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Could it be "possible" to replace consoles with nerfed PCs?

Sigourn

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There are some common arguments against PCs, coming from console users:
  • They are too complex. With a console, it's basically plug in and launch game.
  • Getting games to run properly is a pain in the ass. With a console, you know every game will work, framedrops aside for the most demanding games.
  • Keyboards and mouse is more annoying than joystick. In practice this makes sense quite often, since console games are designed with a joystick in mind to the point K&M is redundant for every title but the best PC ports that take advantage of the many extra keys.
  • A console is simply cheaper.
What if a "PC Mini" replaced consoles? I'm aware this is something that will never happen, but let's assume for a single second this PC Mini monopolizes the market and no developer is against it as long as consumers like it. This PC Mini would:
  • Official hardware upgrades: games keep up with the technological advancements; if you don't have the newest hardware, don't worry as you can still play your games, even if it means downgraded graphics.
  • No unnecessary features: the PC Mini is plug-in and play, all the software is related to videogames. If you want a word processor, get an actual PC.
  • The games released on the PC Mini are available for PC, and viceversa, since they work on the same foundations. In practice, this means no exclusivity whatsoever.
  • Keyboard, mouse, and joystick peripherals. Different games would be designed around the controls that suit them better. If you are playing a steoreotypical "console" game, you just use a joystick. If you are playing a strategy game, plug in that keyboard and mouse.
Assuming this entire comment is retarded, what kind of hardware would you recommend to replace consoles altogether, WHILE also keeping PCs separate?
 
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Most of those common arguments stopped being valid about 10 years ago since computers have been getting more and more easy to use. You don't have to do shit like defragment your hard drives manually anymore, or hunt down drivers for your peripherals or any of that shit. Plus, the whole willful stupidity thing that led to "not knowing if a game would work on your PC" isn't really there anymore - most people who play video games know what hardware their PC has.

Even installation is now basically in PC's favour, you just buy it on Steam and Steam does the rest. Consoles still generally have a disk. Hell, even pirating games has gotten way more straightforward, most cracked games come with an installer so you don't have to move the cracked files in yourself.

I think at this point any console convenience advantage is long gone. Now it's down to splitscreen co-op and exclusives, and if not for either of those there isn't much reason to buy a console.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Saw where Steam Machines went? I think consoles' major advantage is, as you mentioned, the cheaper prices, made possible by mass production of custom chips with fixed specifications.
 

DalekFlay

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Consumers crave convenience over any other aspect by a factor of like a gazillion, which is why consoles are more popular today and shit like Google's Stadia will rule in 5-10 years. Any benefit "set top PCs" would have would be counterbalanced by the added hassles over a console, no matter how small. That's why the Steam Machine bullshit never went anywhere.
 
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Saw where Steam Machines went? I think consoles' major advantage is, as you mentioned, the cheaper prices, made possible by mass production of custom chips with fixed specifications.

Additionally they are sometimes sold at a loss, such as the Xbox line of consoles. I don't know if the original Xbox was sold at a loss (it probably was) but all the later ones have been confirmed to. Microsoft is mainly interested in market share and views the (fairly minor) loss per console as a good investment - it keeps people on their platform.
 
Unwanted

a Goat

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That's the potential Steam Machines had but Valve half-assed them. Consoles are clearly going in similar direction too - don't expect lack of backwards compatibility from PS5 or whatever the new xbawx will be called, they'll have new CPU's but still be kinda modified PC's.

Now the problem with PC's isn't as you think it is. It's a matter of selection of parts being so huge that you can't pick right, ask people who work in retail, they'll tell you there's "3 option rule" and variations of it. If you show your client more than 3 options, it's likely he'll say I think about it and won't buy anything, therefore you have to probe his needs properly and then show him 2-3 products that fit in. With PC building the hard part comes from deciding on hardware. What kind of GPU should I pick for 1080p gaming? There's like 12 models that make sense here(let's be honest you won't buy flagship for 1080p nowadays), counting ones that are discontinued but still can be bought. That's the hard part. And you have several components like that. For a normie that's a lot of shit to decide on.

Steam Machines could've been gamer-focused prebuilds, with yearly iterations in 3 price-ranges, with different manufacturers competing with form factor, additional featuers etc. but not basic specs(CPU/GPU/RAM) Valve could add a "recommended settings" option(as well as handy chart showing which model from which year the game can run) for them for some of the games(bigger ones) they've tested on these models, therefore solving the problem of choice between 24135512421 different configurations. Instead they've released what boiled down to prebuilds with steam logo, with all the variety they have. What they failed at was understanding that they aren't trying to sell them to people who are currently PC gamers and can build a PC but to people who don't, people who expect to buy box, plug it in and play a game.
 

Sigourn

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That's the potential Steam Machines had but Valve half-assed them. Consoles are clearly going in similar direction too - don't expect lack of backwards compatibility from PS5 or whatever the new xbawx will be called, they'll have new CPU's but still be kinda modified PC's.

Now the problem with PC's isn't as you think it is. It's a matter of selection of parts being so huge that you can't pick right, ask people who work in retail, they'll tell you there's "3 option rule" and variations of it. If you show your client more than 3 options, it's likely he'll say I think about it and won't buy anything, therefore you have to probe his needs properly and then show him 2-3 products that fit in. With PC building the hard part comes from deciding on hardware. What kind of GPU should I pick for 1080p gaming? There's like 12 models that make sense here(let's be honest you won't buy flagship for 1080p nowadays), counting ones that are discontinued but still can be bought. That's the hard part. And you have several components like that. For a normie that's a lot of shit to decide on.

Well, my idea was to keep it simple, e.g. you have three GPU options and a list of games that were designed with each tier in mind. So obviously if you have the money you simply buy the most expensive one, but otherwise you can focus on the games you want to play and thus buy the recommended GPU for those games. After all, you will still be able to play the newer ones.
 

DalekFlay

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That's the potential Steam Machines had but Valve half-assed them. Consoles are clearly going in similar direction too - don't expect lack of backwards compatibility from PS5 or whatever the new xbawx will be called, they'll have new CPU's but still be kinda modified PC's.

Every time new consoles are coming people say "they'll have to be backwards compatible" and then every time most of them aren't, as far as I know. The Switch is not, the PS4 is not. The Xbox only is via emulation, I believe. I don't see a huge reason to assume the next gen will be much different. Most mainstream consumers don't care about old games, so it's always hard to justify the expense.
 
Unwanted

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That's the potential Steam Machines had but Valve half-assed them. Consoles are clearly going in similar direction too - don't expect lack of backwards compatibility from PS5 or whatever the new xbawx will be called, they'll have new CPU's but still be kinda modified PC's.

Every time new consoles are coming people say "they'll have to be backwards compatible" and then every time most of them aren't, as far as I know. The Switch is not, the PS4 is not. The Xbox only is via emulation, I believe. I don't see a huge reason to assume the next gen will be much different. Most mainstream consumers don't care about old games, so it's always hard to justify the expense.
From what we know about the next gen is that they will use the same architecture as they do now, which by itself is very similar to PC's(it's not exactly x86, iirc they do RAM/VRAM as integrated thing) and are simply HW upgrade over older models. They're now using the same business model phones use, just 2-3 yearly rather than yearly.
 
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Was not the main reason against PC Gaming that they are far easier to pirate?

This was an argument made by some developers/publishers, but I doubt they really believed it themselves. It tended to happen when a game was low quality and they knew it wouldn't do well on PC (back in the days when PC gaming was less accessible so the overall player base had better taste) so they would say "piracy" as their reason for going console exclusive rather than admit "yeah our trash probably won't sell on PC so we're going to skip it". Doesn't really apply now that Steam and overall convenience improvements have led to the presence of people who'll buy the same trash console gamers will, but it used to be how things went. Consider Ubisoft, used to be making console exclusive garbage and whining about piracy on the PC every time they did. Now they say PC is great and they make their shitty games on the PC, and people are buying them.
 

DalekFlay

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Was not the main reason against PC Gaming that they are far easier to pirate?

Like 10-15 years ago that was a huge thing, yes. Sales were way down, console sales were up, PC genres successfully transitioned to consoles with Halo and Oblivion, etc. During that time there was a lot of talk about how PC was dying because it was all piracy and shitty console ports no one put time into. However Steam pretty much saved PC gaming by getting more people to spend money on games, lowering the cost of entry for publishers and offering smaller teams and indies a pathway toward large distribution. Piracy is still a huge problem but you don't hear too much whining about it anymore because games make good money on PC again.
 
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You don't have to do shit like defragment your hard drives manually anymore

Uh, I literally just now finished defragging my 2tb external and HD Tach shows an increase of average speed reading, went from 98mb/s to 109mb/s.

What OS? Because the past few versions of Windows - which is what most people are using, rightly or wrongly - do disk defragmentation periodically on their own without requiring you to manually start the process.
 
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aweigh

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Windows defrag doesn't move large files to the end of the disk, this is the part that actually greatly increases read speed.

EDIT: or at least the auto-defrag performed by w10 doesn't; it may be an option in the manual defrag. in any case windows doesn't do it automatically.
 

PorkBarrellGuy

Guest
Current gen consoles are, at least in some ways, probably comparable with some PCs for power. I think the real difference between them at this point is that PCs are generalists and consoles are specialists. Consoles are probably perfectly capable of doing things that are considered the domain of PCs, just not nearly as well because it's out of the console's usual portfolio. That being said, it's a lot harder to get a console to do things outside its usual portfolio than it is to get a PC to do any given task because consoles are more difficult to customize to begin with. Certainly not impossible, but PCs are practically DESIGNED to be constantly rejiggered, upgraded etc. whereas consoles (outside of some very basic upgrades) have a significantly sharper learning curve for any sort of hardware fuckery.
 
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aweigh

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an xbox one (not the pro version) is so outdated hardware wise that it's actually impossible to buy parts that equal it right now for cheap... because even the cheapest PC parts already surpass it.

most xbox one games run on 720p or 960p, rarely do they ever hit 1080p, and framerate-wise they're all at 30fps with dips into mid-20s when action heats up.
 

PorkBarrellGuy

Guest
an xbox one (not the pro version) is so outdated hardware wise that it's actually impossible to buy parts that equal it right now for cheap... because even the cheapest PC parts already surpass it.

most xbox one games run on 720p or 960p, rarely do they ever hit 1080p, and framerate-wise they're all at 30fps with dips into mid-20s when action heats up.

Hmm. That indicates to me that PCs are actually putting distance between themselves and consoles. Could have sworn that a generation or two ago consoles could actually reach parity with PCs for some operations, at a fraction of the cost. Dunno, might be misremembering.
 

PorkBarrellGuy

Guest
What's even the point of gaming consoles when every bum these days can afford an adequate PC?

There's no telling when the fountain of cheap components is going to dry up (temporarily or otherwise). It isn't unheard of for prices on both volatile and non-volatile memory to spike hard when something gets fucked up overseas, for example. Though honestly, this kind of thing is likely to hit consoles at least as hard.
 

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