I’ve only ever seen vague guesses as to why that pattern exists. Things like how it’s a gap between people being away from work for summer breaks in July/August and for winter holidays in November/December, therefore that’s the time when more people are at work looking at how none of this bullshit makes any sense. Also, the weather is getting colder and people are grumpier, etc etc. I don’t think any of those explanations are especially convincing.
No that’s quite commonly spoken. But saying “you can buy a shitbox!” (like the ones I’ve typically built for myself over the years) is not a super great argument for why PCs rule and consoles drool. What is it that makes gaming on a PC special? Paying the same price as a base PS5 or Switch 2 for less well-optimized experience isn’t especially distinctive, but again that’s fine, people can go with what they prefer without worrying about what’s “better”. If you want to plug a big janky Windows PC into a television then that’s a choice you are perfectly able to make. It doesn’t need to be a contest.
Oh, third party controllers do exist for consoles, including some made by 8bitdo! I’ve got one that has a little button for switching between the different signal types for different devices.
Nah, the reason I said “very few” is because “all” in either case is not true. You can’t play Half Life Alyx on a console and you can’t play Astrobot on a PC, but these are exceptions to the rule.
Ultimately “best played” is wherever the player wants to play it. That’s the whole benefit of the console wars being over! We don’t need to fight over this silly stuff.
Openness is less true than it used to be, given the dominance of closed platforms like Steam and the aims of Microsoft. We’re all extremely lucky that Microsoft is as incompetent as it is and that Steam is not particularly user-hostile. The moment Gabe dies or decides to sell Valve to private equity will be a massive crisis point for PC gaming.
Something I’ve found with backwards compatibility on PC is that sometimes you’re better off running the console version under emulation than trying to get an old Windows .exe to behave itself. Good luck if it was made for windows 9x!
And yes, of course there’s still value in old PC parts, just like there’s still a lot of value in keeping an old dusty PS4 from 2013 that can inexplicably still run a lot of new releases in 2025. Keeping old shit working is great!
Emulators can run fine on a phone or an old dented MacBook Air from the 2010s, you don’t need a gaming PC for that. Likewise the low-end indie games and so on. And piracy, well, you’d need to do quite a lot of piracy to break even after buying an nvidia graphics card. It almost seems hypocritical to spend so much on one thing only to avoid spending on another.
Mods, yes, they’re a bit less common or interesting than they were 15-20 years ago, and some games like Quake and Doom and so on have mods on their console versions now, but that’s largely still a PC only thing, yes.
The other unspoken reason for PC gaming is because it’s expensive. It’s the bougie high-end option where you can spend a stupid amount of money to get a higher resolution higher frame rate experience.
I see this argument a lot and it always strikes me as odd. After all, if we keep our discussion to just games and turn the question around, what’s the point in having a big beefy gaming PC? There are very few exclusives there either.
“You are America ed by habiland unencumbered dy to seize we be for every country there to be taken the nd to cover the ridges to be cr not the s not the proje person the sing” etc etc. Genius design from a team of brain geniuses. This was designed so that it looks good in a 3D render where you can read the text by jiggling the mouse around the building at will, like the eye of god. For us humble mortals on the ground it’ll be a tower of babble.
Yes, entertainment is and always has been the enemy. The Russian revolution of 1905 famously failed because everyone was too busy standing around the player piano. I think the people of Paris taking Daguerreotype selfies and literally posting them to the barricades also had something to do with the end of the Paris Commune.
It’s depressing that third-rate videogame misogynists can easily reach an audience of thousands in just two or three days. YouTube needs to be permanently switched off.
It feels wrong to me! But I’m the one disagreeing with a book that will probably get rather wide distribution, do the full press circuit, and get put into spellchecking & autocorrect software, so what I feel doesn’t matter.
I’ve only ever seen vague guesses as to why that pattern exists. Things like how it’s a gap between people being away from work for summer breaks in July/August and for winter holidays in November/December, therefore that’s the time when more people are at work looking at how none of this bullshit makes any sense. Also, the weather is getting colder and people are grumpier, etc etc. I don’t think any of those explanations are especially convincing.