Regardless of the accuracy of the report or not (and I reiterate, I don’t even care about the original post) if Sony and Nintendo were to go under, I’d be a 100% PC gamer at that point.
As of now, I’m already doing 80% of my gaming on PC. This last generation was a humongous let down for me. I’m sitting out the current gen until something I have to have comes out of Sony’s first party studios, other than that, I’m back on PC. Multiplat games will all be PC for me. PC games scale upwards, console games never do. I can play PC games that I bought 30 years ago, today, on my current PC, and future games that I buy I can play on my PC in the future. The trend in consoles has now changed in that regard as well, so no one will be playing physical older gen games on new gen consoles. Too much money to be had selling emulated digital ports. Hell, even emulation on PC offers more benefits to playing older games than on their console counterparts via BC. How about key remapping? Higher resolution polys? Better texture filtering or no texture filtering if that’s your thing?
PC games. I can play them how I want to play them. If the frame rate isn’t good enough, I can scale back the graphics. If it doesn’t have a control scheme, I want, I can create one. I can use almost any input device that I’m comfortable with on PC. Once console versions of fighting games die, guess which version will still have a thriving online scene? PC. Guess which version also stands to gain new players once a console version dies? PC. Guess which system will always have free online match making? PC.
I originally ditched PC gaming back in 2003 or so after picking up a PS2 about half way through its lifespan. PC ports were pretty bad back then, and on top of that, not a lot of games were ported. Plus, back then, PC games were dicking us up and down with DRM and that was another reason I quit. Yeah, I could have no-cd and hacked that shit, but it was insulting to begin with, and I didn’t want to support it. Recently some companies cough Ubisoft… thought it was a great idea to make DRM even more ridiculous, and it hurt them in their wallets where it counts.
I remember back in the day when PC gaming was PC gaming and console gaming was console gaming. You bought console games on console and PC games were another beast. Being part of both worlds was great in the late 90’s and had so much variety. Sometimes you got PC ports of console stuff, but not often, since both platforms offered different play experiences. Now a days, things have changed. People tried putting PC games on consoles (all the fucking shooters what the fuck, how can people play that shit with a pad??) and consoles became home to shitty and under performing PC ports that never saw PC ports. PC’s then became home of old school console games via indy developers who love the classics. Now, we’ve seen PC gaming become quite healthy and people are buying games on PC again, and PC ports are being released of console titles that perform much better than their console counterparts. Why anyone is still gaming on a console for anything other than exclusives at this point is beyond me.
Also, lets look at what’s coming up. Both the new consoles are x86 architecture. This means, these games are developed on x86 machines for x86 machines. Every game will have no excuse as to why a PC port is not made and not up to par and not polished. Native code is native code and won’t need tweaks for different architectures on compile. No tweaks will be needed for custom processor vs custom processor. No game this day will be built on a foreign architecture dev kit. It’s all x86. This is a beacon of light for PC gaming. And, it’s even possible that console exclusives could be played on a PC with library wrappers (similar to Windows programs being used in Linux via WINE) since the base architecture will be exactly the same.
So, anyone who says PC gaming is gay, fuck you. PC gaming is the most customizable and user friendly way to play games. Yeah, it might be a pain in the ass to tweak games and time consuming, but to get a game to play the way YOU want and not the restrictive console way that forces you to play the game the way IT wants, is well worth the trade off. And if you still think PC gaming is gay, then fuck you. Twice. In the asshole with a spoon.