Expensive hardware and poor optimization has PC gaming in a dangerous place
Even though I technically started playing my very first video games on PC back when my entire gaming world was whatever math games or movie tie-in games could run on the one computer we had in my parents’ house, I came to be a real PC gamer much later in life.
I only built my first PC five years ago now. I’d still consider myself relatively new to PC gaming, and even I can tell that things aren’t looking so hot. The entire PC gaming landscape seems to be in a very dangerous spot. I’d go so far as to call it dangerous, because I’m not sure who PC gaming is really for anymore, save for people who are already extremely rich. I’m no longer sure there’s a solid argument for anyone to get into PC gaming in the modern landscape, instead of just buying a console.
Thanks to expensive hardware and poor optimization, PC gaming is officially more alienating than ever before, and that is what’s holding it back.
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Budget builds are becoming a myth
First off, it’s nothing new that PC gaming can be expensive. If all you care about is playing games at the highest resolution, and the highest possible frame rates, with all the graphical bells and whistles turned on, then that’ll only be available to you on the latest and greatest hardware. Top of the line GPUs, CPUs, coolers, power supply units, memory, and monitors all come at a huge cost.
It’s all quite nice to have, and if you’ve got the money for it, then you should go for it and enjoy the benefits that come with getting the ‘best’ gear. Is it necessary, though, for good gaming? Absolutely not, and a key pillar of PC gaming has always been that you can curate your build to give you a great experience, even if you can’t have all the graphical bells and whistles turned on. But what if you could have some of the bells and whistles, and every time you played a brand-new game, it was just a plug-and-play process?
Enter the PS5, PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X. You can play modern games on these consoles, with ray tracing, at 4K, at consistent (and in some cases high) refresh rates. A lot of that is game-dependent, but the fact of the matter is that whichever of those consoles you buy, you’re jumping right into a gaming experience that PC players need to spend more to achieve. Just a current-generation graphics card alone, before you’ve built the rest of the PC, will cost more than you would spend on a new console.
If you’ve been at this longer than me, and you already have a great PC that you’ve upgraded multiple times, then I don’t blame you if your reaction to all of this so far is that I’m sounding like a crazy person. But you, and other PC gamers like you, are already in the flow of just upgrading one or two parts as you need to over the years. However, it’s important to recognize that the PC gamer who is only upgrading their GPU every few years, does not represent growth in PC gaming.
Growth comes from people entering the PC gaming sphere from the outside, and in today’s hyper-capitalistic world where constant growth is king, a stagnant market does not help. So is it possible to convince people who have either been console gamers most of their lives, or who are just getting into gaming, to enter the realm of PC gaming? It’s possible, but a much more difficult sell than it used to be. Especially when you can’t guarantee a good gaming experience like you can expect on a console.
The best hardware doesn’t mean the best experience
Why spend top-dollar when you don’t have to?
This next point isn’t exactly the fault of PC hardware manufacturers. It’s more on game studios, and the top brass at these companies that push games out before they’re ready to launch. The result, though, is that you cannot trust that any of the industry’s biggest titles will actually work as they should at launch.
So, imagine the disappointment when, after you’ve spent all that money on PC hardware, you either get an experience that’s equivalent to one on modern consoles, or better than modern consoles, but meanwhile, the games you want to play are bugged to the moon. Of course, games are still buggy on consoles, but there have been more than a few instances in recent years when the PC version of a new release has been far, far worse than its console variants.
These games do get patched over time, and not everything is broken forever. But it’s worth asking what you’re really spending your money on, especially because when you’re having issues running a game on your PC, there could be a number of reasons that explain the issue, and the solution might not be so simple.
On consoles, on the other hand, you might not have the option to go looking for a mod to download while a patch is being worked on, but once something is patched, it’s fixed. You can trust that it will just work every time you jump back on your console to play more, and you’ll continue to have a great experience.
There are more reasons against PC gaming than for it, and that puts it in a bad spot
PC hardware is more expensive than it’s ever been. It’s more of a crap-shoot than ever if games will actually run how you want them to on PC, and all the while, there are three consoles players can buy for less than a mid-range PC build and enjoy a quality gaming experience out-of-the-box.
None of that spells a growing PC gaming market, and while there will always be hardcore enthusiasts who will always choose to spend the extra money on making their PCs the best of the best, not everyone can afford to do the same. PC gaming needs to be everything for everyone, not ‘mostly everything for only the very rich.’ That’s a dangerous niche to try and survive in, and things absolutely need to change if we’re going to see PC gaming have any kind of growth in the future.
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