Why Gaming PCs Have No Future.

[Geek-9pm]

Right.  Gaming PCs Have No Future.     
No, not just me. A lot of experts say that buying any PC just for gaming is a bad investment. The reasons fall into three or four areas. With some variations, thee nagataory ideas are: are:
 1. With newer hardware your investment becomes less desirable
 2. Your will get tired of playing old games on old hardware.
 3. For the money, a PC is not the best game experience.
 4. (You will find another reason. Think about the VR stuff.)

Here are a few links that will break your heart.    

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2150597/gaming-investment.html
Yeah, bad investment.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/shouldnt-purchase-gaming-laptop/
Never with a laptop.

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/playstation-nation-1000002/should-i-buy-a-ps4-or-a-good-gaming-pc-29429027/
Buy something else.

There is more. It gets worse. The big commercial interests are going to make all the money they can for as long as thy can. They want you to get new stuff incrementally better this year and will be junk next year. Such are not seeking your happiness,
 -- they just want your money. 

But you can be happy anyway.   

Footnote:  Did you read this?
http://www.pcgamesn.com/best-pc-games

[DaveLembke]

I dont see gaming computers going away myself. Those who want to game with a PC will game with a PC. I'm a gamer and made the complete switch over from game consoles to PC in the late 1990s after the Playstation. While I liked my Playstation, N64, Sega Genesis, Super NES, NES, and Atari2600, the one thing that was a problem with them with exception to the Atari 2600 not so much was the game prices. Back with the Atari 2600 I was able to get games for between $3 and $15 with most games in the $5 to $10 price tag. NES came along and most games were above $20 each. SNES came out and games were $30-$50 each. Sega Genesis also had the same price tags. N64 some games went above the $50 price tag each. Playstation came out and games were also generally in the $50+ range each.

What I found is that the driving force to get a game console was games that were only available for that console. Years ago when I had my Atari and NES, home computers were way outside of the price tag of owning a new one yet for $200 you can have a game console and play the games on the color TV vs paying $2000 for a computer that could do the same thing.

Video Rental stores were very successful with renting video games. This i believe lead to most of the success of game consoles as for if someone was able to afford a game console they could just rent games  for $2 or $3 for a specified period of time that varied from video rental stores based on how generous of time they were for each title. Additionally if you wanted to play a game that a friend owned, they could just bring it with them to your house and everyone could play it on your game console. Playing games as rentals or with friends games acted like game trials. If the games were really good people felt leveraged to make that sometimes painful purchase to have that game title and sacrifice something else in their lives to have that game title. For example after the 3rd time renting a game and say almost $10 spent you realize that you need to buy that title because if you remain on a rental only basis its going to cost more to play that game than it is to just buy it outright. Games were also able to be purchased used and the used games worked with no licensing hassle that comes with PC games.

The internet came along and changed gaming. Ever since I got the internet in 1995, I was finding all sorts of free or low cost games that were fun to play and I was no longer having to fork out around $50 average for each video game. Shareware, Trials, and Freeware all of a sudden was so much better. Additionally I was able to buy games for the PC at a number of places for price tags of $1 all the way up to as much as you are willing to spend on whatever game title. Additionally many of the games that I like to play were being offered in both PC and Console so I could play games that I use to be leveraged into having to buy a whole new game console just to play a specific title on my same computer I have always had and maybe I just need to buy a $60 video card to do so as games evolve and hardware requirements increase. PC Games also opened me up to Online Gaming with others on the internet. Prior to internet I played some modem to modem type games or games that could be multiplayer with a serial cable between two computers, but now instead of being single-player only games as for most PC games were single player before the internet, now you can play with many people and instead of only able to play with 2 or 4 people maximum at a game console you could be with a group of 40 people etc such as World of Warcraft. The game consoles also caught up with this by also making their systems able to connect to the internet for online gaming where people dont need to be sitting next to you in your home and you can be playing with anyone around the world with a means of connecting with you.

Games have changed though for consoles. Many of them now with hard drives and requiring logging into accounts where games are downloaded and stored to the hard drive of the game system. This is to the benefit of the fact that your games no longer get lost or damaged. But the games are not able to be shared with friends unless you logon to their system as yourself. Sure you can still get games in the stores which can be moved system to system. But I can see this phasing out in the future which would increase the number of copies sold as for it would kill off the used game market forcing everyone to buy new and register the games to user accounts that are bonded to that account.

I use to get games used from Gamestop and other game stores used for PC, but then they did away with that because people were installing games or duplicating discs and then selling the game back to get most of their money back. Some games registered would be bought used and whoever bought it used would run into problems installing the games. So the used PC game market at these stores has dried up.

Myself, I havent bought any brand new game consoles since Play Station 1 in the 1990s when they first came out. But I have since acquired a PS2 for $40 about 8 years ago and a PS3 used for free that had a crashed hard drive and dead bluray player. I was able to get the PS3 working by putting in a 40GB SATA HDD from a laptop in which on boot it formatted the HDD and the OS thats on the ROM of the PS3 made the 40GB HDD ready for gaming. My daughter who is 12 uses the PS3 for mostly Minecraft and the 40GB HDD from the laptop that I got for free that was dead, its HDD lives on whereas the rest of the laptop went to recycle.

I am not going back to console gaming myself. VR doesnt interest me as for I am content with a flat screen display in front of me for now. Someday if I want VR, I will have one that connects to my PC. I have thousands of games to pick from to play for PC. A good game never dies. And one benefit of PC gaming for me is that its not just a game system, I can be listening to music, downloading new games or a linux distro to try out at the same time that I am gaming as well as have browser open and be waiting to make a purchase on ebay on a auction that has 15 minutes left in which I will minimize the game and go make my final bid at 20 seconds left to try to bid snipe it without using bid snipe software. Lastly PC games can play on a vast variety of computers. You can acquire computers for free when others have thrown in the towel on them for simple problems or only problem being they are too slow for them, yet the computers run the older games fine. Game consoles they only made so many of each console and your stuck with having to find a specific console to play specific games, however Play Station was very cool in making the PS2 and PS3 backwards compatible for earlier Playstation game support. This kind of support I hadnt seen prior until the Atari 7800 with backwards support for the Atari 2600 games. My one friend had the Atari 7800 but I didnt have one the 2600 played my games of choice for the time and NES came along as was so much better than Atari 7800 that I wanted the NES with Super Mario Brothers which came free with the system new.

I have a old video game system collection. But its just a collection. In a box not used anymore. PC gaming is for me for now and the future. It would take something really catchy to grab my attention to a new game console. I dont see anything catching me in a way that I need that console. So I will stick with the  PC gaming.

[BC_Programmer]

I don't think any of your links really support your argument, Geek. Aside from being Forum posts -  except the middle one which points out that "Gaming Laptops" are stupid, which is hardly a surprise - It's unclear what you read in them that had you come up with "bad investment" and "buy something else" respectively.

1. With newer hardware your investment becomes less desirable

But this applies for Console systems as well. Both the XBox One and the Playstation 4 received redesigned versions, with both receiving upgraded hardware versions as well.


2. Your will get tired of playing old games on old hardware.

Why would that be? And again that isn't unique to PC systems either. The difference is that when you get "tired" of your console, you buy the newer version, whereas PC systems can be upgraded. My build is coming up on three years now and still outperforms the latest consoles thanks to a Graphics Card Upgrade, the sort of thing  you simply cannot do with a console system (and probably wouldn't want to).

3. For the money, a PC is not the best game experience.

One can build a PC that is capable and competitive with the capabilities of a modern console for only a little more than the price of the XBox One or the PS4 system, while also getting the benefits of not having a machine useful only for vidya games. Another aspect is that the software is c heaper; Steam, the largest digital distributor, has very frequent sales. According to articles from the very same site hosting the forum for your last link, you can find this article which demonstrates it.

The primary advantage of consoles is largely their rather limited set of exclusive software titles as well as them not needing any technical know-how to setup and use.

I am no stranger  to consoles; In addition to a Wii U and a XBox One, I also have a NES, SNES, Super Famicom, Two Nintendo 64s, Three Gamecubes, and a collection of Nintendo Handhelds, so I'm not coming at this from a "Consoles are dumb" aspect either. (The second N64 was supposed to be a present but that's a long story, and the two extraneous Gamecube consoles were a cheap "FOR PARTS" lot on ebay which I repaired)

There is more. It gets worse. The big commercial interests are going to make all the money they can for as long as thy can. They want you to get new stuff incrementally better this year and will be junk next year. Such are not seeking your happiness,

I suspect you are referring to the next generation of CPUs and Graphics Cards; but would this not apply to Microsoft re-releasing the XBox One as the XBox One S and their upcoming "Scorpio" project that is an upgraded XBox One console? It seems like it would also apply to the Playstation 4's upgraded version, the Playstation 4 Pro.

[strollin]

There's a thread on Reddit called PC Master Race where they constantly point out how far superior a gaming PC is to a console.  https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/.  Those console gamers that switch to a PC are said to have "ascended".  LOL

Die hard gamers will ALWAYS go for a gaming PC over a console.

[DaveLembke]

Die hard gamers will ALWAYS go for a gaming PC over a console.

Couldnt agree more with this!    Adds my [LIKE] button 

[JordanMihailov]

I prefer the mouse movement 100% times more than the joystick ) Was a hadcore player at a time

[Geek-9pm]

Well, it is not just me. Others ae sakying hte gamer PC wil become an endangered specie  soon.
Here is a link that favors the PC gamer thing:
http://www.pcgamer.com/pc-build-guide-high-end-gaming-pc/

A $700 or $800 PC is head and shoulders above any console you can buy. Sure, you can go cheaper with a PC, but racing to the bottom isn’t what PC gaming is about. And once you start dipping below $600 it’s hard to see the advantage of the PC anyway.

In effect, they admit that a PC is better only if you  spend a lot of money on it. 

[DaveLembke]

Im not worried about any doomsayers that are console lovers. 

With so many great games that arent available for console, PC Gaming isnt dying off anytime soon. 

Myself being a cheapskate PC Gamer, I am not spending lots of money and the games I want to play play perfect for me.

Games that have system requirements of 4, 6, or 8-cores, I actually enjoy testing the games out on lesser hardware that I have and underclocking and sharing results with others. Sometimes I feel that the game manufacturers just state minimum and suggested requirements shooting from the hip and not actually testing. I have seen games play quite well on just 1 or 2 cores when paired with an ok GPU and the GPU taking most of the processing. The CPU on these test subjects are running at 90-100% use though, but when running a game you should be just running the game and so with the CPU and GPU only for gaming and no multitasking goes on you can many times run on lesser hardware.

The running on lesser hardware wasnt always for the fun of testing as it is these days for me, years ago I use to have whatever i had and if a game required a better CPU and video card I would always buy the game first and if it played on that hardware I was happy, if it didnt then I would buy the next affordable video card that would meet the requirements and usually be able to then play that game and other games with better performance.

Some games and software even had a hardware test in which if you didnt meet the requirements it wouldnt allow installation. Such as back in college I had a Celeron 700Mhz and got Visual Studio .Net 2002. It refused to install to my Celeron 700Mhz with the message that the CPU must be a Pentium Class Processor. So I borrowed my friends Pentium III 733Mhz socket 370 CPU, it then was satisfied with the hardware and I was able to install Visual Studio .Net 2002. Then after that shut computer down. Pop the Pentium III out and install it back to his computer and installed my Celeron 700Mhz back into it and Visual Studio .Net 2002 then ran. It was stupid that Microsoft put this hardware requirement at installation, because ok sure it would take maybe twice as long to compile code, but it was able to compile my code with no problems with that Celeron 700Mhz. 

[Geek-9pm]

Im not worried about any doomsayers that are console lovers. 
...
Some games and software even had a hardware test in which if you didnt meet the requirements it wouldnt allow installation. Such as back in college I had a Celeron 700Mhz and got Visual Studio .Net 2002. It refused to install to my Celeron 700Mhz with the message that the CPU must be a Pentium Class Processor. So I borrowed my friends Pentium III 733Mhz socket 370 CPU, it then was satisfied with the hardware and I was able to install Visual Studio .Net 2002. Then after that shut computer down. Pop the Pentium III out and install it back to his computer and installed my Celeron 700Mhz back into it and Visual Studio .Net 2002 then ran. It was stupid that Microsoft put this hardware requirement at installation, because ok sure it would take maybe twice as long to compile code, but it was able to compile my code with no problems with that Celeron 700Mhz. 

Right! That was stupid.
Still, Microsft isout to make as money as they can by tryingto make us moe away from what it enjoy.  I wonder how much landfill is needed for all the hardware tahthas been deprecated by Microsft and the others.  


Image surce:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3049457/Where-computer-goes-die-Shocking-pictures-toxic-electronic-graveyards-Africa-West-dumps-old-PCs-laptops-microwaves-fridges-phones.html

[BC_Programmer]

It is likely either some components of 2002 don't work or are unusably slow on the Celeron, possibly due to it's excruciating lack of cache; I doubt the JIT would be designed with a special codepath to account for the reduced cache. It's probably fine for actually running applications but Visual Studio .NET itself and trying to debug and everything they likely deemed outside the scope of what they wanted to target.

[Geek-9pm]

Most of yu are already heard Microsoft wants to get deep into the VR thing. They have said a new CPU with 8 cores will be in the new game console. Few of the motherboards used by games now are 8 core.
Besides that,  MS yu haveto use very fast RAM and lots of it.  Some are saying that
the VR,  vertial reality, is very adictive.

[DaveLembke]

Most of yu are already heard Microsoft wants to get deep into the VR thing. They have said a new CPU with 8 cores will be in the new game console. Few of the motherboards used by games now are 8 core.
Besides that,  MS yu haveto use very fast RAM and lots of it.  Some are saying that
the VR,  vertial reality, is very adictive.

Geek I was wondering if you had links to sources for this. Some say this and some say that is something that grabs attention but then leaves us to a google search guessing which sources you used.

[BC_Programmer]

Most of yu are already heard Microsoft wants to get deep into the VR thing.

Microsoft's tech in that field is Hololens, which is Augmented Reality, as it projects holograms into real space, rather than virtualizing space.

They have said a new CPU with 8 cores will be in the new game console. Few of the motherboards used by games now are 8 core.

Yes, their upcoming "Scorpio" is going to have 8 cores. The same as the current XBox One and XBox One S, as well as the PS4 Pro and PS4.

[Geek-9pm]

Yes, BC has it right. Thay code named it "Scorpio" and was touted at a trade s how.

A new Xbox launches holiday 2017. Shares. Update: Microsoft's Mike Ybarra has revealed on Twitter that the Scorpio console will support Xbox 360 backwards compatibility. ... The motive for Microsoft's expediency is to attempt to keep up with the demands of gamers for emerging technologies like 4K, VR and HDR content.
Nov 2, 2016

Sorce:
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/project-scorpio-release-date-news-and-features-everything-we-know-about-microsoft-s-4k-ready-xbox-1323455
Which also says:

The motive for Microsoft's expediency is to attempt to keep up with the demands of gamers for emerging technologies like 4K, VR and HDR content. Another reason is that, should Microsoft wait any longer, high-end PCs that already support these technologies will only get further ahead in the race to reach that next high-fidelity visual plateau.

Shall I hold my breath?

[booxm]

Well, investing in a dolls' house is not a good investment either in my opinion and for my own tastes, but if someone likes dolls houses...
I mean, yeah hardware gets old so quickly, but if you like playing, and you want to play, you'd better find some money for it