Forget about the PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 - the PC is still the best platform for games. The PC is better because it's infinitely upgradable compared to a console, it's got more capabilities and options, it has better multiplayer options and you can use it to do other things. If you think about what the console makers are doing right now you'll realize that they are trying to turn them into PCs.

All of the major consoles now allow you to do things that are essentially native to PCs or originated with them. Netflix, browsers, Voip, online communities... sure, all things that PCs have done first and still do better. Now they are also coming up with ways to turn consoles into DVRs, another area the PC has covered. You can be forgiven if you start wondering why consoles exist in the first place then if all of this can be done on a PC already. It comes down to scale, control over the platform and price.



You see, consoles are easier to support, cheaper to make and cheaper to develop for; they also don't require you know much more than how to operate a remote control. There's also the fact that if you like online multiplayer games consoles have less hackers than PCs but that is due to the consoles locked down nature more than anything. It's simple, if they catch you messing around with the hardware or software they lock you out of their network - their whole network that they control. Hackers in PCs will get locked out of a game or at the worst get kicked out of Steam. Consoles can be seen as being similar to Macs - not impossible to hack, just a little harder.

A gaming PC is in general going to cost at least twice as much or even 3-4 times the price of a console. The thing about a PC though is that this money is an investment that can be used to do other things, not just play games or try to do things on a console that you could do better on a PC (Twitter and Facebook come to mind.) In addition to the obvious benefits of having a faster computer for games, upgrading a CPU, memory or GPU will give you benefits with things like video editing, watching online videos or even just opening up a spreadsheet faster. That's what you get for your money - flexibility and more power.

This has been top-of-mind lately because I'm playing the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 beta on PC with a bunch of people around the country I used to play BF2 with. My gaming rig was almost exactly three years old and while it was no slouch, it just couldn't keep up with the BFBC2 beta as well as I'd liked. That meant upgrade time! As a geek this is an exciting time where I get to spend hours looking at Newegg, reading reviews and checking the hardware charts at Tomshardware.com. The price wasn't going to be cheap but if I get three years out of this setup its more than worth it.

On my own this is hardly something to spur me to write a little post about and that's what makes it so striking. Out of the six people I've reconnected with in just the past week to play BFBC2 - five have upgraded or bought new PC rigs ostensibly to just play this game. So we have six people (including myself) that just dumped over $500+ each into computers to play one PC game. To a PC gamer this is part of life and no big deal, to console gamers this is seen as nuts and proves how superior consoles are. From our point of view spending the money on a game we plan on spending hundreds of hours on (I've got about a 1,000 hours on BF2) makes more than enough sense to open up our wallets.

Sure consoles get more games now, that's just a fact because piracy and development costs are not in the PCs favor due to the myriad different configurations and the open nature of the operating systems (when compared to consoles) but is that what console gamers want to brag about? "Our system is so closed-up that game prices can be essentially colluded upon by the various publishers and the manufactures can hold us ransom to their closed gaming networks and repair shops?" That doesn't sound like a winning elevator pitch to me.

So what's my point? My point is that even though I have a PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 my first love will always be my PC because I can tweak it, I can upgrade it and if it breaks I can fix it myself. Alone these points make it superior to a console even without tossing in dedicated gaming servers that let us pick a server with lower latency which is critical. There are also the free browser-based games like Tiger Woods Online, Combat Arms and others that we can play for free. Let's not forget about true keyboard support for MMOs and chat options that don't make everyone sound like they are underwater or cause lag when too many people use them. There are plenty of reasons why a PC is better for gaming.

< Prev		Next >