Let me begin by stating that I‘ve been a console gamer throughout my entire life. My first contact with games was on the original gameboy, followed by gameboy pocket. Sure, my dad had some experimental DOS games on his computer back in the days of Windows 95, but nothing that really hooked me to the desk. It was in summer of 97 when I borrowed a Nintendo 64 with OoT and Mario64 from a friend who happened to have it twice (richkid…). Soon after our parents decided to gift us one for christmas with the same games, Mario and Zelda OoT, and my brother and me became instantly addicted to it.
It was followed by a Playstation one, followed by Gamecube which I bought from my own money. PS2, Xbox360, PS3, Wii, Gameboy Advance, DS, PSP, PS4, Switch, XSX and PS5, I had almost every console and lost many many hours in the hobby. But I’ve not once looked over to PC gaming and certainly never missed something. After all, the great exclusive games are always on consoles and chilling on the couch with a controller in my hands in front of a huge OLED in a tiny one room apartment, that’s what gaming is. Or so I thought.
The older I get, the more money and less time I have, but I still manage to play a few hours every week, after all it‘s a passion even though I rarely finish the games I buy.
Earlier this year I bought a Steam Deck which changed a few of my beliefs. Suddenly, PC games are comfortable with the Deck on the Couch. And I can stream my PS5 games on it. And I can play all the available games on Xbox Cloud gaming. And I can play almost all of my classic games on it through emulation. It just plays everything. And I have games on it, which are horribly to play on consoles, but there‘s always a workaround available on the Deck (for example just connect a mouse/keyboard to it to play strategy games or connect the Steam Deck with the TV if you want to play on a big screen or if the Decks graphics aren‘t enough, subscribe to geforce now and you‘ll have better graphics than on modern consoles). The Steam Deck made it very easy to be introduced to modern PC gaming.
Meanwhile, consoles are not the easy to go solution for my gaming needs anymore. The fact that both consoles, PS5 and XSX are basically always online DRM machines, a decision for which XBox One was lynched a few years ago, doesn‘t bother me. It‘s day 1 patches, games that are unplayable if you don‘t have a day one patch (looking at you CoD!!!), constant updates, half finished games, the obligatory accounts that you need for almost all publishers if you want to play their games (ubisoft, ea, epic, bethesda, all of them require to have an account for their games), the installation process if you buy a game on disc et cetera. And then there‘s graphic settings for every game today. Top that off with way worse graphics compared to a PC, after just 3 years of the current gen being on the market and there‘s not much left of what once was a big benefit of consoles.
All of that happened while PC became more user friendly. Most games these days already offer controller support on release date. With Steam it‘s super easy to install games. And it‘s not even that difficult anymore to build a gaming PC because configurators tell you which parts of a PC are compatible. Oh and I forgot, exclusive games aren‘t really exclusive anymore, thanks to Sony.
It seems like consoles lost all their benefits, while PC gaming lost all disadvantages. Even when we compare the costs, with an XSX, PS5 (two already, the first one was noisy) and three switches I already bought (lite, normal one and OLED), with controllers, SSD upgrades, cables, the higher price of games, the online subscriptions, accessories like a loading station for both PS5 controllers etc. Everything accumulated I could‘ve also bought a really nice PC gaming setup with a gtx4090, connect it to the huge TV and be able to play everything with just one box. That‘s why I think
tl;dr, console gaming got worse over the past few years, PC gaming improved over the past few years, that’s why I‘ll be switching sides.
