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patronmacabre on 28 June 2015
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patronmacabre said:

I feel like anyone who grew up as a PC gamer understands the appeal of a console. It's just nice always being sure that a game on a console will run reasonably well. Consoles are also appealing because the machines and the operating systems themselves don't degrade after about five years. I love being able to go back to my PS2 and having it work almost perfectly, whereas if I were to go back to my PC from 2000, that machine would likely melt trying to even start up.

You are feeling very much, aren't you? I hope you feel well.

You don't have to go back to your PC from 2000 to play PC-games from the year 2000... most of them will also run on newer PCs. And in most cases they will even run much better now due to scalability of PC games, they run in resolutions and settings which would have been insane in the past.

 

You missed the crux of my argument. I wasn't talking about backwards compatibility, I was complaining about the annoyance of software rot. Computers age after five years (three to four years for laptops) and don't run as fast as they once did. Anyone who has never experienced this has never used the same computer for that long a span of time. The only way to really fix it is to straight up reformat your hard drive and reinstall Windows. 

I was simply pointing out that the nicest thing, for me, about consoles is the fact that I can go back to a ten year old, fifteen year old, or twenty year old machine and it still functions like it once did. That is a nice convenience for me, though I am sure not everyone would appreciate it. A twenty year old PC is worthless trash.

The reason for computer rot is that there is planned obsolescence in the software and hardware of PCs that is non-existant in consoles because of the nature of generational changes. A console doesn't need to degrade, because games will eventually just stop coming out for that system. Planned obsolescence isn't as bad in PCs as it is in, say, smartphones or tablets (which have a lifespan of about two years before their functionality start to go south), but they still have life-spans. Hardware and software manufacturers need to push you away from your old computers, which is why older OSes don't receive support and updates. It is also seemingly apparent that hardware manufacturers, Nvidia in particular, are speeding up the rates of hardware obsolescence with their graphics cards, as there are reports that the Geforce 700 series do not play games as well as they properly should.

I don't mean to get into an argument, but it seems more and more apparent that that so many new PC gamers have no idea what they're getting into. A GTX 980 isn't going to futureproof your computer against the next generation even if it should, because PCs have built-in planned obselence.