What is the use case for owning a console or air fryer?

It does have both a floppy disc drive and 1mb of RAM to be fair. STFU Chucky Egg!

Easier to use use less things to go wrong. Just plug in the console and it works. No faffing with various drivers and troubleshooting, maintancence.

One hardware standard for developers to work across so gets the best out of the hardware. Some pc ports have been shit recently with drm etc.

Takes up less space, especially if you want a desktop set up. Less equipment needed etch, easier to integrate into home space

Need to upgrade often to maximise the usp of pc gaming (best performance etc, and ‘feeling’ like your rig is outdated quickly, pressure to keep up

Can resell games or give/lend to people

Cheaper hardware costs, can trade in consoles like games

More mainstream and perceived as less geeky (who cares I know but the normals will judge you)

Worse for the environment, more expensive energy costs (nitpicking here)

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Obviously lots of upsides likes cheaper digital games and choice of where to buy them. Better performance if you can afford it, certain genres are pc only or much better on pc with mouse and keyboard.

I’m sure my list can be easily refuted or is outdated as not used a proper rig for several years due to cost and space in my house

I own a Series X and PS5. I have a gaming PC with a GTX1070, so I hardly use that now because of how ancient it is.

I game mostly on my Series X, its all down to price. Have you seen how cheaply you can get games on Gamivo through the VPN trick? The extremely popular Palworld is about £3 at the moment, RE4 £12, Hades £1, Tomb Raider - Definitive Survivor Trilogy £4.

While MS continue to allow 3rd party key resellers, I will continue to invest into the Xbox ecosystem. The prices are just too crazy to ignore.

Gamivo looks a sure fire way to get scammed to fuck. Iffy as, would not be giving them any of my details.

Because they are most definitely not legit. You've only got to look at the subreddit to see how people have been screwed over. You may have been lucky, good for you. But sure as eggs are eggs, your data will not be terribly secure.

zagibu

I could attach my PC to the TV but the fan noise alone would drive me nuts. Another thing consoles do better these days is noise. Unless you are spending a lot of money, as soon as you fire up a heavy duty game on PC, the jet engines crank up.

Buying a 2nd hand PC is not something I would think about. Could you share a link to a 2nd hand PC that has better specs than a PS5 for £450?

As a console only gamer I think the old days of saying having a pc is a faff etc are a bit outdated. You can quite easily use one like a console now. Also my ps5 constantly needs updates, I have to download every game on to the hard drive and I have numerous graphics settlings to obsess over on most games too. Sounds a bit like a pc…

Having young kids who like to play videogames

I think something like that will appear, not necessarily from Valve, but someone will do it. It's taken a bit longer than usual for cheap hardware to catch up thanks to crypto and AI but laptop parts are in a really interesting place and there are some great little mini-PCs that are just a tiny box. Prices on those are still a bit higher than you'd like though, and obviously they can't compete with something sinking over 100 watts through it, but with how well the Steam Deck's holding on I think that something like that will do surprisingly well on games.

I don't really use gaming devices online, I just want to pay for my game and walk away, I don't want to be part of an online eco-system or reliant on a service.

I was assured that was impossible even on a console these days, I'd just have to conform, but it turned out to be somewhere between an extreme exaggeration and an outright lie. Thus far, I've only ever had to go online to patch something once.

I'm happy enough with consoles. When the opportunity to play the PC versions presented itself I wasn't exactly blown away by the difference. If you have the extra chromosome that qualifys you to work for Digital Foundry maybe there's a difference, Fallout 3 had the same excessive load times, same jank and weird animations, frame rate drops and same ugly character models as the PS3 version. If I played with my face centimetres away from the screen maybe I could really appreciate the assets being rendered more cleanly. At least the PS3 version wasn't crashing and glitching about once an hour.

Years after playing it, I discovered that the PS3 version of F.E.A.R. was supposed to be terrible. Somehow, I enjoyed the game, whatever made F.E.A.R. compelling for players must have been relatively intact in the PS3 version. It's just another version of the game with it's own quirks and it's own charms at the end of the day.

If they started putting PC games on physical media again with just a dial-a-pirate code wheel in the box, maybe then PC would be the best choice.

Where is the poll for this thread?

As others have said, console gaming is far smoother. Plug and play, no need to fiddle with graphical settings, comes with a controller, simple UI, can be notably cheaper than an equivalent PC and overall just feels far more social in a family environment than a PC. PC only feels worth it if you want a premium experience that involves tinkering with settings and often play alone or online. And even then you need to be able to seperate work and gaming if you work in a relevant field.

I personally can’t separate the feeling of working when trying to game on a PC. I imagine it’s how some folk hate working from home because they can’t switch off when their workstation is also their living room or bedroom.

I work as a software developer (occasionally) and do a lot of technical support. I know my way around a computer.

First and foremost, in common with a lot of the other posts on here, the idea of my gaming time resembling my job, in any small way, is extremely unappealing. Like Bongo I've experimented with a PC under the TV but there is always some element of friction. There is of course stuff you can do to get it to make more sense, but it never quite works 100%. Plus there it is feeling like work again. The screen scaling and/or resolution won't be right for every situation. You will always, always eventually need some form of mouse and keyboard. I've actually got one that is a wiimote style pointer with a small keyboard on the underside, about as perfect for the job as you can get, and it's still shite.

Secondly, PC's do not "just work". It's just not true, not to the level of a console. Nor should they be expected to. My job would be completely redundant if it were. There is always something that needs tweaking, especially when you have something new to sort out; new game, new hardware, etc. Emulators are in a whole other league. I think what people really mean is "it's easy to fix", which it is to the sort of people who are into PC gaming. Dare I say, I think a lot of people enjoy working on it - enjoy setting everything up "just so", troubleshooting an issue, getting something fancy working in a new and trivial way, getting the exact balance of settings working. I completely get it, I get that exact same kick out of various things in life. Indeed that's why I enjoy my job. But there it is again resembling what I've just got home knackered from doing.

Lastly, and this is very personal, but I'd be constantly chasing the dragon of improving performance. I'd never stop upgrading and I'd never be happy with what I had. With a console, it is what it is. Maybe a pro version will come out at some point and I'll throw a few hundred at it. That's it for 6-7 years.

So I could spend thousands upon thousands of pounds and a lot of time getting the PC-under-the-telly concept working, which is a constantly moving target, or I could chuck a PS5 under there which was actually built for that very job and be happy.

Oh and yeah exclusives. I know things are changing nowadays but it factors in. Sony's exclusives are amongst the best games you can play