PC Gaming isn’t in fact dead, it’s about to explode again.

Argument for the defence:

Ever since this generation of consoles launched the PC has been declared dead, but this doesn’t take into account the fact that in fact the platform has been going great guns in the meantime. Steam has taken off and throughclever use of sales has shown that PC games can have long tail sales years after their original releases. In the last few months I’ve grabbed games such as KOTOR and the UFO series as well as games from the last few years that are probably still on the shelves. Console games just don’t have this long tail in the same way for the publishers, in fact the games stores pretty much make sure that it’s only in the interest of the publisher to have discs on shelves for the first few months because they then take over with second hand sales for which the publisher gets nothing. A company like Blizzard is still selling copies of Starcraft and Warcraft 3 today. On top of that Steam is just such a convenient platform it’s made me impulse buy several games when I wouldn’t have normally.

The biggest advantage that the PC has is that the console platforms have given up competing with it by declaring that they are going to have 10 year cycles this time round. Can you imagine how good a 10 year old platform is going to look compared to a PC with the latest $100 graphics card? Games can get better looking over time, but they can’t squeeze the sort of power out that new hardware can bring. Already PC games are higher resolution and can avoid the nasty trick of using lower than HD resolutions for rendering elements that most console games resort to, and over time this is only going to get better.

The console platform holders are scared of one thing: People will break their DRM and make piracy as easy as it is on the PC. This gives the PC a big advantage because they ban something quite important: modding your games. The two giants in this arena are Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. There are tools available for them from the developers themselves that allow you to craft your own content right into the game. This is an invaluable tool for people who want more content, to tell a story or want to learn how to make content for games.

The compatibility problems of old are greatly improved, most games run fine on all modern graphics cards and we have DirectX 10 to thank for that. Yes, even for OpenGL and DirectX9 games. DirectX 10 drew a line in the sand and broke the cycle of cards just adding random features to DirectX 9 that may or may not be supported by rival card manufacturers in the same way. DirectX 10 demanded that a fixed set of features was implemented and now that nearly all cards are DX10 compatible in modern gaming PCs this has filtered down to the old DX9 games as well.

The final point to make is that PC  gaming is already much bigger than console gaming and so has already won. Casual gaming is much more massive than all the consoles combined, and distribution methods such as Facebook reach a staggering number of people. I know people will say that that’s not real gaming, but they are wrong. A game is a game, whether it’s World of Warcraft, Call of Duty or Farmville. Just consider how many more PCs there are than consoles and this fact: Valve consider the considerably smaller Mac market to be bigger than the PS3 market, that's the order of magnitude of the difference.

The argument for the opposition:

PCs are expensive and unreliable. You barely need to make more than that argument to guarantee that consoles will always win. You buy a PC from Dell, it comes and works for a year or two. New games start to get a little sluggish and so you buy a new graphics card, but your power supply isn’t powerful enough to run your new card so you need a new one of those as well. This isn’t consumer friendly gaming, this is hobbyist gaming. This may not matter to you or me, but to the average person (Let’s call them “Normals”) it’s a deal breaker when they can just grab a 360, PS3 or Wii and never have to worry about upgrading it, the PC just can’t compete. It’s not just graphics cards either, add a couple of more years to the cycle and you need a whole new set of brains (processor and memory) in order to run the latest games. You might as just well buy a new PC every 3 years, which given the 10 year cycle for the current consoles means that you’ll buy 3 PCs to every PS3 or 360 you buy.

There are three letters that strike fear into every PC gamer. DRM. Whether it’s a root kit installed by Sony, or a need for a constant internet connection to Ubisoft servers it never works reliably. Upgrade your operating system and the DRM will stop working because it was doing something nastily wrong in the first place. Hackers attack the authentication servers and you can’t play your game. You’re in a hotel room in the arse end of nowhere for work and you have no internet and you can’t play the games on your laptop. We all fear it, we all know that in a few years we’ll need cracks to even be able to play these games legitimately. We all know that consoles do it better.

Conclusion

The biggest threat to stop PC gaming becoming dominant again are the publishers and the pirates. Nobody is going to let DRM kill PC gaming, and with another half decade on this round of consoles to go it's the PCs game to lose. In 2015 PC games will look so much better than the PS3 and 360s it can't fail to win.



I do have one or two small niggles with the PS3 though that I’d like to see fixed. None of these are a deal breaker (OK, the last one is but I hope somebody has a solution for me) and should in no way be taken as anything other than a list of things I find slightly annoying or lacking. They certainly don’t make it a bad console; they’re just areas that could be improved.

1. Make iPlayer work with the media remote (full screen mode and the pause button first). Probably impossible because of the way that all Sony do is add an icon for the web page on the main UI, but having to use a controller is a real pain.
2. Give the slim a USB socket on the back. I have a docking station that lets me put two controllers on it and it will charge them while not in use. The PS3 only has USB sockets on the front, which means that I need an ugly wire sticking out to use this. This also counts for keyboards and I guess everybody who just connects their controller using a USB connection (which is rubbish and another gripe as if you charge while playing a micro USB connection pulls out too easily, but that’s an aside). If there was a USB socket at the back I could run things through a hub, therefore hiding all those nasty wires.
3. The stop button on the media remote causes blu-rays to stop play back and returns you to the XMB. This button is awfully close to other useful buttons such as pause. I’ve accidentally hit stop before, and boy is it annoying when you’re just trying to pause a film. Return me to the blu-ray menu and then allow me to continue, even if I meant to press it then that’s probably what I meant.
4. Progress bars. The PS3 has a lot of progress bars. You get one when you install a game, you get one when you download a patch, followed by one when that installs. You can even get progress bars while saving your game. Compare your trophies with a friend and it’ll give you a progress bar while it synchronises. And then there are the hourglass like swirlys that indicate that the XMB is loading something. Press the PS button in game and you’ll get a couple of seconds of swirling. Scroll through a connected media server and you’ll get more. I don’t mind that these actions take time, although I think they take longer than they should do. It’s just that the progress bars are really out of place on a console. Running little big planet last night I was watching progress bars for a full hour, in which I couldn’t use the console for anything else and you know what? It made it feel like a PC that couldn’t multitask and not a console. It gives off a bad impression.
5. Talking of not being able to use the console, the lack of background downloads when you patch a game is annoying. They aren’t all as bad as little big planet because very few games get that amount of developer love post release, but patches on the PS3 certainly take longer than they do on the 360. Any really large patches on the 360 tend to be on the Marketplace as optional downloads, and so can be downloaded in the background and every critical “can’t play until you get this” patch only takes a few seconds. On the PS3 the patching process is longer anyway but the patches also seem to be bigger. I’ve never waited more than a few seconds to play a 360 game, but have gotten bored of waiting for a PS3 game to patch on more than one occasion.
6. Installations. No, I don’t mean installing to the hard disk in order to run faster. I mean the installation process that happens after you download a game and try and run it. Why does my closed system need installs? Why can’t it just download the files to the right place in the first place as, again, the 360 seems to do. The PS3 downloads everything as an encrypted compressed file installer and then does the copy, this is PC territory again!
7. Cross game chat. I use it on the 360 all the time and I miss it on the PS3. Hurry up and add it Sony. You’ve been saying it’s coming for ages now.
8. Reliability of the network connection. To start with I thought this was just me, but other people have said they have similar problems. One of my PS3s just won’t keep a connection to the PSN over wireless, and ever since an upgrade last year sometime neither think they’re on a plug and play network any more despite everything else I own knowing that it is. I also can’t reliably stream videos or audio from my PC or Mac without it stopping after a while. I’d love to know what it is about my network that causes this, and I’m sure many other people would too as I know I’m not alone.
9. Noise. Even after just 6 months of owning it, my slim is getting louder. This thing runs hot, the amount of heat thrown out the back is staggering and those fans run hard to keep up. Yes, the 360 sounds like a jet engine and tend to fatally melt, but that doesn’t stop me wanting the PS3 to be quieter too.
10. The media player. My PS3 is hooked up to the most expensive speakers in my house, it would be nice if the media player was better.
11. The controller sucks. Yes, you heard me. It’s too small and I can’t use it for extended amounts of time without it hurting my hands, which are abused from using a keyboard and mouse daily for years. Also, even the Dreamcast even better analogue triggers than the PlayStation has now. Are any of the madcatz controllers any good?
12. The XMB. This abomination of a UI is spreading like a cancer through Sony products and while it sort of works for some situations the PS3 is not one of them. It has a massive problem with large amounts of items. Connect to my music collection and it’s a pain to use because I have thousands of items in the list to scroll through. My games list is too large as well and is awkward. It’s just not a nice UI for scrolling through. One of the problems is that it’s the wrong way round. The horizontal scrolling changes the category and is the larger area. Vertical scrolling has the items, but is a much smaller size. Hundreds of items do not fit with this UI.
13. Trophies. Make them upload to the server when you get them, not when you decide to sync. Or when the console is not doing anything on the XMB. Or anything other than when you tell it to, it makes comparing them with your mates hard. Also speed up that whole checking them process, progress bars aren’t as fun as they look.
14. Invite to game. Hey, want to join this game with me? On 360 it’s simple and you just have to press the guide and click. On the PS3 what you’ve actually done is send a message and then they have to find the right option in the game to join you. If the game supports it.
15. This is my biggest gripe, and the one that physically stops me playing (and owning) more PS3 games. I own two PS3s. One is in the living room, and one is upstairs out of the way with all my audio recording and video capture gear. I also have two 360s for the same reason. With my 360s I have my saved games on an (overpriced) memory card. I can plug that in to either system and play my games where I want, even on somebody else’s 360. As far as I can tell I can’t do that with the PS3 and my saves are confined to the console that they live on. This annoys the hell out of me, as it means that if I want to play on the sofa I can’t play the same games that I was playing in what I laughingly call the studio earlier. I buy 360 versions of multiplatform games because of this (ok, and also because of the multiplayer. And maybe achievements. But this is a reason too)

The thing is that more than a couple of these problems can never be fixed on the PS3. Things like fixing game invites and making trophies synchronise when you get them will probably be breaking changes for every game and so we’ll not see them until the PS4.

I actually have a theory that the fact that 360s all tend towards the exploding end of the reliability spectrum has the benefit of making 360 users not complain about the little things.

Agree with my gripes? Disagree? Am I just being an idiot and missing something, am wrong about something or have I missed a gripe? Add them to the comments.

Next week in this series of venting that my imaginary therapist said would be useful: what annoys me with the 360.