Are consoles cheaper “per transistor” or sth? If so, why? Is it about the vendor locking you in and charging more per game? That would seem even more skewed against the buyer: buy this pseudo-pc so we can sell you expensive, limited-choice software.
I much prefer gaming on consoles because I can't be bothered with all the mental overhead that comes with PC gaming. Like most of us I don't have much time. I turn the console on and I'm instantly playing a version optimised for this hardware. More than happy, even eager, to pay for a version that doesn't have me forever tweaking graphical settings or have me thinking about what the latest advancements in RAM or whatever is.
I'm actually looking forward to Steam Deck as ideally it'll give a much closer to console experience for some PC games I've missed out on.
Edit: I was reminded by another comment that the couch experience of desktop gaming isn't for me either. If I can't operate the whole thing from a gamepad I'm not interested, and last time I gave this a go with a little Lenovo I used for emulation, this still wasn't possible.
> Big Picture is a mode of Steam designed for use with your TV and game controller, so you can enjoy your Steam games from the comfort of your couch. With the press of a button, Steam displays a full-screen user interface which has been completely redesigned for readability and interaction on TV. It can also be used on your usual computer display.
It wont solve the hardware/ram/compatibility problems, but in my experience there are not many of those on the latest Ubuntu. If it works, it works well, and if it doesn't it doesn't at all. And mostly it does.
On a modern system you buy in the next electronic store that is ready to use the mental load is the same as using any Sony OS.
The advantage I see in consoles is that they are more multiplayer friendly. It is mostly more comfortable to share a large couch, but PC maintenance is as easy as it is on console. You cannot play instantly. I use a console 3 times a month when friends come around to play. I often have to wait for a fairly long update of OS and games. Can happen on PC too, but with modern boot times, there really isn't much difference anymore aside from input/output.
With a console you don't have that option, you would need to buy a new one, so that's not comparable.
- It just works. Games can have bugs but no hassle with installation, drivers etc. Games are more or less better optimzed because all the devs are working on the same hardware. No 100s different CPU and GPU. And one operating system
- Exclusives. Studios are moving away from it to some extent but some games can still be only played on consoles
- Home entertainment system. Youtube, Netflix, blurays etc.
That being said I have a gaming PC and consoles too mostly becasue of the exclusives
That's before you get into the "openness" of PC - if you want to play a game on steam but your friend has bought it on the Microsoft store how do you play together? How do you voice chat? What do you do when the Xbox services don't work when docker is installed?
- At the beginning of the release cycle consoles are often sold at a loss, the money is made back from game sales (a $60 PC game costs $70 on console)
- It's much easier to optimize for the known hardware configuration of a console than for "all PCs". Console hardware isn't high-end, the heavy lifting is done by heavy optimization of the games for the specific hardware
- even cheaper, and not a case of paying later for $70 games
- exclusives: by far the biggest draw to switch
Interesting enough to spur Valve to launch a portable competitor so it'll be interesting to see how those pros hold up.
They're subsidised by the game prices. You still pay for it in the end.
> Home entertainment system. Youtube, Netflix, blurays etc.
You can use a PC in the same way. If you position it well, you can even have a dual purpose work/entertainment PC.
Might as well buy a better PC to do everything.
That's one of the reasons I hate consoles on an ideological level. Unless there are technical reason that make porting the game so hard that it's just not worth it, the only reason for "exclusives" to exist is to fuck over consumers.
Whereas on PC I have to go upstairs, usually switch out my work cables and keyboard/mouse, power up the thing, then fire up my game. Definitely less comfortable than the console experience, but on the other hand, there's games that just don't work on consoles (strategy, text-heavy games, etc).
At the moment I play Sekiro on the console and FFXIV on the PC. Both work on the other platform, but both are stronger on the ones I prefer to play them on.
I for one hate using controller, and consoles don't support M+K (ok, xbox does, but not all games do).
Playing 3d shooter on controller is just like playing it using arrow keys, possible and I was doing that when I played DOOM (the original). Tried it and hated every minute of it because of inprecise shooting.
And strategy games? Moving pointer with controller?
RTS? Is there any on consoles?
And the last but not least, what to do when one doesn't have a TV? Those are not popular nowadays :)
- I have to unplug and replug my headset (an official Xbox-compatible Astro headset) from my xbox about 33% of the time to get it to recognize my microphone, and this is a common complaint among owners.
- When I try to play Minecraft with a friend, about 50-60% of the time we can't connect, and one or both of us needs to completely restart our console.
- A recent heavily-promoted game, "The Ascent", was actually throwing video memory errors on Xbox consoles for a lot of people:
https://old.reddit.com/r/XboxSeriesXlS/comments/p4losy/the_a...
https://external-preview.redd.it/8wPHr4M1TrBuG8qon6YO2WkrM_V...
- One of Xbox's flagship games, Sea of Thieves, due to creative choices in the world lore, has tied respawn time to your console horsepower. So if you have an Xbox One, you now have to compete against Xbox Series S/X players, or people who have bought an external drive, who respawn much, much faster than you. And the game pushes you strongly towards PVP most of the time. And even if you avoid that, it's still not uncommon to die due to PVE circumstances and "lose" because of the unacceptably long respawn times. So rather than just enjoying the game, you're often cursing your inferior console, or spending time thinking about upgrading its storage just to be competitive.
Newer console games often make you feel pressure to buy the newest console iteration when the older iteration is nearing its end, but Sea of Thieves was released years ago on the Xbox One. Now it's a litany of performance complaints whose answers are just "get a Series X." These days consoles are earlier and earlier becoming advertisements for their newer generations.
I dont really see the issue of suboptimal experience to worry about. Modern games autodetect optimal options to play out of the box.
But the main reason for me is the controller: It's just so much better than any other controller I've connected to a PC. The back triggers have excellent force feedback and in some games the vibrations tell you on what type of surface you're walking. This might not count for XBox users, which can use the controller on their PC.
Also, I use a Mac, and I don't want to bother with setting up a gaming only Windows PC. If I factor in time spent, $500 is worth it.
I did play Forza Horizon 4 on the PC with a Xbox Series X controller and it worked fine. But had bad experience if I tried to use an PlayStation 4 controller. Which controller did you use?
But for Forza Horizon 5 I do play it on a Xbox Series X and currently prefer it for two reason: 1.) Its just works without any major issues (a friend of mine has on the PC currently constant crashes) 2.) My PC hardware can run the game but not pretty well
One big benefit I see on the Xbox side is that you can play the games on your PC too. And I hope that "exlusives" die as its just annoying.
But in short if you just want to play games a console might be less friction compared to a PC. No need to fiddle with graphics settings and so on.
I use PS4 controllers with my PC(linux), pretty sure they work with windows too. What controllers cannot be connected to a PC?
There are console-exclusive games, depending on which types of games you like those exclusives can be extremely interesting.
A PC is more expensive, almost always has been. If you need a desktop PC anyway, that might not matter much as you only need to factor in the better GPU for gaming. But with the GPU prices right now even a mid-range card is more expensive than a full next-gen console.
Bloodborne was released in 2013 and I am still waiting to play it.
The PS3 even supported 7 controllers and is still used for some Bomberman Ultra. The PS4 and PS5 sadly max out at 4...
And these are still half the size and weight of my PC. Of course there are mini-itx gaming rigs out there but those cost as much or more than all my consoles and controllers together.
Exactly. It just works and saves time. Just buy the game, plug it in and play it. Simple.
No 'swap this GPU inside step', 'installing additional drivers step' or 'incompatible hardware errors', or 'run it in 32 bit mode' etc.
I was a “PC gamer” for years, but consoles are better for plug and play group/sofa gaming.
The fact that a game might be 69.- instead of 59.- on release and for a much longer time without sales on this platform is then suddenly not so important anymore.
A console is cheaper, and can be left permanently attached to your TV; and the UX is more focussed than a general purpose PC, and optimized for controller as single input; you probably want a PC—probably a laptop—for other things, but unless you are going to buy a second PC for living room gaming, it isn't really a console substitute.
> Are consoles cheaper “per transistor” or sth?
Yes.
> If so, why? Is it about the vendor locking you in and charging more per game?
Actually, its about the vendor charging developers for access to you; at release AAA game prices are pretty similar console vs. PC (over time, I think PC game prices fall further and faster, but like films games live or die by earlier sales. If you are a buyer that tends to buy games long after release, then PC is much more attractive.)
With a console, you buy the latest one and play the games until there's a new one (in the case where money is no object). You never have to worry about settings or optimisation, it just works. You also know exactly when your hardware is out of date because there's a new generation console.
Personally I'm a PC gamer, I currently run an RTX 3070 and I still wonder whether my CPU or RAM are limiting performance because I'm not getting the performance I expected (but wasn't guaranteed by any single vendor for my custom build). This is a problem I can solve, but it would be worth it to me to pay someone else to deal with it because I just don't have the time/inclination.
Maybe I should buy a console...
2. Hardware convenience - just a box you put next to your TV that works from the second you take it out of the packaging.
3. Software convenience - no need to deal with a million compatibility issues, buggy drivers, and all the problems that come with Windows and gaming hardware.
2 I agree with. I'm hoping Steam Deck might make a big difference.
3 It's also gotten better in general, AND consoles seem to have more bugs than they used to, because things can just be patched now. Think Cyberpunk! Consoles are still better, I just think the difference is way smaller now.
For 300€ I got a computer (PS4 Pro) dedicated to nothing else but gaming. And that's mostly just because I can help it, crave Skyrim and Fallout 4 once or twice a year, anyway.
A worthy PC would cost me at least 800€. Right now, I'd say it's even impossible, because of the graphics card situation and APUs don't match the consoles.
While games can look better on PC, you would also pay another PS4 in electricity costs to run a fancy system, over here.
As an example, I bought a PS4 late 2013 or early 2014 (honestly can't recall the exact date), and it was performing pretty well for games released, um, whenever I last bought a new game (late 2020, I think). I doubt that a PC from 2013 would have been able to play a "beefy" PC game released late 2020.
I mean, I guess I could chase the forefront of PC hardware, just to support gaming. But, then I'd also have to dual-boot (it is still the case that a substantial amount of PC games need Windows to run on), and lock myself in to updating the PC hardware every 2-3 years, just to keep up with new titles.
Meanwhile, my primary desktop was purchased before my PS4 and still runs linux admirably. Would I get more oomph if I upgraded it? Sure, more (much more) RAM and probably 2x - 4x the number of cores. But, I don't actually have to, it does what it needs to.
For the price it would've taken me to upgrade my aging gaming PC to be able to play AAA games smoothly would've cost about the same as getting both a PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
That combined with the fact that I don't need to upgrade the consoles for years made the choice really simple.
I still play a few games on my PC (Valheim, Factorio etc), but I'm hoping the Steam Deck will allow me to retire the old beast completely.
The only pro I can see at the moment for any console is the ability to place it in the living room for the family to share a casual gaming / entertainment experience.
I do have a PC and, while not a "gamer", I enjoy hitting back on the old classics (Age of Empires 2 DE) from time to time.
But that is a personal gaming experience, not to be shared with others in my home.
Another factor is you're far less likely to encounter modders. First thing I do is disable PC crossplay, if the game lets me.
So why buy a mid range sports car if you can buy an SUV for the same price that you can also go grocery shopping with, or a pickup that you can also haul stuff with?
In the end it always comes down to the use case of the thing, and the people buying consoles are not just interested in playing games, they’re also not interested in the stuff a PC offers.
As soon as you introduce choices, you introduce complexity. People buy consoles because they want to play games with the least amount of complexity involved, and they’re willing to sacrifice those choices because often they don’t even want them in the first place.
Also, consoles often have some games that only come out for that console, so if you’re really interested in a game, sometimes buying the console is your only choice.
In the PS3 and early PS4 era, yeah you were missing out on PC gaming but nowadays consoles are plenty fast. Plenty fast indeed.
Since sony sells console hardware at a loss (only Nintendo doesn't do this), jailbreaking PS5 will create demand for the devices in clusters. Lots of research was done on PS3 and PS4 clusters where you could get GPU (and at one time CPU!) for cheaper than anywhere else. In modern times, I suspect people will mine crypto on them.
If so, this is actually really bad news for gamers because it will put the hottest current gen console into the same bidding war with miners as GPUs have been in the past few years.
Yes. Because of scale and optimization.
But that's more of a side-effect than the real reason. It's mostly about having a device you can switch on and instantly play. No installing drivers. No picking parts. No incompatibilities.
I've been building my own PCs for over a decade but I'm losing interest. It's such a hassle. I do 90% of my gaming on my Switch. Games I had on Steam for years and barely touched I suddenly play through in a week on the Switch. Why? Convenience.
1. Console games are initially more expensive, but you can sell them used when you're done, which isn't possible on PC. I regularly buy games for $100 (Australian pricing) and sell them a month or two months later for $80. (I'd rent them, but rentals don't exist anymore. I keep the ones I really really loved, but sell on most.) On PC, the same game might launch for $10-20 less, but that doesn't make up for not being able to get $80 back from every purchase.
2. Many games are unfortunately exclusive to a particular console, including many of the most popular franchises, e.g. Mario, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, and The Legend of Zelda are only on Nintendo consoles. If those are your favorite games, then none of the other factors really matter. And it's much more common for games to be exclusive to a console than exclusive to PC; there's virtually nothing these days that doesn't end up on the consoles, there are usually a couple of major blockbusters every year that don't make it to PC.
3. PC graphics card prices have absolutely skyrocketed due to cryptocurrency mining. I paid $130 for my graphics card seven years ago; the same model regularly sells for $150 on eBay now and when I look at replacing it, I can't find anything that significantly beats it for under $300. I looked at spending my tax return on a multi-part PC upgrade, but to match the performance of the new PlayStation I'd have to spend nearly double its price, and most graphics cards would require me to join a waiting list. (As it is, I went with neither and I'm waiting to see what happens next year.)
4. Formerly, playing games together with friends in the same room. Sadly, this is less and less well-supported on consoles with every year that goes by, but it used to be practically exclusive to them, and not something PC games ever implemented. This was especially important for kids (who make up a huge portion of the market and often have siblings to share the console with) and students (who would hold multiplayer game nights in dorms etc). It matters even for online multiplayer, though. You want the system your best friends have so you can all play together. And that's more likely to be one of the major consoles, and you'll rarely get your whole friend group to switch, especially if it's to a more expensive (at least upfront) option.
No bullshit. PC's have compatibility issues, weird hardware edge-cases where you have to debug with multiple drivers to achieve stable performance (I wish I had only one of those per year of gaming...), etc. Quite simply consoles have issues sometimes, but broadly they are just far too small to really be items. Consistency is king when you just want to play videogames.
Also, people don't need any of the "other stuff", so there is that.
PC has the biggest game library though if you don't have boundaries (include emulators and stuff). You can't get anywhere close. And if stuff is broken, you can fix it. And if stuff is boring, you can cheat to the fun part (single player games!).
Also I don’t think the target demographic would care much about it not being a pc (otherwise they would buy a pc). There’s a convenience of having a gaming box already set up, plus Playststion can have exclusive titles
So for gaming i choose an xbox console and for the 70$ Price I subscribed to xbox game pass ultimate (it’s 15$/mo) but I have access to all 1st party games day one with more than 200 games in the backlog which I don’t have time to play them
Plus there's still a culture of buying and selling hard copy console games which can make the net running cost next to nothing.
I think when I'm at my desk there's always this nagging feeling telling me I could be doing something more productive (code, music, learning) whereas on the sofa with a console I don't feel that.
I’m really looking forward to the Steam deck. It may not have the power of current-gen consoles, but it takes so many good things about current consoles and combines them together. Openness of a PC, not Windows, portable + docking, etc.
> I’m really looking forward to the Steam deck.
Uhm, the Steam deck is literally running Linux and using the same compatibility "hacks" for non-native games. Which are not hard to "deal with" these days btw - Steam handles all that for you with Proton, you just press play.
Valve has improved the Steam experience for Steamdeck, along with the Proton compatibility layer. Then they added "Great on Steamdeck" that will encourage devs to aim for better controller support.
Now there are rumours Valve is working on a new "console".
Imho once there is a "console" that is basically Steamdeck with builtin Steam store and a powerful GPU... in otherword a fully capable PC with desktop performance + the console user experience (or almost there) there is strictly no reason to buy a Sony/Nintendo console anymore.... especially since SEGA, Sony & al are porting more and more games to PC.
I think we are all in a better place if those platforms converge, and Sony/Nintendo just focus on making great games. But it doesn't matter anyway, since if Valve can release an actually good "console" experience, with builtin Steam store... Nintendo and Sony have nothing more to offer bar a few exclusives.
I've heard that for every console generation for the last 15 years. I don't think the arguments are any stronger now than they were in 2013.
Of course, Valve can design and release their own console with fixed hardware and they could perhaps out-compete Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. But a customizable PC, especially one where you can install any Linux-based OS you want, will never be able to destroy the console market.
Not to mention, nothing that Valve has done indicates that they are willing to create a full Console OS, that would hide all of the desktop OS complexity from users and developers: headache free updates where you don't assume the user can just drop to a root shell if something breaks, network config utilities that can be used with a controller, fully standardized drivers, libc, OpenGL/Vulkan version etc.
Not to mention, part of the advantage of consoles is that they offer some amount of trusted computing: the fact that it's mostly impossible for users to install anything on a console is a major advantage even to end-users for Online games, where you have almost 0 problems with cheating compared to PC where it is a constant struggle.
I'm not sure I understand. What kind of device are you waiting for? The way I see it, a "fully capable PC with desktop performance + the console user experience" already exists, it's called a gaming PC with Steam Big Picture.
> But it doesn't matter anyway, since if Valve can release an actually good "console" experience, with builtin Steam store... Nintendo and Sony have nothing more to offer bar a few exclusives.
If Valve releases a console with an actually good console experience, then great, one more console with good console experience to choose from. So what does it bring to the table that other consoles don't have? Their PC-gaming oriented game catalog full of games that are either also available on consoles or are for some reason unsuitable for the usual couch+controller style? Because if I wanted that, I would've bought a gaming PC with Steam Big Picture, a thing that already exists.
I suspect if MS takes another generational shellacking from Sony they will try a similar maneuver, combining the Xbox and Surface brands to make a single SKU gaming PC. The Xbox already runs Windows 10 with a custom ui. They won't drop out off the console race without trying this. (It would be a compelling student device.)
Sony is stuck selling dedicated TV attachments but luckily they command the biggest audience and have "won" the console war against MS three of the four generations. The PS5 has done so well there's no reason to believe there won't be a PS6. Sony plans the obsolescence on a 10 year timeline. They refused to put an SSD into the PS4 era consoles knowing that adding it would be a generational leap for the PS5, more than graphics.
If I have to have a separate machine for gaming to have some privacy I'm going to just buy a console.
Whatnow. There are more games that run on Linux than anyone will have the time to play. Then there is also Proton. A lot has changed since 2010.
I can't game on PC anymore because of RSI when using mouse. Even for cross platform games, the console version usually has far superior controller support.
What this does is increase the possibility of someone finding how to bypass the signature verification check and then running their own code.
I'm not in the jailbreaking space, but I guess that what it means here is that some people may find flaws in the code and leverage them to potentially bypass the signature verification, although this might prove very difficult to do. It might also help emulating the PS5 behavior which in turns could lead to some modding/cheating for some games. Who knows ?
> It means ultimately that decrypted firmware files will be available for hackers. This would make reverse engineering of the PS5 firmware possible, and from there, open possibilities for finding future exploits and/or write custom firmwares or Homebrew enablers.
[0] https://wololo.net/2021/11/08/ps5-exploit-fail0verflow-show-...
Interesting. I don't own a PS5, but Xbox seems to be pretty much a PC [1] (weeeell, like a Chromecast-style PC anyways). The main reason to legitimately jailbreak a PS4 back in the day was to get back the Linux functionality Sony took away from its users, and to run emulators possibly.
It's interesting that the hacker communities acknowledge that the legitimate reasons for jailbreaking your PS5 are not many, at least not yet.
There may be some ARM fun in the future, as thermals are a huge thing now (the PS5 is mostly a heatsink with a computer attached and the newest Xbox is kind of a chimney).
If my memory serves me correctly, the PS3 for comparison had a custom Cell CPU which was used for supercomputer clusters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster So they must have had some kind of edge compared to normal PCs.
That was the PS3, through the OtherOS feature[1].
With around the same graphics power as a Radeon 5700xt/6700 card, with the whole PS5 system costing around the same as that card, a jailbroken console actually looks like pretty good value right now. If it could be broken enough to run a general purpose OS with acceleration enabled.
They're right, its just a PC now. Its crazy, I can't think of anyone who wants a console that has a rough computer equivalent of a Ryzen 7 3700X, 5700 RT with ray tracing, shares 16GB GDDR6 ram, a blu-ray drive, with a 1GB NVME drive for $500+tax (in store stock and not scalped, and even scalped at $900 its not easy to match PC hardware). Who wants to hack such a device for legitimate reasons like using it as a computer? Nobody, its not worth it!
The way I view it is as paying a subscription for support, I bought a PS4 at launch and the fact it can play the newest Call of Duty at 60fps looking decent is absolutely worth the price. I'm not a PC gamer so I'm curious if a PC from 2013 that cost like $400 would hold up as well.
Now the PS5 is out I view it as time to pay the next sub of $500 to have a guaranteed level of performance for the next console cycle
At the same time, I don't really recommend building a fancy gaming PC, most games are not exciting and having an APU for playing fun older games makes the most sense to me, I used my GPUs way more before, but since 2017 for Prey I haven't felt like I cared for them since I care to play AoE II and Starcraft more, and new games that are exciting are all indie, and don't need good graphics like into the breach, or Factorio don't exist on console. The PS store irritates me because they resell to me the same games again except on a different console, PC just runs everything. Heres the performance of an 3400G APU ($150 CPU+GPU on one chip. You can also upgrade the hardware if you see a good deal, unlike a PS4 where you'd have to buy a completely new one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0p5fbW5odY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yxPtHuyPJo
I think you should consider a low end PC for gaming, its got tons of cool stuff you can run, they even cloned PS3's PT, you aren't getting better support for gaming by buying a console. https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/2/17519118/pt-remake-windows-...
Been a long while since I built a PC.
On top of that, you can't get various PC components easily right now due to chip shortage. With PS5, you're getting it all in a 100% working box.
(Unless Australia also has an oversupply...)
For instance https://m.euro.com.pl/konsole-playstation-5/sony-playstation...
It says "up to 7 days delivery" but when I ordered one few weeks ago it arrived next day anyway.
So while the stock doesn't hang around, it seems like it is now at least possible to get one without too much fuss.
https://press-start.com.au/news/playstation/2021/11/08/eb-ga...
