I've been a PC gamer ever since I was very young. It all started with a few flash games on a little old Mac my Dad let me use for a while, before it broke down and he got me a little EEE PC running Windows XP instead. Neither computer was a powerful monster gaming rig, even for their respective times. The mac had a dated (yes, even for then) PowerPC processor that, compared to Intel, was really anything but a representation of computing power, and the EEE PC was not all that far ahead of the Mac in terms of computational power either. However, they both ran the only games that mattered to me at the time: flash games and roblox. Somehow, these were the only sorts of games I really needed to set me on the path of gaming on PC instead of consoles for the rest of my life.
Both Roblox and the various flash game sites I played on were amazing beacons of freedom and diversity in games back then, at least for me. Roblox was filled with all sorts of 3D worlds made entirely of discount lego, with all sorts of interactive games and adventures I could go on not just by myself, but with my older brother, who introduced me to Roblox in the first place. Zombie survival games, space exploration games, war games, disaster survival games, and so much more were on Roblox for me to play with all sorts of people around the world. Meanwhile, many websites for Flash games had equally diverse 2D singleplayer games, which were often more polished and feature rich than the simpler 3d games on Roblox. They were my taste of diverse singleplayer experiences, ranging from action games to puzzle games to management games to arcade games to everywhere in between. I could find all sorts of neat and interesting stuff to play, and this diverse set of ideas and games were what motivated me to create my own.
I can't imagine having grown up playing only standard run of the mill AAA console games and having all the same interests or outlooks that I have now. I had access to a few consoles throughout my childhood, and I don't remember them nearly as fondly as the old computers. I could only play certain games while following certain rules; I could only play a few big titles with little variety, I could only play the single player mode since multiplayer was locked behind a paywall, I couldn't just search for new games or look around whenever I got bored, and more that escape me after years of not touching a game console. There were a few games I really liked on console, like Halo, but there generally wasn't a lot that I really missed on PC.
I see a lot of console gamers considering the switch to PC lately, but being put off by confusion over things like cost and the benefit of PC. Or, they may just writing off PC as little more than the place to go for better graphics. Either way, I thought I would write this article to share why PC gaming is so special to me, and why it has little to do with the hardware or the graphics or anything like that. It's not about the enthusiast options that the PC allows for, but rather some more general benefits.
Note that this is an article about the great things about a PC, not the shortcomings of a console. It's not meant to be strictly a comparison article about why one is overall better than another. I love my gaming PC, but I don't outright hate consoles, and the way I intend to write this article, I don't expect anyone to read this list and immediately throw their console out the window and never buy a console again. That being said, just because I don't have a rabid seething hatred for consoles doesn't mean I don't dislike some aspects of them. Even then, I'll shy away from the "Your console is GARBAGE!!!111" style of writing and instead focus on the reasons that there'll probably never be a gaming platform quite like PC.
All that being said, allow me to begin. Gaming on the PC is mostly about freedom in all sorts of varieties and factors, so I'll sort of walk through the steps of playing a game on PC (obtaining the game, playing it, configuring it, etc) naturally and I'll explain where the various freedoms come in.
On PC, you're spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing a game to play in several ways.
First off, there's a crazy amount of different games coming out for the PC at practically all times. You've got your standard faire of top-dog AAA titles with marketing and the latest graphics, for starters. However, anyone can program a game on their computer and can set it up on a website to download, or they can find a way to sell it. So, you also have a wide variety of other games of various scopes and sizes. You've got big MMOs with decently sized budgets designed to promote interaction between players in various worlds. Some of these are even free to play, such as Runescape and Eve Online. You've got AA titles that try to go for at least some of the polish of big AAA titles but focus more into a certain aspect or mode of gameplay. For example, Killing Floor 2 is an extremely slick co-op zombie shooter. While many other big AAA titles have multiple modes of play and may throw a "Zombies" mode in as an extra, Killing Floor has a laser focus on the zombie mode and really carefully designs it and polishes it to the highest degree for depth of gameplay and teamwork and options for the player. You have indie games made by one or maybe a few people on a shoestring budget that tend to be really unique and interesting. These tend to appeal to a specific niche; some are all artsy fartsy, some are retro-styled in some specific way, some play around with interesting mechanics, etc. The indie games tend to have stuff you won't see in the gameplay of other games, all for a low price tag. On top of that, there's a huge plethora of free games off all sorts of shapes and sizes, too. Whether you want to buy a big game that you'll play for years, a medium sized game you'll play for maybe several months, or a little unique indie adventure that you pay a few bucks for and work at for a few weeks or even a few days or hours, the PC has you covered thanks to the combination of being easy for developers to access and develop for, yet valuable thanks to a large and diverse presence of players for both big and small game developers to appeal to.
As far as game genres go, PC has almost everything. From Action to Adventure, from Shooters to peaceful games, from 2D side scrollers to the latest 3D adventures, there's an extremely wide variety of genres and games available. There's even some genres that lack popularity on other platforms, such as various kinds of strategy games, MOBAs, and more competitive First Person Shooters. Of course, those are just genres. Each genre has a zillion subgenres on PC; for example, there's not just a few main first person shooters, but rather a ton focused around fast paced arcade gameplay, and others focused on slow-burn tactical gameplay with tension running high, and others focused on a mixture of the two with team work being a must, and plenty of others. On top of that, there's all sorts of indie games that might put a spin on a genre that otherwise feels the same across most games.
One of the best places to find spins like these are in games made for game jams. Game jams are competitions where developers have to make a game within a finite amount of time, usually following a theme or some rules. There's game jams where a game literally has to be based around a "prompt", which leads to some interesting games. For example, I once saw a prompt that went "The more you have, the worse it gets", and a game I played based on this prompt was a first person shooter about shooting demons where once the demons died, their essence was chained to you, restricting your movement and slowing you down until you killed too many and couldn't move further across the level. You could let go of their essence to get your mobility back, but it meant the demons you killed would respawn back to where they first started in the level. This meant you had to weigh the benefit of movement and progression with the benefit of having less demons alive to kill you. There's other limitations and types of jams, too; some that require developers to use specific assets, some that force a certain technical limitation on the game, etc. Because these games are hastily developed for fun and for sport rather than to make money, they'll almost certainly never see the light of day on a console unless an indie developer decides to make a full retail game based on a jam game they made earlier, and for the purpose of open judging and developer expectations, these games are usually released completely for free and at no cost online. Because of this, the PC has access to a massive library of both free and creative games that will never see the light of day on any other platform.
Of course, once you've picked a game to play on PC, you still have yet another great option of where you buy the game. Steam is the biggest and best known store on PC, offering players all sorts of benefits such as achievements, cloud saves, cross platform play for Mac and Linux versions of games, easy mod support via the Steam Workshop, forums and communities for a game built right into Steam, built in chat with friends and the ability to easily join a friend's multiplayer game, tons of great sales, etc. Of course, there's other platforms to buy games, too. If you hate having DRM in your games that controls when and how you choose to play a game, you can buy games from Gog.com. None of the games on that website have DRM, and you can download them for Windows, Mac, and Linux without installing a client, although there's an optional client you can install if you wish. There's also itch.io, a website dedicated to indie and hobby game developers. There's all sorts of those "game jam" games I talked about available here; just check the front page, and you'll see a flood of unique and interesting games you can play for free, sometimes without even downloading anything! There's also games with a "Choose your own price" feature; you can usually put in $0 if you want to play a game for free, or if you like the game and appreciate the developer's work, you can spend money on the game as a sort of donation! Some games even give you extra goodies for paying optionally, such as soundtrack files for you to listen to, or artwork or concept art for the game.
On PC, you're not limited in what kinds of games you play or how you access them, and that's only the beginning of the freedom you get with games.
Modern PC games are well configured enough right out of the box that if you fire them up on at least a somewhat decent computer (like the one from my previous article on getting a budget gaming PC), the game will likely run fine and will have sensible default controls and settings and the like, so if you really don't care about configuration, all you need to do is jump into the game and play.
But if there's anything you want to change at all, you can do it.
You can increase your video settings to play the game with prettier visuals if your computer can handle it and you're OK with a lower framerate. Likewise, you can decrease the visual fidelity of the game to make the game look simpler or run faster if that's what you want in order to get your games running on your potato. You can also toggle off post-processing effects like depth of field and motion blur. This is particularly important to me because I feel they often make games uglier while also decreasing performance. Either way, you can have your games running at whatever settings you like, not whatever setting ships with the game by default.
But, it's more than just video settings. Want to swap your controls? You can bind all sorts of functions to any key on PC. In fact, you can even hook up a controller to your PC and most games will recognize and make use of it like on a console. And, in some games that allow even more configuration, such as Counter Strike and Quake, you can set up advanced key bindings via the console to bind multiple functions to a single key in order to map out more advanced behavior than a simple control to a single key. For example, at the beginning of a round in Counter-Strike, you can buy weapons. I could click through the menus like normal, or I could use the console in the game to set up my K key so that whenever I press it, it buys my favorite weapons for me so that I don't have to click through the menus to buy my weapons.
You can also configure other auxillary settings. You can tune things like the field of view to strike your preferred balance between seeing everything you need to while keeping the game a comfortable visible size to play. Or, you can adjust aspects of the heads up display to display more important information at a glance or to change how information is displayed. You can even configure things like precise sound volume, so maybe you want the music in a game to be louder than the sound effects so that you can really jam out to the soundtrack as you play the game, or maybe you want it the other way around so that you can hear vital sound cues from enemies. Last time I played Halo on a console, there was no way to adjust the music volume and sound effect volume individually, so when the gunshots were waaaay louder than the stellar soundtrack for the game that I wanted to hear, I had to make the choice between deafening myself with the gunfire just to hear the stupidly quiet music or missing out on the music to keep the volume of the sound effects reasonable. I was so disappointed that I stopped playing it on console and never came back because I just couldn't hear the music for the game, and I'm a fan of the soundtracks of most games I play, so not being able to hear it is disappointing to me.
So, you can configure games to play the way you want. Great, you might remark. Anything else, you may understandably retort up to this point in the article, or is the PC just a platform for strict shoppers and setting tweakers?
When you beat a game like Skyrim or Fallout, you might play it again a few more times with some difficulty tweaks and different character builds in order to experience greater or different challenges than before, or in order to see how the game feels when played differently, or in order to see different outcomes in the game. However, after that, if you're on PC, things get real interesting. Large communities of people who like to program and tinker with software often begin making modifications for these games and releasing them. These modifications can add all sorts of new features to a game. They can add new areas, new items and weapons, new characters, new NPCs and enemies to fight or interact with, and all sorts of things. There's mods that turn all the dragons in Skyrim into Thomas The Tank Engine, mods that rebalance the weapons and combat to provide more depth to combat and gameplay, mods that add new quests and locations to spice up the game, and even mods that turn the game into something else entirely, adding a completely new world and different story into the engine of an already existing game.
This isn't just limited to single player games, too. There's all sorts of games that facilitate mods even in a multiplayer environment, so that you can experience fun, unique, interesting, or just plain crazy mods with friends. Some multiplayer games allow you to make new maps for them, others allow that on top of some server plugins, and others have even more in depth mod support that allow you to turn the game into something else entirely.
Different games have different philosophies to modding. Some games don't have tools for modding and don't allow very much of it, save for maybe some cosmetic or skin changes. Some games have some server-side plugin support for gameplay changes on multiplayer servers. Some games are built from the ground up with modding in mind, such as Garry's Mod. There's all sorts of different games on PC that support mods to varying degrees, so that no matter what you're interested in, you can always find a different take on the game you like, instead of playing it once or twice and moving on to the sequel.
Speaking of sequels and the inexorable progression of time, another huge benefit of the PC that consoles don't see is backwards compatibility for games. Windows is the shining example of backwards compatibility as far as OSes go, and it's a large reason why Microsoft has been able to dominate the personal computing market for so long. Stick a Windows XP game in the disk drive of your Windows 10 computer, and it'll probably just work. Even if it doesn't work out of the box, most older games get community patches or fan patches that fix the issues of running that particular old game on new hardware with an OS. Even on Linux, most old Windows games run pretty great in Wine. As for DOS games, DOSBOX almost always runs them all perfectly. While none of these solutions are perfect, they're reasonably reliable, and are more diverse and often times just better than the options you might get on other platforms. On most consoles, your only option to play a particularly old game on your modern console is to either buy a sequel, or buy a reboot, and even then that's not a perfect solution. Sometimes reboots just "Get it wrong"; they mess with the art style or the audio design or something else that really kills the vibe that the original title worked so hard to set. Generally, if you want to run an old game the same old way you played it back in the old days, the PC is the best platform for you since you can use emulators or patches or compatibility layers capable of running the old game directly on modern stock hardware. Instead of playing a reboot that gets it wrong, you can play the original as it released with all it's faults and successes.
The most obvious benefit of PC in this regard is the lack of an online multiplayer fee paywall that prevents you from playing any game online unless you pay up to one specific company. Most console manufacturers charge a multiplayer fee because they want to make the money back on the console that they sold at a loss, not strictly because they need the money to pay for servers or anything like that. In fact, most multiplayer services on both console or PC are paid for either by the game developers themselves, or by players hosting their own servers. As a result of this paradigm, playing multiplayer on PC is plenty cheaper and lacks a significant fee while still bringing the same quality of connection and play that you would expect on a console. Conceptions that the PC lacks a multiplayer fee because the multiplayer is of worse quality are merely a misconception.
But if you look into it, that's not all the PC has going for it as far as multiplayer goes. On PC, you have a lot of different methods of communicating with other players and community members online. Discord is the first that comes to mind, but there's also other places community can form too, such as on forums, in other kinds of chat rooms, and even on IRC channels for the more old fashioned out there. On console, your friends may all use an Xbox chat service that requires you to be sat down in front of your console in order to participate, whereas on PC, you can access most of these chats and forums and communities on both PC and even mobile. PC simply has more options for communities for games as far as interactions and chat with other players goes. In fact, many console players use a phone or computer to access forums for a console game.
However, it's not just that the PC has a variety of options for interacting with other community members technologically, but also that it can facilitate more communities in general. There's a wider variety of games on PC simply due to how accessible it is for developers combined with the large number of players that can be reached on PC. This means a wide variety of different kinds of players one might meet. You've got the often silly and zany yet competitive nature of a community for a game like Team Fortress 2, the strategic and cooperative community for a game like Killing Floor, the more competitive community of a game like Counter Strike or Quake, and many others. Going beyond the specific games just a bit, you've also got communities dedicated to multiple games. There's communities around old abandonware DOS games, communities around a tree of realistic tactical shooters, communities around games you can mod the hell out of, communities around everything between and more, and much more. There's even weirdo websites just like this one!
However, that's just for chatting with other players and finding and sharing content about a game. What about actually playing with other players?
Anyone can host servers for games on PC if they're willing to put in a bit of spare hardware, internet bandwidth, and a little bit of fiddling. This means there's all sorts of different servers you'll find for some of your favorite games. A game like Team Fortress 2, for instance, will have some servers that are normal and just dedicated to standard casual play, sort of like the kind you would be used to on a console game. You might also find some servers dedicated to one particular map, gamemode, or a small pool thereof. However, there's more to these servers than that. Look further, and you'll begin seeing all sorts of really interesting servers that aren't quite what you'll expect. Within Team Fortress 2's server browser, you can find servers entirely dedicated to the trade of cosmetic items and hats, servers where every stat of every weapon, including both the good and bad stats, are multiplied by 10 (so a rocket launcher with +70% rocket speed and -30% blast radius will have absurdly fast rockets that only deal direct hit damage), as well as servers where every shot is a critical hit no matter what, servers where players go to idle the game and earn items over time or just to hang out and chat while repeatedly killing the idle players, servers where each team is comprised of one specific class and it's pitted as one class against another (how would a team full of scouts do against a team full of soldiers, for instance?), servers that are literally just headshot-only sniper duels, and much more that escape me right now. Even though I like to stick to the vanilla game, sometimes I pop into a weird crit-only server or a 10x stat server or a trade server just to mess around and expand my horizons of a game just a little. Oh, and that's just Team Fortress 2. A game like Counter Strike has custom headshot-only servers to force players to practice their aim, as well as "retake" servers where every round starts with the terrorists having already planted the bomb and the counter terrorists having the objective of retaking it right away, with just enough positioning and equipment to make a retake feasible, trade servers for trading weapon skins, surf servers for surfing along level geometry, as well as all sorts of other kinds of servers that escape me at the moment since I play TF2 plenty more often than Counter Strike. Either way, there's lots of different games with loads of different community servers to explore.
Oh, and that's before I even get into MMO's. That is, Massively Multiplayer Online games. Many of these are only possible on PC simply due to the nature of certain kinds of players on PC versus that of consoles. I'm not going to write much about them because I rarely play these sorts of games, but if you want to partake in a massive online world with hundreds or even thousands of other players, there's something for everyone. There's Runescape for casual social play and grinding, Eve Online for people who want to focus on economy-oriented gameplay as well as combat in a complex cyberspace, Planetside 2 for people who want to participate in massive wars and battles with a wide variety of futuristic weapons and vehicles, Dead Frontier for people who want to attempt to outlast a zombie apocalypse, establishing settlements and building up powerful characters over time, and much more that escape me now. If you want to play a game with a huge number of players at once, the PC has you spoiled for choice on that front, too.
All these different kinds of servers may be confusing to you if you're new to PC gaming, and that's fine. I encourage you to explore a game and the community thereof at your own pace to your own preference. All you really need to know is that, with the freedom to host whatever kinds of servers they like, players on PC end up forming all sorts of different communities and custom-made game modes within a single game to serve every niche of player. This means that no matter what kind of player you are within a game's community, there's a sub community out there that's right for you, with a neat forum or discord server to chat on and a game server that's just right for how you like to play the game.
I see a lot of banter regarding the PC now that the next-generation consoles are coming out. A lot of people are saying that the newest game consoles coming to market will blow anything the PC has to offer at a competitive price out of the water. And honestly, I think that's somewhat true. Some of the speculation is just hype, but I think that, in a best case scenario for the PC, a PC build equivalent to either console might cost a few hundred extra bucks, at least on launch. The prices for a PC or a console will get a lot closer as time goes on and new hardware is introduced that you can use to build a more powerful PC for cheaper.
However, the idea that a game console will come out that will make the idea of playing games on a computer truly obsolete is patently absurd for all the reasons above. These consoles are always going to be made the same way they are now, and they're always going to have a bottom line similar to what they have now. They're not going to have the freedom of an open platform that the PC can provide. They going to be reasonably cheap, reasonably well made devices capable of playing a handful of reasonably high-quality AA and AAA games that are made by big enough companies to regularly release their games on console, plus all of the indie games that blow up big enough to make it onto consoles. And honestly, that's not half bad. Some people want to keep up with gaming casually, and that means picking a device that will be officially supported by the latest and most popular titles for a long time for a cheap price. That's a niche that consoles excel at, and while the PC can obviously allow you to do the same, some people don't want to have to learn how to look for a good deal in a computer or how to put their own computer together, even if it's fun for a lot of people who end up doing it.
But, the PC will always excel in other aspects over consoles, even if a fancy high-tech console gains an advantage over PC in one aspect of price versus performance for 6 months. PC will always have the most diverse set of games and ways to obtain them, as well as the most diverse communities and ways of playing games. It'll always have the freedom to play a wide variety of games, from the AAA and AA games to the old games to the indie games to everything in between. It'll always have the freedom for players to mod their games however they like and to enjoy them however they like, with configuration and patches and settings and the works. It's always the place for both game developers and game players to truly experiment with all sorts of games and ideas. The PC will always have this freedom that consoles can't emulate or fake.
Because of the unalienable freedoms of PC gaming, I'll personally take even a weak old netbook from 2010 over the latest game consoles coming out. Unlike what some suggest online, I don't feel any buyers remorse over owning a nice gaming PC just because a new console is coming out that will probably be plenty more powerful than it. I don't feel some need to have the latest thing or to brag about how expensive or powerful my computer is to puny consoles or to quickly hack together a $2000 computer to beat the latest consoles coming out because that's not whta PC gaming is about for me. PC gaming is about the freedom for me to play whatever game I want however I want, from the oldest of the old games to the weirdest of the indie titles to everything in between. And as long as PC has that freedom over consoles, consoles will never truly "kill" PC gaming.