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I was seriously considering getting a PS5 until I saw the costs of the games + hardware.
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Gaming
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I think you are vastly minimizing the "plug and play" aspect of consoles and that the common person has a machine that can run games with a "minimal setup". While PC gaming has plenty of benefits: I think you're downplaying how much time, money, and energy you have to waste to PC game.
Steps to play on a console: 1) Turn on the system, 2a) Maybe if you're unlucky and a new patch comes out the same day you want to resume playing you have to patch the game, 2b) Play game (possibly even resume playing where you left off so you're literally instantly back into the game). Time-to-play: Maybe 20 seconds? (granted a little longer on last-gen, but also this gen you can be back in a game literally within 5 seconds).
Steps to play on a pc: 1) Turn on pc, 2) Turn on (or launch) steam/egs/gog/etc, 3) hope game was updated, 4) hope drivers are updated, 5a) launch game, 5b) maybe sign into another 3rd party launcher, 6) load fully into the game, 7) play game. Time-to-play: 1-5 minutes depending on if the computer is fully off or just in sleep. Possibly much, much longer.
But WAIT, maybe the game isn't running great so you have to alt+tab out and make sure you didn't leave something running in the background, or your 100+ tabs in chrome/ff/etc are hogging all the ram and needs to be closed; maybe new drivers came out that you need to download/install to get the game running right, maybe the new drivers made the game worse and you have to revert them. Maybe the controller you wanted to play the game on disconnected or otherwise malfunctioned and now you have to restart the game the get it to pick up the controller. Maybe the DRM on the game has hitched up and you're locked out of the game. Maybe you get a windows update that closes the game for you so it can helpfully install whatever new updates are available for you. etc etc.
I can't say my experience playing PC games comes even close to that.
It takes me maybe 10-20 seconds to get most games that I play open on my machine, excluding the obnoxious splash screens games have when you open them which is the reason I think #6 might be a compelling argument. With the splash screens, it's easily 2-3 minutes because more than half of that is sitting there staring at some stupid brand logos.
Of course, I already have a PC for other reasons, and the PC's hardware is more than capable of playing games (moreso than most consumer gaming consoles at least, if not all), so I've never really felt like there was much reason to get a console, with the exception of a Switch since it's a handheld. There's already an enormous catalogue of games to play on PC, so it's not like I'm missing out on much. Also, I might be a bit unique in that I'm using my PC all the time anyway. For someone who doesn't use a PC very much, I could see a console being more appealing due to it being a dedicated gaming device.
Bingo, you've described my experience exactly. My computer is almost never off.
That’s wasteful.
If it wasn't usually running something and was idling, it would be more so. But generally speaking, I have something occupying it.