SJXarg said:
Eclectic Dreck said:
Though people will dismiss it, price is certainly a key point. Simply put, keeping up to date with PC hardware is more expensive (and more trouble) than doing the same with consoles. Ease of use is another issue as most people just want to throw a disc into the drive and know it will work without fiddling with drivers and whatnot.
I find this to be a somewhat misleading argument. I assume you are referring to playing every new game at absolutely maximum settings (a bar that keeps rising) without holding the same bar up to a console. I think you'd find if you bought a graphics card that was a bit more powerful than the one in (insert console name)(to make up for the speed bonus a console has by being simpler) and kept the settings relatively equal across all your games, that the price difference in PC part upgrading is suddenly minor to non existant.
The price I cited (~4500 USD) was over the span of 10 years and represented three separate gaming machines. The first was a desktop 1.1 GHz Athlon. Hardware limits (board socket, video slots, memory limit) forced the system to be replaced in 2004 after I had reached the utter limit of what a geForce 3 could do. The next machine was a Pentium 4 running at ~2.5 GHz but it too needed to be replaced due to precisely the same limitations. The current machine I'm using (Phenom X2, Radeon 4870, highly scalable motherboard), cost, in total 900 USD (700 if you discount the new Antec 900 I stuck everything in).
4000 USD over 10 years isn't all that much money in the grand scheme of things, and the per year price of four hundred bucks is a pittiance, especially considering most of those four hundred dollars were paid at hardware replacement points. In my previous systems, a simple upgrade of a video card (in both cases costing less than a hundred bucks) let me wring another year out of the life of my machine. I expect this machine will handily last another 3 - 4 years barring major hardware failure.
But, just because that price isn't terribly high, it is still substantially more than I paid to keep up to date with MOST of the major consoles including the Xbox (purchased for 200 USD), PS2 (Purchased for 300 USD), PSP (purchased for 200 USD), DS (acquired in exchange for pulling a 24 hour duty while in the service), 360 (400 USD including additional controller accessories), PS3 (400 USD total), and GBA SP (150 USD). Even if we are silly and tack on the extraneous expenses (XBL subscription for example) the cost balloons a few hundred bucks. There
is a price difference and what is acceptable to me is not acceptable to many.
But, please, do not simply try to dismiss the difference in cost with a wave of the hand. Its a bad argument that people are simply tired of hearing. The real problem with the argument is this: just because a game can technically run a game (as in it executed the code without error) does not mean it runs the game in a fashion that is acceptable. And, for most people, acceptable would probably be the setting with equal or greater fidelity to the console counterpart. Sure, I could get Saints Row 2 to run on my old machine, but even with the settings so low that you might as well just start digging for them it still struggled regularly to keep up.
Yes, most people have a computer in their homes. Yes, in many cases they could spend a few hundred bucks and achieve an acceptable level of performance for games. But even in these cases the cost over time is almost certainly higher than the cost paid for any particular home console (unless of course you purchased them when the prices were at their peak).
It should be noted however that the trend of needing new hardware is slowing considerably. Back when I first started playing PC games, a system could be utterly useless for playing games a year after you bought your machine. My first machine (a 486 dx, acquired in summer 1995), played doom, duke and even quake all right but simply could not run Quake 2 or Half-Life. My second PC, a 400 MHz machine ran games perfectly fine until it was replaced in late 2000. That machine lasted for four years, the one that followed more than five. This is a trend I'm certainly thankful for as I love PC games but have, more than once, resented the price of ownership.
