Why do we buy gaming consoles? PCs have better specs, broader utility, more versatile controllers, and a larger selection of games.
Lemme take a second to consider the consoles I’ve personally purchased.
I bought a PS3 because because it was the cheapest and best Blu-Ray player on the market. The ease with which the PS3 has been upgraded through firmware to stay current with the latest improvements in the Blu-Ray standard (including 3D) have repeatedly confirmed that this was a smart decision.
I bought an X-Box 360 after the last set of price cuts for the exclusives: Halo, Mass Effect, Gears of War, etc. No regrets. (I only regret the Kinect a little bit, because my wife absolutely adores the voice commands.)
I bought a Wii because the unique controller made possible gaming experiences that were otherwise unavailable. (And it was cheap enough that the novelty had sufficient novelty.)
In the previous generation, a PS2 was a no-brainer for me because of (a) the exclusives and (b) at the time, it was the only way you could sit on your couch and play on your TV. (These days, I’ve got a second PC hooked up to the TV for gaming.)
The other advantage of the current console generation is that it allows me to buy DRM-free copies of games that have DRM-crippled PC releases. I refuse to spend more than $5 on any title that has DRM (since I’m effectively renting the game, I’ll only pay rental prices for it), so there have been a lot of games that I would actually prefer to own for the PC that I’ve purchased for the console instead.
Looking ahead to the next console generation: It looks like DRM may actually end up being more prevalent on the consoles or possibly even mandatory (in which case, I definitely won’t be buying). The advantage of playing-on-the-couch has also vanished (because, as I mentioned, I’ve already got a PC hooked up to my TV). I also suspect the only exclusives we’ll be seeing are from Nintendo and Microsoft because nobody else will be able to justify losing 2/3rds of their potential sales.
I’ve seen people make fun of the Wii-U’s “gimmicky” controller, but ultimately I suspect Nintendo has the right idea: The most effective way to justify a console’s existence is for that console to offer a unique experience. A box and a set of controllers that plugs into your TV no longer qualifies as that.
The other alternative, at least from my perspective, would be for a console to actually offer a comprehensive media center, much like the PS3 justified its purchase cost for me by also serving as my Blu-Ray player. The current generation of consoles kinda pretends that they’re going to do that, but the little walled gardens of limited, hard-to-access content that they currently feature make them look like pale jokes compared to the WD TV Live Hub that I currently have hooked into my TV (which allows me to both trivially stream online video and load any video file from a USB drive).
With that being said, it’s certainly plausible I could end up owning an X-Box 720. I really like Halo.
A major advantage of the console must surely be that it’s a fixed specification. I can buy any PS3 game out there, safe in the knowledge that it will play on my PS3, with no questions over differing specifications, compatibility with a specific hardware set-up driver issues… At worst, I may have to clear out some space on my hard-drive and/or run a firmware update – but I should probably be doing the latter anyway.
Conversely, although a new PC will offer a better gaming experience, I then need to go to the expense and hassle of upgrading it periodically if I want to stay current. And since most of what I use my PC for is surfing the net and writing gaming notes, the majority of the expense of upgrading is wasted for the majority of what I do.
At least, that’s how it works for me – a PS3 (only) for gaming, and a relatively cheap PC for utility.
Definitely true. One of the things I’ve found interesting in recent years is that I haven’t had to spend much time upgrading my computer in order to play the latest games. If I wanted to stay on the bleeding edge of what the games can potentially output on a PC, of course, that wouldn’t be true; but I’ve yet to encounter a game that my PC hasn’t been able to play. And my upgrades in the past decade have been limited to (a) purchasing a new stick of memory because Windows Vista was a memory hog; (b) buying a modest new computer for around $600 when my last machine literally died from a burnt-out motherboard; and (c) buying a single new graphic card.
I think I’ve actually spent more money on console hardware in the last decade than I have PC hardware.
Part of that is likely because the current consoles have stayed on the market for so long; game developers have been forced to develop to a low-end technology standard that’s roughly 10 years old right now. (The current console generation is 7 years old, but when the X-Box 360 was released it was already a couple years behind the cutting edge of PC standards.) My very modest PC specs still radically out-perform the current consoles, but when the new consoles come out, I wouldn’t be surprised to find my current PC specs obsolete within a year or so.