You know lately if you've been paying attention to the news here, a lot of PC gaming stuff has been popping up. Now I'm not talking about actual PC games (though admittedly the issues do involve PC versions of games) but the quality of PC versions, their relation to consoles, and the attitudes of PC gamers.
Take the new Battlefield game coming out. For some reason there is this huge uproar about the quality of the PC version vs. the Console version. Console owners are whining about how the PC version is so much better, Dice telling everyone to shove it, PC gamers loving it and walking around like their... well you know.
And today I noticed a FarCry 3 story stating that the PC version is going to be superior to the console version. This is just one of the many types of stories that are floating around. All stories designed to stroke the ego of PC gamers, with console gamers being pissed off for some fairly ridiculous reasons.
FACT: PC games will always have superior visual and sound quality to console games. There is really only one reason you would need to support this, and that's that PC gaming has the advantage of having ever evolving hardware. It can constantly use state of the art technology right now, whereas consoles are closed off in a hardware sense and only evolve after the end of a console's life. You wouldn't expect an old vinyl record player to be able to output lossless audio like the kind you'd get out of a .wav file would you? So you can't expect consoles to output the kind of quality a PC with the latest tech can output. So in that regard, I can see the point devs like Dice have.
But where I'm having an issue is, who the hell cares? I'm about to make a radical generalization that is not at all true about every member of the group I'm generalizing, it's merely discussing an observation. Why does anyone care about stroking the ego of the PC crowd? They have to be the most entitled, elitist bunch of gamers most of us have ever come across and it's ALWAYS about the GRAPHICS with them. Why is it that so many articles lately have to make PC gamers feel better about the quality of their version of any game? As a PC gamer, you should know that even a shoddy port will look better on your gaming rig than on any console, yet for some reason this massive sense of entitlement raises up as if PC gamers are "owed" something and you have devs practically bottle feeding them and giving in to the temper tantrums.
I suppose the fact that, by comparison in a marketing sense, PC gaming is small next to consoles. Most of gaming devs develop for consoles, consoles have a hell of a lot more variety and options of games that will never appear on PC, devs fear piracy on PC more than they do on consoles, etc... So maybe PC only devs, and devs looking to move into that realm will do anything they can to keep what fanbase they have for their games. Of course, once you give an inch, people tend to take a mile, and that's where the sense of entitlement comes in.
Every article here that so much as hints at PC in even the smallest way is bombarded by PC fanboys down playing consoles and posting comment after comment about their rig and how it only cost them $200 more than a launch PS3 to have "teh bestest grfx evar" and how "PC's are a gen ahead of consoles." Seriously, if you have to keep saying it then I guess there must be something wrong with the games you're not playing on that PC, or you're trying to convince people that PC gaming is bigger than it is.
We get it, PC's are superior in hardware to consoles. Always have been, always will be. Anyone who doesn't get this fact has probably been living in a cave somewhere with their eyes shut, and their ears blocked. But if you're really into gaming, then you know 2 things. First, gaming isn't about the graphics. Graphics are the most superficial aspect of gaming. Take the sh*ttiest game in the world and give it the most photorealistic graphics possible, and you're left with a very polished, very "pretty" turd.
Second, console gaming is far larger than PC gaming and is where the real money is. Quite frankly, people will ALWAYS choose a convenience first. A console is built for everyone to have the exact same experience at a cheaper price than a PC, with years of never having to buy an upgrade to make your games only look better but not actually BE any better. It is for this reason devs make more games for consoles, and why the industry focuses on consoles to a much greater degree than PC's.
I'm sure this blog will be torn apart by innumerable PC fanboys once again talking about their rig, why if you do the calculations PC gaming is cheaper, throw in some reference to Steam, and accuse people of being to lazy to spend $600 to build their own "better than consoles" gaming PC. I don't really care. I'm just sick of the ego stroking PC gamers seem to need to have and the devs who bend over backwards to give it to them just because they can't be satisfied with already having the superior hardware.
I believe there is a word for someone who is clearly superior yet has to have everyone continuously acknowledge it and have everyone appease him/her for it. I don't know what it is right now, but if anyone does feel free to post
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