| disolitude said:
Back in the day when SNES and Genesis were the norm and PC gaming was a mess, no one in the right mind would jump over to PC gaming if you took away their consoles. Today however these next gen consoles are as close to PCs as it gets in terms of features, interface and functionality. One could easily find a 500 dollar prebuilt CyperPower PC and buy it instead of Xbox 1 or PS4 and plug that in to their TV and call it a day. Honestly if it wasn't for Nintendo, I'd consider concoles to be dead. The other 2 players are already selling people PC's, its just that consumers havent realized it yet. 3 years from now with SteamBoxes, Windows 8 gaming and Android gaming streamlined, there will be very little difference between an X1 or a Windows 8 PCs when it comes to gaming. And in terms of AAA gaming, I would say history spoke loud and clear. You are right that sometime in 2006-7 game devs started focusing on consoles and made PC ports of games that were sub par to what was expected, if at all. Games like Crysis 2, Resident Evil 5 and many other console ports were shat on by the PC community. Devs have since reconsidered this console first strategy and we have had some proper PC ports of games that would never even come to PC's before hand. Castlevania LOS for example or MGS Revengeance...these games would have never made it to PC 5 years ago. And as far as PC devs, they smartened up and gave us proper PC titles like Crysis 3 and Mass effect 3 while also giving a slightly watered down ports to consoles. |
I actually think we're closer on this than it sounds. The statement that the latest Sony and Microsoft consoles are basically stripped down PCs is perfectly true, and as I pointed out myself even a lot of the big games on the systems are made by former PC developers now. I even concede that the barriers to PC gaming now are much, much smaller than they were before. Shoot, for some reason I don't understand a lot of PC gamers get upset if new games don't support console controllers. If consoles were to vanish today, a larger share of console gamers would migrate over.
I guess we mostly differ in two respects: I was working on the presumption that the question's reach was more than just "if consoles disappeared today," and I still think the stigma against PC games remains strong enough to ensure that a lot of gamers would be lost in the transition. We still routinely hear the old criticisms that PC gaming is too expensive, too complicated, too demanding, etc. The veracity of those claims is irrelevant: the perception alone is enough to drive away a lot of people.
