Nah, the reason I said “very few” is because “all” in either case is not true. You can’t play Half Life Alyx on a console and you can’t play Astrobot on a PC, but these are exceptions to the rule.
Ultimately “best played” is wherever the player wants to play it. That’s the whole benefit of the console wars being over! We don’t need to fight over this silly stuff.
Openness is less true than it used to be, given the dominance of closed platforms like Steam and the aims of Microsoft. We’re all extremely lucky that Microsoft is as incompetent as it is and that Steam is not particularly user-hostile. The moment Gabe dies or decides to sell Valve to private equity will be a massive crisis point for PC gaming.
Something I’ve found with backwards compatibility on PC is that sometimes you’re better off running the console version under emulation than trying to get an old Windows .exe to behave itself. Good luck if it was made for windows 9x!
And yes, of course there’s still value in old PC parts, just like there’s still a lot of value in keeping an old dusty PS4 from 2013 that can inexplicably still run a lot of new releases in 2025. Keeping old shit working is great!
Emulators can run fine on a phone or an old dented MacBook Air from the 2010s, you don’t need a gaming PC for that. Likewise the low-end indie games and so on. And piracy, well, you’d need to do quite a lot of piracy to break even after buying an nvidia graphics card. It almost seems hypocritical to spend so much on one thing only to avoid spending on another.
Mods, yes, they’re a bit less common or interesting than they were 15-20 years ago, and some games like Quake and Doom and so on have mods on their console versions now, but that’s largely still a PC only thing, yes.
The other unspoken reason for PC gaming is because it’s expensive. It’s the bougie high-end option where you can spend a stupid amount of money to get a higher resolution higher frame rate experience.
Especially when it’s someone else paying for that storage. It’s like all of the video ads on the internet using up everyone’s mobile data.
I see this argument a lot and it always strikes me as odd. After all, if we keep our discussion to just games and turn the question around, what’s the point in having a big beefy gaming PC? There are very few exclusives there either.
The 360’s hardware had more in common with an old Apple Powermac than with a typical Windows PC.
Live service games are a natural monopoly and therefore need to be nationalized.
Yes that’s all well and good for programming computer code, but that’s not how making arguments through human-readable prose works.
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It’s interesting how this site hides their direct and clear recommendation to de-Google the Google phone on a completely different page from their recommendation to buy the Google phone, which is much more vague on the matter at best. Maybe it really is an ad after all.
Yes, considering the average westerner’s privacy is essentially exploited by Google every single day, telling the privacy-conscious person to just shut up and buy the Google phone without discussing alternatives makes this website read like it’s just another ad on an internet filled with ads.
In addition to what others have said, neoliberalism more specifically has always been cruel, violent, and authoritarian since the beginning. Margaret Thatcher was not exactly a person who believed in peace, love, and togetherness.
It’s worth noting that the Apple tax on iOS is exactly the same as the Valve tax on Steam: 30%
It’s a hell of a fee for processing a credit card payment plus a bit of file storage. No wonder neither company feels the need to actually make their own games.
It’s just in the US and it’s obviously because of tariffs. But nobody can say that aloud in public otherwise it will make Trump feel upset, and we can’t be having that, apparently. He can hear you. He can hear all of you. And it’s making him upset.
Not only that but there is a broad lack of understanding and empathy towards the elderly and people of all ages suffering from mental decline. It’s ableism, to put it plainly.
The article is a little vague on this, but it seems like this round of price hikes is just for the US and it’s due to tariffs.
The smaller third party companies market and advertise their Hall effect sticks as something special to differentiate their products from the big companies. There are probably overstated claims being made in much of this advertising, as there tends to be in all advertising.
Perhaps this is the great lie of Hall effect marketing. Everything breaks, especially if you let kids use it.
Really, the N64? The N64 stick was not in-practice long-lasting. I’ve never gone out of my way to get modern Hall effect stuff, but if they’re anything like that then I understand why they remain a niche thing for hobbyists who will baby them.
No that’s quite commonly spoken. But saying “you can buy a shitbox!” (like the ones I’ve typically built for myself over the years) is not a super great argument for why PCs rule and consoles drool. What is it that makes gaming on a PC special? Paying the same price as a base PS5 or Switch 2 for less well-optimized experience isn’t especially distinctive, but again that’s fine, people can go with what they prefer without worrying about what’s “better”. If you want to plug a big janky Windows PC into a television then that’s a choice you are perfectly able to make. It doesn’t need to be a contest.
Oh, third party controllers do exist for consoles, including some made by 8bitdo! I’ve got one that has a little button for switching between the different signal types for different devices.