How are consoles justified at this point?

So I lucked out and was able to get the new consoles, and I have a more than capable pc.

I thought I was set to play games wherever I wanted. But with Dying Light 2 and several other games this gen, consoles are lucky to get a stable not even 1440, but 1080 60.

Can anyone with more game Dev experience enlighten me on where all the power is going. I know consoles are never as powerful as the latest hardware, but PCs several gens old can manage 1080 60 at this point.

Are devs just trying to maintain visuals as close to "ultra" pc settings as possible?

I am by no means trying to start a, "lul pc is better duh" argument, I am legitimately curious and frankly concerned.

I understand that not everyone can afford a PC, and consoles are just easier that's why I like them. But when the series s(which was boasted as a less but still powerful digital console) is being lumped in with the Xbox ONE, not even one X....

I don’t want to ever have to consider what a “driver” is or whether it impacts my experience.

So, consoles.

I like playing games on my couch and just putting the disc in. I already spend too much time of my day at desk. So, consoles.

Which games are failing to hit 1080/60 on the new consoles?

Under normal/pre-COVID circumstances, my answer would be this: "I don't fucking know." But between the chip shortages, scalpers and crypto miners, you get what you can get.

Frequently participates in various video game discussions with in-depth and well thought-out opinions.

Is intimidated by "graphics driver."

...Understandable. Have a nice day.

Look I play mostly on PC but these threads are always dumb. If you like playing on console, buy games on your console. If you like playing on PC, buy on PC. If you want a Series S, you should buy one. If you gotta have the PS5, good luck in the raffles, I hope you get one. If you like playing fortnite on phones, keep playing fortnite on phones. Stop worrying about what digital foundry said about your sports team and play the damn games lmao

It's perfectly understandable, IMO, and a worthy complaint against PCs. Nothing necessarily intimidating about it, but it's always irritating when something on PC just won't run and you have to try several different ways to ensure that it does (I primarily play on PC). Pushing power and start and just having a thing run is a fine reason to prefer consoles, even if sometimes that means you're not seeing the game with the highest level detail, etc... It's also unnecessary to be snarky about it, and completely irrelevant to how often a person frequents a the forum on a website about video games.

Put me in the group that hates all things tech, even if I've been playing video games for 30 years. Video game hobby does not automatically mean tech savvy. A PC is only for MMOs for me, everything else is a console. I want the ease of use, the plug and play.

Also, while this doesn't apply to the majority of people here I'd imagine, it's just easier to play on a console when you have a family. You can squeeze some extra game time in while the kids are up and active with a console, compared to hunched over at a desk in a corner of the house.

Having a PC, Xbox, PS5 and Switch I kind of spread things out. If I think my Xbox is getting lonely, I play Xbox. If my PS5 looks like it's missing me, then I spend time with it. Same with my PC and Switch.

This thread isn't questioning why someone would play on consoles, it's asking why consoles aren't as good as they could be.

Drivers are no more complicated than downloading a firmware update on a console. Your Nvidia program tells you a new driver is available, you download/install it, you're good to go.

I have a PS5, a Switch, and a Gaming PC. I've always gone where the games I wanted to play are. I don't care how I get to play them, as long as I can get to play them. And you still have console exclusives which may or may not get ported to the PC years down the road. Nintendo's games certainly won't, unless you go through emulation and not care about the risk.

i think as the market for hardware-designed-to-support-games has matured, it's no longer optimizing towards pure performance. just look at the switch- arguably the most successful piece of hardware currently available at retail, and easily the most anemic when it comes to hardware muscle.

i understand it might be disappointing to not have the 'bleeding edge tech' experience on consoles anymore...but that puts you firmly in the performance-enthusiast demo- and i just don't think console hardware designers nor software developers are optimizing towards those interests. framerate is important, but probably not the guiding priority.

pcs with their modular-by-design nature are always going to be the place for the best performance in the long run. but speaking as someone who has been waiting for GPUs to return to sensible prices- i currently have zero interest in paying that kind of premium for extra performance.

You're hand-waving a whole lot of nuance here, OP. If you were to compare the GPU power of the PS5 and XSX to a current video card, you'd probably end up around an RTX 3050. That's a card that can certainly manage 1080/60 at mid-to-high settings in new AAA games, but it ain't getting there with RT on unless you use DLSS.

PS5 and XSX are generally hitting 1080/60 without RT at this point but, yeah, you'll probably have to compromise to do better than that. Higher frames by turning on variable resolution or prettier pictures by dropping FPS - take your pick. None of this is surprising if you look at the specs of the APUs the new consoles are using.

We're talking about $500 machines here, after all. Even in a magical land where video cards were still going for MSRP, you couldn't build an RTX 3050 PC for $500.

I have a series S and the little things kicks ass. Everything I have played so far is smooth as butter. Been playing Resident Evil VIII last week or so and it's gorgeous. Have had zero issues frame rate wise, no complaints.

The comment on 1080p / 60 sounds like more of a Series S problem or just dealing with games that only run at 30 fps. Everything I play is 60 fps and above 1080p, like performance modes that run at 1440p.

In terms of why, I work at a computer all day. I even have a work from home area and a personal computer setup, but it's still a desk with a keyboard. I just want to sit down on a couch and be comfortable. Also, the couch is too far away from the TV, so I'm not going to move the PC there or run an HDMI cable down the hall.

The PS5 could in theory be more powerful, but it's powerful enough for what it does, and it only costs $500. Also, I'm still rocking a 1080 GTX. I wanted to build a new computer like last year, but, you know, the supply chain.

I can't help myself. I know I complain about this on the Discord and during live chats all the time, but I genuinely cannot help myself.

I am sorry but a mainstream console (i.e., PS5) not having VRR or 1440p support, in the year of our Lord, 2022, is goddamn ridiculous. I get everyone thinks that these features are coming in the next firmware update, but people have been saying that for over a year now.

Also, it does not help that the standards for HDMI 2.1 are already a mess, and that's one of the reasons why PC folks prefer DisplayPort.

@sethmode said:

I dunno... I've been PC gaming since 2015, and in my experience in regards to troubleshooting, having to go though a long and tedious process of getting a game to run is pretty exaggerated these days. That's not to say that current PC gaming is flawless, but me having to troubleshoot a handful of games in recent memory, specifically Saints Row 2 being a notoriously bad port, Saints Row: The Third not liking MSi Afterburner, Burnout Paradise Remastered not liking OBS, Onee Chanbara Origin needing some additional driver setting turned on (if I remember correctly, it wants triple buffering, thread optimization, and low latency mode enabled), Fallout 4's bullet debris effect causing the game to crash when using an RTX GPU, and the Steam version of Nier: Automata's performance issues (until Square finally fixed that version after the Game Pass release), does not out outweigh the literal hundreds off games that I own though Steam, GOG, Origin, Uplay, Epic, Rockstar and Bethesda of which start up and run as well their console counterparts in terms of stability. Furthermore, assuming that a person keeps their computer clean in terms of not installing any sketchy or unnecessary software (and also hardware in cases where extremely high temperatures and/or unstable overclocks are the issue), the majority of fixes don't involve anything on the level of editing a critical Windows file or hex editing the game's executable. It's usually just a set of files that you have to drag and drop into a game's files, or a certain graphical setting doesn't like one set of graphics cards or another in the case of Fallout 4 and Batman: Arkham Asylum, and just simply waiting for an official patch; the latter of which hasn't been unique to PCs since the mid 2000's. I mean, sure, it is extra steps and/or waiting, and perhaps those that get easily frustrated by that really should stick to consoles. But I'll stand by saying that it's not the big deal that some people make it out to be based on my personal and modern experiences across three custom desktops and a laptop, and because of how knowledgeable I've become about the quirks and features of PC gaming since switching from consoles.

So, yeah. I'm still gonna say that's it's pretty silly to write off PC gaming because of increasingly uncommon occurrences that can be fixed within 20 minutes of finding and applying the right solution on Steam or reddit, compared to the hours if not days it can take to have a substantial blog entry or review (be it written or video). And, sure; it's not hard for me to imagine that most people will have more patience for posting their opinions about a game and less patience for fixing them because an individual's preference will win at the end of the day, and expecting everyone to be as interested in low level tech support as I am will often lead to disappointment. But it doesn't change my view in that the dichotomy between being really insightful and very aware of the many facets of a game's formal qualities, and getting either stumped or intimidated by technical issues is still bizarre to me; as if the tenacity and wisdom that's used to analyze a game can't also be used to troubleshoot a game if an issue were to occur, which is why I'm teasing/backhand complimenting Nodima (and I would do the same to Humanity or bigsocrates since my shot was nothing personal), so your read on my signature character trait is accurate, but also a little exaggerated, at best.

I always love to treat consoles as collectible items as they make me feel happy and motivated to play games, either I play with them or put them on display plus consoles are a big part of my childhood too.

Some games are just poorly made. Doesn't matter that you're driving a Ferrarri if the driver is a 5 year old. This was already getting pretty apparent during the ps3/360 days. It's no longer about developers being hindered by hardware, it's about developer time and ability. The hardware can do absolutely amazing things, but it takes a lot of work to make it happen.

Dying Light 2 has spent a long time in development I'm sure Techland just needed to get it out the door, doubt a lot of time was spent optimizing current gen. Time is probably the answer lack of.

Judging current gen on a cross gen game when we already have better examples with Rachet, Returnal and Spiderman MM is not a fair reflection on the hardware.

Current-gen consoles came out about a year too soon, which is a shame especially as last-gen still had a lot of legs left. PC nowadays can do 4K/60 if you can get the right GPU (and I don't just mean the most expensive one), and if consoles would have waited a little longer, they would also be capable of that. Basically all console generations have impressed people at launch and then slowly faded out in comparison to what PCs can do, except this one that feels underpowered already at the beginning.

Half-step consoles will eventually fix this issue but there you run into the problem that most games won't fully take advantage of their power. This whole generation feels like just a continuation of the last one without any innovation other than SSD drives (which have been available on PC for 10+ years already), and I hope that we don't have to wait too long for next-generation which will finally fulfill the promise of true 4K with good frame rates and visual fidelity, unless those consoles will already be chasing 8K at that point.

PC hardware several gens old in the price range of a console cannot manage 1080p60 on Cyberpunk 2077 and Control.

The Xbox Series S barely counts as a current-gen console. I'd generally discourage anyone from buying it, for multiple reasons.

As far as I can tell, 4k60 is generally the goal with performance these days. However, much like in previous generations, that 4k60 goal rarely gets reached, so a lot of PS5 and Xbox Series X (not S) games these days give you the option of 1080p or 1440p60 or 4k30.

Most people don't really care about the difference between 30 and 60 FPS, at least not until they've spent a significant amount of time playing games at 60+ and suddenly have to go back to 30. They do, however, care about convenience and ease of use. PC gaming is not rocket science these days, most people could do it and everyone posting in this thread has the mental capacity to do it. It's still an effort, especially a significant initial effort if you've never touched a PC or the concept of downloading and installing a driver is completely foreign to you.

And that's OK. That's who the consoles are for, and that's why they can get away with not being able to play games at high framerates and resolutions all the time. They're not built to do that, regardless of what all the marketing might tell you. They're built to be a convenient box that you can just put a game in and go. After waiting for the latest multi gigabyte patch to download to fix all the bugs the game shipped with.

This is the Dying Light 2 requirement for 1080/60 on PC:

Dying Light 2 PC requirements: Recommended specs (ray-tracing off)

• Performance: Full HD at 60fps
• Quality: High
• Operating system: Windows 10
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X / Intel Core i5-8600K
• Memory: 16GB
• Graphics card: AMD RX Vega 56 8GB / Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB
• Hard-drive space: 60GB

And this is the requirement for low RT 1080/30:

Dying Light 2 PC requirements: Minimum specs (ray-tracing on)

• Performance: Full HD at 30fps
• Quality: Low RT
• Operating system: Windows 10
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X / Intel Core i5-8600K
• Memory: 16GB
• Graphics card: Nvidia RTX 2070 8GB (no AMD option here)
• Hard-drive space: 60GB

For a poorly optimized cross gen game, it seems like PS5 and XSX are holding their own. You can’t just look at 1 game and conclude that’s the general truth about the entire console market. Every game has its own performance profile. The graphical performances of the new console is said to be around RTX2060/2070. An entire system for the asking price is actually very good.

Games perform poorly/inconsistently because games are developed for multi-platform now. Aside from some of the Sony 1st party titles, games are targeting a loose definition of a hardware spec, and then knobs are adjusted to make it work to some quality and performance threshold.

I don't see any reason to expect a mid-step console this time around. It made sense with PS4/XBoxOne specifically because they were APUs designed for a smaller budget, they had a fairly sizable node jump going from 28nm down to 16nm finfet, and AMD was doing poorly at the time and probably happy to give Sony and MS a great deal.

PS5/XBSX are on 7nm, and going down to 5nm just isn't going to facilitate a jump akin to what the PS4pro/XB1X brought. The improvement between last gen and this gen is precisely the sort of step you ought to expect from computer hardware these days. The days of huge generational leaps in hardware like we used to have are over.

Asking how one "justifies" a product that sells so well that both companies made millions of them and couldn't keep them on store shelves is clearly just trolling "PC Master Race" garbage.

How do you justify a luxury item that people want? Because it's a luxury item that people want. Even though Microsoft has been very explicit that it will not be making ANY console exclusive games for Xbox (by which I mean games that aren't on PC too) it has sold an estimated 12 million units in the first year or so and the Series X is still impossible to get. Sony is now following suit by porting its biggest properties to PC and the PS5 remains unattainable. So it's not even exclusive games being held "hostage" that's making the consoles desirable.

Why would anyone have to "justify" selling an incredibly popular product? That's like asking "how do you justify Marvel movies?" just because you prefer other kinds of movies. It's a snotty question on its face.

@apewins: I have no idea why you think that games wouldn't take advantage of half-step consoles. Modern consoles are very similar in architecture to PCs and since almost every major game comes to PC they are all designed to scale to various set ups on that architecture. Does it take some work to make games scale on consoles too? Of course, but the assets already exist and the base programming is already designed to take advantage of it. The Xbox One X is a very capable piece of hardware and in some ways still performs better than the Series S because games WERE designed to take advantage of it.

The days of games being written "to the metal" in assembly or whatever to take advantage of unique features of individual hardware are long over. Modern games run on engines designed to scale. You might get a slight advantage to writing a game for a very specific piece of hardware that you lose if you're writing it for two versions of that hardware, but it's nothing like the old days when programmers could make consoles do almost magical things with unique tricks designed for their specific hardware that just couldn't be done anywhere else. All the hardware now is just some slightly customized version of a widely available chipset and the customization stuff provides some marginal benefit but not enough to really matter.

Look at Cyberpunk 2077 for an example. That game ran like buggy garbage on base hardware but substantially better on the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro and EVEN BETTER on the Xbox Series X and PS5 even though the 9th gen systems were running it in backwards compatibility mode and not taking advantage of any of the built in advantages, just faster clock speeds and SSDs. If a game can run that much better without even being customized for the new hardware then games designed to run on both Series X and Series X.2 will be perfectly capable of taking advantage of whatever advantages the Series X.2 has.

relevant to this conversation. so long as a company can put up these numbers and then sell software to a base that large, any hardware is 'justified' irrespective of specs.

Not sure what the topic is exactly, if it's that you're disappointed the new fancy consoles aren't running games easily it's because it's easier to drag performance down in development than it is to optimise a game, this is a terrible example but if you were rendering 100 trees on the previous console at 30fps now you can render 300 trees at 30fps, now just replace trees with polygons, shaders, real time lighting, more shadows, higher resolutions etc... The performance didn't improve all you've gained is some trees, if you want to hit 60fps you're going to have to carefully snip away at the trees so they still look good but you get more performance... or you could just lock it to 30 and focus on making dlc.

If you want to run things at their best PC is always the best choice because no one makes games targeting the best PC's, so if your rig is a couple years old you're still laughing, the downside is the bad ports (a lot less frequent these days), the tweaking that is sometimes required to get things working how you want and the occasional horror story like parts failing or software issues, so consoles are justified by their absolute ease of use, but if you're like me you care about performance too much and haven't played a console since the 360.

Because an entire console costs the same as one low-to-mid level PC component. They're a fucking steal, that's how they're justified. Last gen was a bit of a crock in terms of price:performance, but these consoles have good guts and, while clearly a decent PC outperforms them, they are 2-3x cheaper.

^^^^ This. Sure, PC gaming gets easier every year...but it is STILL not as simple as consoles; and the price to get in at 1440p or 4K is nowhere near the same. There was a golden time when PS4 muched where you cudl buidl a $500 PS4 beater using PC parts - that is gone. Hoentsly, the DIY PC parts suppliers who make the mobos, drives, video cards and RAM are hell bent on the "commodidty" pricing of those part never being that low again. That why consoles exist, and that maybe why they always exist.

The thing I don't have time for anymore is that PC games love to assign me homework.

"Hm, this game isn't running right. I know that It should be, but it isn't and I don't know why."

So now I have to scavenger hunt through a dozen reddit threads and hope at the end of the journey that the answer isn't "Oh yeah the ports bugged wait for patch."

I'll just echo what others have said. I hate tinkering to get it right. More so for older games that ultimately hit the skids when you're a few OS' ahead.

With a console, I largely know what kind of experience I'm going to have. And it works out cheaper in the long run.

I'm sure this is going to sound extremely silly to many people, but I'm excited for the new consoles as the best place to play last gen games. My Xbox One and PS4 are barely up to the task and I have a lot of games for both of them I've put off playing until I can get beefier systems.

Oh, and I want to see how the PSVR 2 shakes out.

I don't really care if it's 4K or 1080, 30 or 60 fps, and I don't want to fight people with sticks for components or upgrade every time something new and shiny shows up on the market. I gave up that fight a decade ago and never looked back.

You wrote a lot to say a little and really could've stopped at "fixed within 20 minutes". Why do I want to install a game and then spend another 20 minutes trying to figure out how to run it? I was just reading this look back on Horizon this morning and was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Fast-forward to 2020 where Horizon Zero Dawn was ported to PC. Coming off the heels ofDeath Stranding, which was the most impressive PC port I’ve ever played, I decided to pick up another game using that same Decima engine: Horizon Zero Dawn. I was shocked to find Horizon initially unplayable in some configurations, despite running maximum settings in Death Stranding without a hitch. I waited for five patches before starting a new save file and giving Horizon a proper go. If not out of pure stubbornness, I might not have made it to the end.

To me that's just completely unacceptable. Whatever amount of user error or preference may have been involved in that situation - for example, I often see PC players mention frame drops or screen tearing as rendering a game "unplayable", which I always find hilarious - the fact that she spent money on a completed video game and it did not work for her as she'd hoped is ridiculous. That's all there is to it. It has nothing to do with being intimidated or stumped, I simply didn't get into video games to worry over whether some piece of my hardware or software struggles to communicate with each other.

I also grew up on Apple computers. My family switched to a PC for five years from 2000 to 2005. It was stoked partially by my noticing that a lot of the most acclaimed or interesting games of that time - Half-Life 2, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, The Sims 2, Max Payne 2, Black & White, Blade Runner - were PC exclusives or purported to run so much better on PC. So I convinced my parents they should get a PC, and they did: A Gateway running Windows XP that miraculously ran Allied Assault fairly well and did fine with The Sims 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon, but laughed off Half-Life 2 and Max Payne and really struggled with the complex AI computations and particle effects of Black & White past the first level or two.

What else did I get that year? A Playstation 2 which, yes, was not always a majestic console. I had at least two during its lifetime. But at least when that console stopped working, you knew exactly what was going on - the laser was dead and there was very little troubleshooting necessary. Just ship it out and get a new one.

But there are little things too that are a bit more nitpicky and not as related to that root disinterest in troubleshooting anything that I own (yes, as an adult I only use Apple products once again primarily because they're not modular at all). The primary one is that I hated mouse and keyboard controls. A mouse feels unnatural in my right hand as a lefty while I never feel fully accurate in my right hand (I do use a mouse with my right hand, but I immediately go stupid when switching from internet browsing to demon slaying).

I hated having to re-center the mouse all the time or running off the mouse pad trying to make something happen. I hated when dust or whatever would get in the trackball and suddenly make scrolling a pain in the ass. I hated having so many damn buttons all spread out across a single surface. I hated the way third person camera movement looked (and still hate how it looks in video, it's so immediately apparent) with a mouse, so herky jerky and artificial compared to the more filmic qualities of a stick.

And of course now gamepads on PC are 99% standard, but that memory will always be there. That memory of constantly being confused, disappointed, frustrated, uncomfortable with little spurts of "I guess I get it" drip fed between random crashes due to an OS malfunction in the background.

To be less reductive and hash it all down - I really do just hate PCs in general, and I find reducing it down to "drivers" the easiest way of saying so because it's a word that never, ever comes up in the console and iMac conversations (I know there are drivers for Mac computers but I'm a very, very light user who just never encounters them - TextEdit is my word processor of choice, for example). And I've also never been right up on the latest tech. I spent the entirety of the PS3 era on a CRT, entirety of the PS4 on a 720p TV with a base PS4, this iMac I'm talking about is from 2008. The arms race aspect of PC gaming has never inspired me, and "it just works" is far more important to me than "it works best".

All I said was that you were needlessly snarky and that people can like consoles for whatever reason that they want to like them for...and that the reasons that they do like them are justified. Don't know what else to tell you outside of that...it's a hell of a screed you threw up there for something that doesn't impact you at all.

Woof, this hit close after my recent debacle of trying to get Doom Eternal to run through PC Gamepass. This is it too! I'm fine with finding these answers out (as annoying as they may be), but it isn't something I remotely enjoy and I can therefore not agree that something like a firmware update that goes through while you're sleeping is the same as trying to figure out the exact way you need to finesse a launcher to get your game to run. Again: "hit power, push start" is a very compelling reason to like console games and always will be.

@av_gamer: this is exactly my situation and option. The console war or pc master race stances are all dumb. Play games you like, and don’t worry about other people doing things differently than you. All methods are legit, and that is simply factual.

As to the OP question regarding unused power, at least in the case of Dying Light 2, it’s a game that had started development back in 2018 if I recall the announcement, and that means it was potentially not originally intended for next gen hardware and they didn’t want to adjust their work thus far when they got their dev kits for the newest gen consoles. A lot of games were like this last gen too. Other than some launch titles and platform exclusives, third party games usually take about 2 years to catch up. That said, I’m Dying Light 2’s case, it’s also developed by Techland, a company known for janky releases that might not be optimized well.

I think we are simply still in the third party lag season, which is likely longer that time around than previous console generations due to the slow apocalypse we have been experiencing the past 2 years.

As others have mentioned, consoles are super simplistic and easy to use. On a series console, I can go from cold start to playing in about 3 seconds (with quick resume). On a pc, just launching Mass Effect legendary edition requires that I launch both steam and origin, and half the time I need to launch origin by itself just to sign in again (not sure why). And getting mods to run was another hour minimum. But overall, I would much rather play Mass Effect on a pc than series console.

So it's 2 different extremes, both of which appeal to different types of people. I know people who would get frustrated if they had to sit in a queue time for over a minute, yet I'm the person who would gladly sit in matchmaking screen if it meant a quality match. Not exactly comparing apples to apples, but you get the idea.

Well, since my perspective still seems to need some more explanation: I'm passionate about tech. I'm interested in knowing how this stuff works beyond just pushing a button and letting the electronic do its thing. When a problem does happen, I like to fix said problem. And when someone else is having an issue, since threads about a game not working, or asking about buying a PC, I like to share my knowledge if I feel as though my insights can be of value. So when I see posts of people just throwing up their arms in defeat over potential issues of which I know aren't a big deal, or having a misconception of which I know isn't true, I can't help but to have some sort of emotional reaction to it, because that's X amount of less people that I have in common with and potentially play games with. I don't about you, but I can't always do single player, and a little confrontation can be fun to a certain extent.

But, hey. If you're fully convinced that policing my tone is more important, so be it. I figured that being on this site for 12 years along with people who have been around for a similar amount of time meant that we could all be friends here. But if I'm misreading the room, then, fine. I'll go back to being passive.

I have a new PC, but sometimes it's just nice to be in the living room with my partner. She can be watching her K-Drama or playing Wooly World or what not and we have other options to play. And jsut because we're doing separate tasks doesn't mean we're not enjoying our time together. I'd occasionally get a tug on my shirt to help her with a level or devise a strat or whatever needs she has.

With my office rig and gaming PC all tied up together in our bedroom, it becomes a separate thing, which doesn't feel all that great sometimes.

I finally hit a point with the latest Gen of consoles that it is "good enough". The price of video cards has gotten out of hand.

Plus, my wife likes to play and it's convenient to buy the game once for us both to play.

Consoles are just easy. Hit a button, start playing, never worry about anything.

I was an avid PC-gamer for years but fuck it, I can't be bothered doing that any longer.

@nodima: To be fair, the TL;DR became much less directed towards you about more towards sethmode's interjection at that point.

That aside, thanks for giving me a more complete story. Like I said, I started in 2015 where the hardware and software compatibility issues and limitations of the 90's and 2000's are significantly less severe if not nonexistent these days. The 20 minutes of trouble shooting with the 7 specific games I mentioned really are uncommon edge cases within the over 400 modern games that I have though Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic, and so on that just work. But, as much as I'd want you and others to give PC another chance, you seem pretty firm on your stance, so, sorry that your past frustrations have sullied things for you.

I like consoles. I buy it and then don't worry about upgrading anything for years. Games run exactly as the devs intended for that platform. It's easy. And at this point games run so well and look so good that I really just don't care if a game runs at 59fps sometimes vs. a locked 60.

Plus I work on a computer all day, the last thing I want to do is use a mouse or keyboard in the evening.

@facelessvixen: If you really feel like I'm policing your tone, I don't know what to tell you. Multiple people have mentioned how the "PC master race" stuff is historically shitty in general, so I'm sorry if I said that your initial post was unnecessarily snarky, but also, it was unnecessarily snarky. Either way, it wasn't some kind of attack on you, or attempt to tell you what you can and can't say, I just offered my opinion of your opinion. I don't know how else to describe it at this point.

I have been playing video games on a controller for 30-ish years and I never learned how to type the "correct" way. And now that I'm older, keeping my fingers over wasd hurts my hand after like 10 minutes. I know most games give you aim assist against mouse and keyboard, but as a console player, it always seems like hacks and aimbots are the bane of PC players' existence. I'm good, thank you.