maybe 20 seconds? (granted a little longer on last-gen, but also this gen you can be back in a game literally within 5 seconds).
Steps to play on a pc: 1) Turn on pc, 2) Turn on (or launch) steam/egs/gog/etc, 3) hope game was updated, 4) hope drivers are updated, 5a) launch game, 5b) maybe sign into another 3rd party launcher, 6) load fully into the game, 7) play game. Time-to-play: 1-5 minutes depending on if the computer is fully off or just in sleep. Possibly much, much longer.
But WAIT, maybe the game isn’t running great so you have to alt+tab out and make sure you didn’t leave something running in the background, or your 100+ tabs in chrome/ff/etc are hogging all the ram and needs to be closed; maybe new drivers came out that you need to download/install to get the game running right, maybe the new drivers made the game worse and you have to revert them. Maybe the controller you wanted to play the game on disconnected or otherwise malfunctioned and now you have to restart the game the get it to pick up the controller. Maybe the DRM on the game has hitched up and you’re locked out of the game. Maybe you get a windows update that closes the game for you so it can helpfully install whatever new updates are available for you. etc etc.
I can’t say my experience playing PC games comes even close to that.
- My PC is already on - it’s a multipurpose machine, so I was already using it for something else.
- Steam opens on startup, no need to open it.
- Steam auto-updates the game in the background. No need to wait.
- I don’t think I’ve ever needed to update a driver to play a game. Also, regularly updating most drivers is actually not recommended, and you should only really be updating them if something’s broken. Graphics card drivers you might want to update now and then, but even then it’s rare that a graphics card driver makes a game suddenly playable. This seems comparable to firmware updates for consoles, although the last two consoles I used were a Switch and I think a PS3 so my memory’s a bit hazy there.
- Yes, third party launchers are obnoxious. It still only takes maybe 10 seconds at most to get most games opened though, from my experience. Not all games use third party launchers either, but sadly a lot of the bigger games do.
- Being able to continue easily where you left off does seem like a benefit consoles have. It’d be interesting to see that on PC, although I have yet to find a need for it since you can save practically anywhere in most games anyway, with the exception of cutscenes and tutorials I guess.
It takes me maybe 10-20 seconds to get most games that I play open on my machine, excluding the obnoxious splash screens games have when you open them which is the reason I think #6 might be a compelling argument. With the splash screens, it’s easily 2-3 minutes because more than half of that is sitting there staring at some stupid brand logos.
Of course, I already have a PC for other reasons, and the PC’s hardware is more than capable of playing games (moreso than most consumer gaming consoles at least, if not all), so I’ve never really felt like there was much reason to get a console, with the exception of a Switch since it’s a handheld. There’s already an enormous catalogue of games to play on PC, so it’s not like I’m missing out on much. Also, I might be a bit unique in that I’m using my PC all the time anyway. For someone who doesn’t use a PC very much, I could see a console being more appealing due to it being a dedicated gaming device.
Bingo, you’ve described my experience exactly. My computer is almost never off.
That’s wasteful.
PC player complaining about the cost of a PlayStation is new to me. Isn’t it normally the other way around? Isn’t a PS5 about as expensive as a decent GPU alone?
Yeah the PS5 is pretty reasonably priced for what you get. I think the issue is two fold:
- We already have really expensive machines that probably play games much better than the PS5 in frames and quality so buying another machine for a handful of games is just not in the cards.
- Many of us much prefer keyboard/mouse and using controllers is really hard when you’ve not done it in many years.
I think we just wish Playstation was more friendly to PC players and not have these long exclusives (they’ve gotten a lot better recently though). Microsoft for example is a lot friendlier to PC players than Sony. Pretty much all MS first party games are on PC pretty much day one and many of them are on GamePass day one as well.
All MS first party games are on PC because MS owns the PC ecosystem. Not because MS is friendlier💀
Yeah while MS does also “own” the PC ecosystem via Windows, I’d bet MS probably makes more money off of an individual Xbox player than a PC player which should make them a bit less friendly to PC.
For starters:
- Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales
- Sales and prices are usually much better on Steam than consoles so a lot of people wait for that number to drop over time
- For most multiplayer games you need to pay for Xbox Gold which is upwards of $50-$60 a year (or gamepass which is even more, though you get more out of it).
- You have to buy the console (this really depends on if MS actually makes money on console sales though) to play the game too.
Microsoft doesn’t have to put their games on PC if they don’t want to and in the past they kind of didn’t (no one liked GFWL). They could totally go the exclusive route again, but I think MS knows that Xbox die-hard will buy an Xbox console and obviously buy the games on the xbox store for whatever it cost. PC players will also buy it if it’s a good game and a good price and, this is crucial, is on Steam.
PC players are an untapped resource of potential customers; That’s why Sony finally decided to also cave and put their games on Steam. Money is money, but the difference is MS is betting big on GamePass and good-will right now since they are behind Sony in sales. I think because they’re behind Sony and trying to earn that good-will back, MS becomes more friendly to PC by putting their games on PC day one and on GamePass day one whereas Sony is still going with the 1-year (or more) PS5 exclusivity thing.
The interesting thing will be if MS ever gets back on top again, who knows what that looks like, but it’ll probably suck.
