The gaming landscape has changed significantly over the last 20 years. It has gone from being a small, albeit beloved, pastime to what is now the biggest form of entertainment. Consoles have of course played a huge role in this growth, introducing gaming to a much larger demographic than the PC’s of old could ever accomplish.
Fast forward to today, and whilst consoles are still a huge contributor to the continued growth of the industry, it is PC gaming that has arguably seen the greatest degree of incremental growth over the past 20-30 years. What was once a somewhat niche market, favoured by enthusiasts, is now garnering more and more mainstream appeal. Fantastic game availability, user friendly store fronts, easier to manage operating systems, popularity amongst the influencer/streaming community and a wide variety of hardware choice are but a few of the factors contributing to this.
As someone who did a lot of PC gaming, and PC hardware “tinkering” back in my teens before moving exclusively to console gaming (until very recently), I wanted to take the time to delve into the state of PC gaming from my perspective now vs then and how it stacks up against the modern day console experience.
I recently built a top-of-the-line gaming PC and so my experience can likely be described as “best case” though I have also recently built a PC for my daughter with much more modest specs. In researching for this article, I have spent time on both of these hardware configurations. For full transparency, the specs of the two machines I am using are:
Build 1:
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
RTX 4090
32GB DDR5 6000 RAM
2TB M.2 SSD (7000MB/s Read/6500MB/s Write)
Build 2:
AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Geforce RTX 1660 Super
250gb SATA SSD (500MB/s Read/350MB/s Write)
16GB RAM
Purchase. That’s right, the divergence of these platforms starts before you turn them on, and it is the first glimpse we see of the pros and cons of both. For consoles, this is relatively simple. You decide what “ecosystem” you want to be in, and buy the console. The only real decision comes from discless or not though on the Xbox side, the 2 main options (Series S and Series X), whilst supporting the same games, do offer a different experience owing to the lower specs of the Series S.
Now for PC, this is where its biggest strength lies, but also its potential barrier to entry. The number of hardware permutations is almost limitless. This can be daunting at the very least, especially from someone new to PC gaming/building. Now of course, there are options to make this barrier to entry easier to overcome. Pre-built PC’s, partpicker websites that check for compatibility, online videos offering great advice etc.
Now, all this sounds like a lot of effort…..and it can be. But the benefit of this is being able to fine tune your experience and build/purchase a computer that meets your own specific needs, not least of which being budget.
So, you have got your console or PC home, ready to get some gaming done. This is where the console, in my opinion, offers the most user-friendly experience. You plug it in, you create an account, you play a game. Now you may need to download first if you don’t have a physical game (likely even if you do to be honest…) but by and large, the console has very little attrition on the path from unboxing to playing.
Now, on PC, this initial “out the box” experience differs depending on if you have a prebuilt PC (which likely has Windows pre-installed) or if you are building yourself. Either way, it is very unlikely that you will be able to “plug n play” without a bit of tinkering in order to get the best experience. Prior knowledge and experience here will help of course, but either way, this is unlikely to match consoles on this front with only a handheld like the Steam Deck getting close to that console experience.
Games. If you are reading this article, it is likely that games are what you are here for and this is where, in my opinion, PC gaming has come on in leaps and bounds over the past 20 years. Now PC has always had games, lots of games, but PC gaming today offers, in my opinion, the greatest diversity of any platform and the greatest freedom in how you choose to consume gaming content. Steam is of course the primary storefront on PC, and for good reason. It is incredibly user friendly, offers great prices, often has sales and offers great controller support. You also have other store fronts (albeit smaller), and multiple ways to regularly claim “free” games. In addition to this, publishers that previously didn’t support PC are now doing so. Xbox has been publishing games day and date for a few years and PlayStation is now bringing its games to PC after a console exclusivity window for the big single player tentpole game, and these Playstation ports are often excellent.
All this said, consoles are of course no slouch in the games department with PlayStation having that exclusivity window on its big tentpole single player games whilst Nintendo remains the only one of the “big three” that still has true exclusives on its hugely successful Switch platform.
But it doesn’t stop with what games are available, but how to experience those games, and this is another area where both platforms offer clear pros and cons. On console, this is again relatively simple, though we have seen this slightly evolve over the last few years. For all intents and purposes, it is insert/download and play. You don’t need to worry about compatibility, or complex graphics settings beyond in a lot of cases now, performance (60 fps) or quality (30fps) with some games also offering unlocked, 120fps or 40fps.
On PC, you again have a more complex approach, but also one that gives the end user a lot more freedom in how they want to experience their game. A number of graphical options allow for scaling across a wide variety of hardware profiles and give the player control over what to prioritise. Framerate, Resolution, Ray Tracing, amongst a multitude of other ways to truly tailor the experience. If you are someone who prefers to just jump in, you do still have options. The big GPU manufacturers have control panels that will automatically create performance profiles for most modern games based on hardware and apply these settings to the game and some games also have recommended settings that are again, based on your hardware. On the face of it, to the uninitiated, this can still seem quite overwhelming, but having recently spent a lot of time playing on PC and helping my daughter set games up on her PC, it’s refreshing to have this level of control over your game and it’s nowhere near as fiddly now as I remember it being all those years ago. Even on the lower spec machine, I was able to quite easily adjust settings to achieve a good looking and performant experience on the games I tested, including the likes of Cyberpunk and Dragons Dogma 2.
So, in conclusion, which is better? As expected, it is of course very subjective and depends on what you want to get out of your gaming experience and what you are willing to put in. What I can say, at least from my own recent experience, is that PC gaming is in a great place and in my opinion has never been more approachable, and rewarding, than it is today.
