261–270 of 359 posts
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I'm with you on the benefits, but for those of us who successfully use a PC as a TV console, console exclusives are a real kick in the teeth. Bloodborne was released in 2013 and I am still waiting to play it.
It runs better on emulator than it does Playstation, there are 60fps mods :)
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- Cheaper than a gaming PC. Of course it depends on your setup but for the same price ($500 MSRP) it would be hard to build a decent rig that plays the current gen new games perfectly - 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 - E…
As for how it manages to be cheaper, there's two factors - 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…
Sometimes with significant quality downgrades, I remember texture quality of early Skyrim being abyssal because the whole game was console optimized. On the other hand there is cyberpunk which apparently didn't even reliably run on some of the consoles it was released on, no idea if it was because of released date agreements or if it was just a shitty money grab.
As far as I understand the great upside of consoles in the past was that the manufacturers strictly vetted the quality of games you could release for them. There have been a few "scandals" where they obviously rescinded those controls to get a game out in time for a specific season only to have it crash and burn. Not sure how strict the controls are now, do they still vet the games strictly or is it just an app store with minimal quality checks?
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I'm with you on the benefits, but for those of us who successfully use a PC as a TV console, console exclusives are a real kick in the teeth. Bloodborne was released in 2013 and I am still waiting to play it.
> console exclusives are a real kick in the teeth. Console exclusives are often funded by manufacturers, so the game may not exist without the console.
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You’ve missed the point. I don’t want to setup and configure yet another computer.
There is not a whole lot of configuring to do. Just buy a prebuilt and install Steam and you are done. After that you install the games in steam, launch them from steam, buy them from steam etc. Basically the same experience as the dashboard on playstation or xbox.
Once you buy a prebuilt machine you're losing a good chunk of the savings that people talk about when buying a PC. You also don't just install steam, you have to install drivers, and maintain an OS (which doesn't have a controller friendly input method) so you need a keyboard and mouse around for windows update time or driver update time.
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Consoles are on their last run in my opinion. 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 otherwor…
This doesn't make any sense. The biggest advantage of consoles over PCs is the fixed hardware, allowing developers to focus on hyper-optimization and bug fixing for all the quirks of that hardware. Not to mention the economies of scale console manufacturers can get when they are building tens or hundreds of millions of devices with the exact same specs. Of course, Valve can design and release their own console with f…
I don't understand your argument either.
I think it's logical to assume when they already introduced "Steam Deck verified" (cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL0NIhJpHg0 ) that Valve will release a fixed config, and that developers will be able to finetune their game to run great on it.
Where I follow you is that in theory Valve allows other manufacturers to build a Steam Deck compatible hardware, and hence there may be third party alternatives to their rumored console, which indeed could have perhaps different GPU / CPUs...
In that case first thing comes to mind, is when you hear of all those 30 FPS games on today's consoles.. what are we losing here? Some mythical "console experience"? When consoles today do have all kind of lags and stuttery gameplay since games engines nowadays are more complex than ever? There's basically no downsides.. I mean even Nintendo I was watching someone play a simple game like Animal Crossing and the loading times were so long... where is the mythical console experience? Seems like it's been gone for a long time. Now you get a polished experience, and a platform that (in theory) doesn't crash, and doesn't require you to figure out drivers and whatnot.
Next thing comes to mind is, for those people who are new to PC GAMING, they don't need to touch anything. They are not going to "install any Linux-based OS they want". Why would they do that? That scenario is strictly for the advanced users like us who would already have a capable "gaming PC" and are confident about hacking things.
The cheating part is partially addressed by Valve, they're working with anticheat developers.
Regarding cheating it seems like consoles are no longer a "pristine environment" due to crossplay:
https://www.pcgamer.com/on-behalf-of-pc-gaming-sorry-about-a...
Given all the issues described in this thread, what is the upside of a game console (non-gamer)? Why not get a PC that you can automatically use for other things, can play games from any vendor etc (some of the issues mentioned in the thread). 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:…
You have to use Windows or deal with weird compatibility hacks? 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.
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It just works is a huge one. Driver issues and OS versions are such a huge pain even now. Many games require brand new drivers (which very often very very unstable), and the MS store required your windows version to be up to date, and everyone has their story about windows update being stuck for months on end. That's before you get into the "openness" of PC - if you want to play a game on steam but your friend has bo…
> 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? Both services support adding non platform games through their shortcut/executable. They also support voice chat for groups and players not in game. > What do you do when the Xbox services don't work when docker is installed? File a bug report? Or you just came up with some hypotheti…
The multiplayer services are independent and crossplay is an exception, that's what I think they were getting at. Being able to launch an executable from a different store doesn't matter if your copy uses Steamworks for multiplayer and the copy from the MS store doesn't support that.
> File a bug report? Or you just came up with some hypothetical issues?
It's not a hypothetical issue or a bug, it's a common problem for games that use anti-cheat software. Refusing to run when virtualization features are turned on or virtualization software is installed/present is a common tactic they use and if you file a report it'll usually get immediately closed as wontfix, because it's a tradeoff they decide to make. E.g. https://support.faceit.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019809319-Yo...
Given all the issues described in this thread, what is the upside of a game console (non-gamer)? Why not get a PC that you can automatically use for other things, can play games from any vendor etc (some of the issues mentioned in the thread). 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:…
In the PS3 and early PS4 era, yeah you were missing out on PC gaming but nowadays consoles are plenty fast. Plenty fast indeed.
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> Cheaper than a gaming PC 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.
You really don't pay more for games or certainly don't have to. Farcry 6 is $60 on PS5 and it's $60 on PC, same with Forza Horizons 5 and as far as I'm aware pretty much every new release. PSN and Xbox Live run similar sales to Steam and often the same games go on sale for the same price at the same time. Plus sometimes there is very good deals at retail or on the used market that just have not existed as an option f…
But subsidizing doesn't necessarily mean unequal pricing. It does not follow from equal pricing that a part of the $60 for a PS5 game didn't go into subsidizing the platform. For example, for all we know, a comparable amount of money for the PC game could have gone into extra development and QA effort necessary to support the more varied PC ecosystem so in the end the prices could be the same anyway, even without the game vendor willing to give up some profits for one or the other.