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czecherychestnut on 25 July 2015
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Bofferbrauer said:
czecherychestnut said:
If consoles didn't exist many PC gamers would just complain about the legion of HP Pavilion and Dell Inspiron users rocking 4 yr old integrated graphics and dual core Celeron's holding back PC gaming.

Sure, you can build PC's that would smoke the average console these days, but the average PC is far weaker than current consoles. Just look at the latest Steam hardware survey (which is skewed towards higher end PC's anyway due to its gaming nature). Most common GPU? Intel HD 4000 series. Most common CPU? Dual core between 2.3 and 2.9 GHz.

Its not consoles holding PC gaming back like some people claim, its PC users themselves because for every i7, GTX980Ti toting gamer complaining about cr*ppy consoles holding back his eye candy, there is 4-5 PC gamers rocking their parents HD4000 Dual core Celeron with 2 GB of RAM PC. Developers want to maximise their audience, and game engines can only be made scalable up til a point, so it makes little sense for a developer to make a game so graphically challenging that the bulk of PC gamers can't play it.

Not true. Loads of Office PCs (most of them at homes, but I found Steam installed on many PCs at workplaces) and Ultrabooks have Steam installed for some older or casual games. Especially the latter generally still come with a dualcore and only HD Graphics. My dad, for instance, has steam installed on his notebook soely for some old pinball games and match 3 variants. My mother hasn't even used Steam once, but it came preinstalled on her convertible notebook.

I have Steam installed on 2 PCs, a modern one and a retro one. The latter naturally is very unimpressive (Core 2 Duo E4300 and GeForce 7800GT and no, there's no zero too much, it's that old!) but enough for some retro and indie games I got there. But these also contribute to the list.

But how many PC gamers would not have Steam installed? I'd say very few, so the market for PC games must be a subset of the 125 million Steam users, and given 20% of that 125 million are using integrated Intel graphics, and from rough calc's less than 15% of people are using a GPU more modern than a GTX 670 / Radeon HD 7700 series, the actual size of the PC market that overlaps with current consoles is ~ 18 milllion PC's, which is half the number of XB1's/PS4's on the market. 

All I'm trying to say is that this myth that underpowered consoles are holding back PC games is just that, a myth. If you actually break down the number of PC gamers that have the hardware to take on console games (and hence have the possibility of being 'held back' by consoles) the size of the PC market is much smaller than current gen consoles, and in fact it is the legion of underpowered PC's that are holding back PC games.  And that has always been the case since day dot of PC gaming.

Yes, eventually over the course of a console generation the average PC will gradually increase in power up to the point consoles are holding back what game developers will do in games, but we're still talking years away from now.