I don’t find it hard to believe at all, I find it likely, actually. There are many many PC games that never got ported to console, especially in the ps2 era when consoles didn’t even attempt to mimic the performance of PCs. And I don’t mean flash games or web games or anything like that, since you can run those on a non-gaming computer. There are thousands of PC games, ranging from exclusive big budget titles to smaller niche or indie games that wouldn’t make it on console.
In the xbox 360/ps3 era, the PC has at least 80% of the same library as the consoles, but the reverse isn’t true. The ps2 has a lot of games, but PC development was also extremely active in that period.
I don’t know how we’d actually go about finding this data though. Because each console game is licensed, there’s a record of it and it’s easy to quantify the number of games. PC games not so much - I wouldn’t know where to go about putting a number to it.
Even so, listing all console games vs all PC games is unfair. Even if you have a console with some backwards compatability, it’s not like you can get your xbox 360 to play dreamcast games or your ps3 to play gamecube games. The more reasonable comparison is to say that the xbox 360 has access to ~half (guessing, based on the compatability lists I’ve seen) the xbox games, and that most PS3s have access to… PS3 games. Do the new ones do PS1 games? I know the ps2 emulator has been gone for a while.
Meanwhile a PC can indeed run pretty much any PC game ever made. Ironically since PCs can run emulators, they can also run more console games than consoles do.
So does a PC have access to a greater library than the x360 or ps3? Yeah, easily.
Wow. This is so wrong its almost sad. Let me see if I can wade through this wall of text and help you out.
This is all patently untrue. And beyond that, even if it were true, it would apply to games in only a handful of genres and would be a personal preference of the player. There is no across-the-board dumbing down of games. And even suggesting it shows your PC bias more than anything.
Games that don’t sell aren’t being made. Huh. Almost like the developers/publishers want to make a profit or something.
I get what you’re saying. But you realize that if PC game makers followed this advance the cliched “You have to buy a new video card every year!” thing would be true right? At that point, real PC gaming would go back to being inaccessible to most of the population.
Your opinion. And I’m not even sure what you’re trying to say. Console gamers are immature? Yeah, that’s not elitist.
Once again, your opinion. Tomorrow, I’ll get to play the first 2D Mario game in 18 years. Games are getting better all the time and going back to their roots too. It’s a great time to be a gamer.
Let me just repeat this… I get what you’re saying. But you realize that if PC game makers followed this advance the cliched “You have to buy a new video card every year!” thing would be true right? At that point, real PC gaming would go back to being inaccessible to most of the population.
What? No, I was referring to PC games designed for 98/ME that have to be tweaked to run on an XP/7 computer. I’ve read it’s a pretty widespread problem.
Console games that are backwards compatible just work.
Are you honestly touting illegal emulation as a benefit of gaming on a PC? No wonder publishers are leaving you guys in the dust, some of you have no respect for the people who actually make the games.
Wikipedia has some pretty good lists (Lists of video games - Wikipedia), but as I said, it depends how you count. Do you limit it to PC vs Xbox 360 or do you limit it to PC vs all consoles. Do you count the “seek-and-find” titles or the $1.99 adventure games or no?
But I think the best way to look at it is to look at Amazon’s weekly release lists. Count the console games and count the PC games. See which one comes out on top by a wide margin. Hint, it won’t be PC games.
Novice question - I’ve not played any computer games for about ten years, since the PS2 - what’s the script with playing games on a laptop? I don’t own a desktop - I’m typing this post on a 3yo laptop, 2GHz processor, 1GB RAM, ati radeon express 1100 video card. How would this perform running contemporary rpg-type games - say whatever the modern equivalent of final fantasy 7 is.
Short answer: you wouldn’t. Laptops aren’t designed to play games and comtemporary RPGs like Elder Scrolls IV, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age wouldn’t run at all on your setup.
Although this does bring up a good point. With many PC users switching over to laptops, a desktop that plays games has become a secondary purchase, wholly separate from what they would have bought if they just needed a PC. And laptops are just not designed to play games.
Doesn’t have to be broken to need fixing. What makes a game good is subjective and varies from player to player. To stick with Fallout 3, one player might wish it were less FPSish and more turn-based, and so might pick up a mod that allows you to run all combat from VATS. To be balanced, it would need to give you more or less unlimited action points, then decrease your VATS damage output bonuses and increase the damage you take. I’ve seen mods that do some of this, and there’s probably some that do exactly this. The next player might prefer to remove VATS entirely and tweak the game to run like a real shooter, so that his skill determines shot accuracy instead of character skill. There are several mods out there that do exactly this. There’s nothing sacred about the compromise the designers made here. Sure, the hybrid version in the vanilla game works well (and I’ve never modded that aspect of the game myself), but some people enjoy the game more if it’s changed.
Of course, as you point out with the Doom 3 example, a mod might actually make a game worse, but that’s just a matter of using a bit of judgement in choosing which mods to use.
And of course mods aren’t just about tweaking mechanics. There’s lots of entirely new content that is available. New maps, new quests, new whatever. These increase the playing life of a game, resulting in more bang for my gaming buck.
This is a big debate in itself, and I’m not sure I can prove it to any degree in the space of a paragraph or two. But a question - have you been PC gaming for at least a decade and would notice a trend in the design of games? I’m not saying your opinion is junk if not, but I’m curious if you’ve been around to see for yourself.
If people are put off by the myths that PC gaming costs too much and is too complicated, then people switch to consoles instead, the potential user base for PCs shrinks and the potential market for a new game may be deemed insufficient to support it. The reason they don’t sell isn’t necesarily because they aren’t worthwhile games, but simply because you can’t do certain types of games well on a console and too many people only have consoles. For example from 1995 to 2005, there were dozens of high quality PC flight simulators. Almost nothing has developed in that category in the last few years.
No, it has never been true. PC games have always been designed to scale well to run on a variety of hardware. I buy a PC every 3 years for over a decade now and I’ve never been in a position where I couldn’t play a game.
Yes, it is elitist, and it’s true. What do you want? It’s demographics. PC gamers are generally older and more mature on average. Obviously I’m not saying every single console gamer is like that - but multiplayer experiences (especially with voice chat) on the PC are so ridiculously better than anything I’ve dealt with on xbox live.
Console games get better, yes. I don’t disagree with the notion. But PC gaming used to be way ahead, but consoles by attempting to be mini-PCs have closed the gap to some degree. But it was actually a better relationship before - the playstation 1 and 2, n64 and gamecube, etc. did not attempt to be mini-PCs. They generally went for a different sort of game. So you didn’t have so much direct competition between PCs and consoles. If you wanted shooters and simulators and strategy games, or any game that tried to explore what you could do with new technology, you played them on PC. If you wanted party games or platformers or lighter adventure games and such you went with a console. And things worked better that way.
For that reason, I actually like the Wii most in concept out of the current generation - it attempts to be the system of casual and party gaming with novel controls. The Wii and PC gaming could coexist without harming each other. By comparison, the PS3 and Xbox 360 attempt to be little PCs, but just suck at it. But people play the sort of game on them now that in the past would be clearly a PC domain. So what happens is that these systems pull themselves up by essentially immitating PCs, but then pull PCs down by forcing multiplatform development that’s forced to be able to run on outdated, low end hardware. The end result is that people had the option for higher quality in the past, but now things are only as good as the lowest common denominator.
I can’t speak for windows 7, but in XP if you just right click the executable, and choose windows 98 compatability mode, it works most of the time. This is only for pre-2000 games anyway, since by 2000 games were being designed to run well on the NT architecture with windows 2000.
Well, unless they don’t, as is the case with a large chunk of the xbox library on the xbox 360.
Oh come on, I’m talking about dead systems. Does it really hurt anyone if people play SNES or genesis games on their PC? There’s plenty of piracy on consoles too - there was just a mass banning of over a million 360 units recently.
It makes no sense to make it PC vs all consoles. If you’re making a choice of what specific system to use for gaming, then you only have the library of that specific system to use. You can’t buy an xbox 360 and then use all the SNES, dreamcast, ps2, etc. games to say “see! look how huge a library consoles have!”
Wait, in order to determine who has the bigger library of games, you’re counting sale numbers? How does that make sense? If I mentioned how many hundreds of millions of dollars WoW has made, does that mean the PC has a bigger library even though it’s just one game?
Of course consoles sell more, that’s what I’ve been saying all along. You’re proving a point that isn’t in dispute in order to try to use that as evidence of something it doesn’t relate to.
Besides that, a significant fraction of PC gaming is done through digital distribution, so that skews the retail stats even further.
While you could possibly build a computer with matching or superior technical specifications for cheaper, it doesn’t mean it will perform at that level in reality. A console is highly optimized for what it does and games can be optimized to work for a very specific set of hardware. I imagine you would need a significantly faster PC to match the console in a game setting. IME buying cheap motherboards and memory is more trouble than it’s worth too. Of course the latest generation of consoles are pretty old now and even average gaming rigs can whoop their arse.
I own an Xbox 360, PS3 and a highish-spec gaming PC. While I almost exclusively play games on my PC I can see why people prefer consoles. I have no problem messing with drivers and patches and I enjoy installing/creating mods. I embrace the fact that a PC game, when released, is dissected and analysed by the fans in order to find ways to improve it. I still play ancient games that are completely unrecognisable from the original releases. An average game with a toolset is more interesting to me than a good game without. I have a ton of free time though…
Some people just want to sit down and unwind with a game. For those people consoles are clearly superior. They don’t have mods or persistent servers but they don’t want them either. While newer graphics cards completely blow console graphics out of the water; the graphics on consoles are not exactly ugly. There might be no anti-aliasing but it doesn’t effect the enjoyment of the game that much when 2 mins after turning the console on you’re in a game with 9 other people, blowing shit up and having a hell of a time.
I think consoles are becoming less convenient over time though. Both my PS3 and 360 have a 20gb HDD. I desperately want to upgrade that but MS charge a relative fortune to do so. Also, because I don’t play games that often, I quite often have to download patches for games. Almost every time I tried to play it seemed GTA IV had a new patch. There are OS patches too. Just because a game is on a console doesn’t mean it will run smoothly either. GTA IV suffered from framerate drop during heavy action scenes and I lost count how many times Saints Row 2 froze on me. The 360 hardware problems are widely documented. I doubt we are many generations away from people starting to develop viruses targeted at consoles, though that is an unsupported WAG.
I don’t think PC gaming is dying. There are many great games and exclusives still being released. It’s contracted, sure, but the quality is still there. I don’t want to get into another long argument about it though.
I’ve read your OP like 4 times now. There is no price listed. You’ve quoted prices of various component parts, but there is no one “here’s the minimum you need to spend from the ground up” price.
Either you understand where PC games are better and that matters to you or you don’t care about that part of “gaming” and you might as well save your money and buy a console.
That’s all there is to it. You cannot buy a gaming PC for less than the $179 a 360 costs. You cannot upgrade a cheap Dell to a gaming PC for that amount either.
What’s the easiest way to tell the difference? All competitive gaming, except arcade-based stuff, is done on PC. If that sounds like something you want to be a part of, you should spend $1000+ on a PC. If “competitive” is a turn off, you can get by with the PC you have and buy a console if you want.
No it’s not. “Competetive gaming” covers all genres and all platforms. Neither side, console or PC, can lay claim to the majority of competetive gaming.
I think his main point is that often times you do not need to start from the ground up. You usually already have a set of components that will do just fine as part of a gaming rig.
You read the OP but managed to miss the entire point then. My point is that the cost of a gaming PC doesn’t have to be the price of building a computer from the ground up. It’s the marginal cost of taking a computer you already have and turning it into something that can game.
Now if your computer is from 2002, then yeah, that’s not an option. In that case I’d recommend spending around $500 to build a decent rig. I could get something down to $300 or $400, but you’d be better off spending a little extra in this case. Do you want a specific build? But even then, the value of the new system would exceed a purely gaming system - you’d be upgrading your ancient computer for general purpose usage too.
What’s the budget you want me to aim for here? Someone sent me a PM last night and asked me to recommend a $600 build for them and I did - and it’s almost as good as my rig.
What? You have tons of options for under $200 in the video card department. If you have a non-ancient CPU and 2gb of ram, all you’d need is a video card.
This is bullshit. I don’t really care about competitive gaming, and yet PC is a vastly superior platform for me. Competitive gaming is like item #23 on the list of advantages PCs have over consoles, certainly not the only one or remotely most important.
Are there leagues with organized, monitored/referreed play with seasons and standings and stuff on the console? I genuinely don’t know, I’ve never heard of it. A few times I’ve seen promotional tournament types of deals on consoles, but nothing like CAL/CPL or TWL or widespread clan vs clan matches (where you train on your home server and challenge others who do the same).
Then you hinder your cause by not quoting a price. “Build” a full PC, and list the price of each componetn so that people can decidefor themselves what they need to upgrade. Page2, and I still have no point of comparison. (My only computer is a laptop that doesn’t do much.)
Fine. What’s your budget? I’ll build you a system for it.
And then if it comes out to $400 or $500 everyone’s gonna go “LOL SEE XBOX 360 SHITTY VERSION WITH NO HARD DRIVE IS $200! YOU LOSE” ignoring the fact that we’re talking about building a computer from the ground up that will be both a better general purpose computer (and we all use those, right?) and a better gaming machine.