PC Online Games vs. Console Online Games

I love both, and they both have their advantages, but for the purposes of this debate, I'll debate on the PC side. I just hope that the console side will have good debaters as well

I'll start with these two topics:

PC is better, because the MMO's natural home is on PC, it's much easier to download an MMO and play it on the PC, there's a greater variety, and most of the best MMOs are on PC. And there's loads of free MMOs on the PC out there, but none on the console (for obvious reasons).

PC's keyboard and mouse setup is much better, it is useful for many things: for typing, for shortcuts, for photo editing etc and for gaming, on FPSs, it is much more accurate to use keyboard and mouse than to use a gamepad on consoles. (Why do you think there is an aim assist option on many console FPSs?)

 

I'll take console then .

Addressing your points:

1. MMO's are but one genre, and there are many, many more that are widely available on consoles.

2. The PC control setup as its advantages, but it also as disadvantages. Not all buttons are within easy reach on a keyboard, and keyboard and mouse are quite cumbersome, you cannot hold them while you play, and by the I mean lift it up and move around whilst playing.

Compared to say, a xbox 360 controller, where its portable, you can easily get comfortable without taking your hands off the controls, and its compact and all buttons are withing easy reach.

On another topic, the price off an xBox 360 isnow as little as $150, while a PC that is capable of playing recent games is often upwards of $1000.

 

No worries about poor competition then, the console side has the MASTER OF DEBATES!!!!! SCARECROW!!!!

The price of the PC itself may be much higher than any console, but PC games themselves are generally much cheaper than console ones. For example, Assassin's Creed II (PC) is £26.99 on Amazon UK, while Assassin's Creed II (Xbox 360) is £34.99 on Amazon UK.

That's a relatively new game, how about an older game? The Orange Box (PC), again on Amazon UK, is £9.99, while The Orange Box (Xbox 360) is £12.99 on Amazon UK. So generally, PC games are more cheaper than console games. AND, I'm not looking on Steam, where they sell PC games for £1 in offers

Also, one of the most innovative genre of games is Indie. And most indie developers start out on the PC. Not only that, most indie developers start out with free PC games you can download on the internet to this day. So, you can find a lot of indie gems online for the PC, but, on consoles, indie games cost money. In fact, you CAN'T get free games on consoles (unless you pirate), but there are tons of free games for the PC, in various forms (flash, abandonware, indies), that you can download, without ever leaving your house.

 

What the... Alright then!

 

Awesome topic. Good luck.

 

She's probably still thinking that this is an open debate or something, so we'll have to wait until she comes on Gameogre again.

 

That was exactly what I thought, sorry xD.

Now let's see.

The price of the games themselves are inconsequential to the huge sums of money required to play games at the graphical detail and frame rate similar to the xbox 360 on a PC. Take CoD:MW2 for example. The game is graphically stunning on the xbox, with very high frame rates, but put it on a PC? Your not seeing the same kind of performance until you pass the $1500 mark with a PC.

Indie games are enjoyable for a time, I freely admit that, but theres no possible way for them to compare with games like CoD:MW2, Assassin's Creed, etc.

The free games on PC are free for a reason, it's because they are almost certainly of a lower than their payed counterparts. There are of course exceptions to this, but they are few and far between.

 

But, if you simply upgrade your PC only once every year, and buy lots of the cheapest of games (on Steam for example, where they sell great PC games for just $2 or $1 ) as well as the latest releases, then the amount of money you spend should come quite close to the equivalent amount of money you spend on a console. Or, you can go the opposite way, upgrading your PC only very rarely, and buy an MMO such as Guild Wars, or a game with a level editor or even better, that is moddable (see below), like Neverwinter Nights 2, and end up with a game that has huge replayability value, with a PC that you won't need to upgrade for a very, very long time, until you move on from the game. There are very few console MMOs as I originally stated, and I doubt any of them are as good as a game like Guild Wars. See below for comments on moddable console games.

And remember, most people must have a PC anyway to surf the web, or type up something on a word processor (not to mention specialists who will need to program on a PC, or do photo editing on a PC etc), so you've got to factor in the cost of the extra PC as well, and most people will not want a slow rubbish one, so they'll automatically go for a new one from Dell or similar.

And here's a new topic: A lot of PC games allow modding. However, most console games do not (in fact, I can only think of LittleBigPlanet that even has a level editor). Counterstrike was originally a mod. G-Mod is an absolute must for any Half-Life 2 owner. Any major PC game that allows modding will generally have thousands of mods created for it. Console games, unfortunately, do not have these mods, so people on console games will simply have to be satisfied with downloadable content.

Edit: btw, I just voted for myself, so you should vote for yourself if you haven't already Scarecrow.

 

OMG sorry again, I thought I posted my reply but it doesn't seem to have gone through.

Now, you may be forgetting that the $1-2 games are all Indies, and while there're fun enough for five minutes, they offer no lasting value.

Upgrading your PC is more difficult than you imagine. 95% of gamers don't even consider upgrading there're PC, simply because they consider it to hard, or there're afraid that they might break it. And let's not forget that the upgrading costs money. Mid level graphics card go for $150, a new CPU, which most likely will require a new motherboard, another $200, more memory etc. And this will go on and on year by year, a fairly large money-sink. A console on the other hand, you pay $200, you can play anything perfectly for 2-4 years, then you but the next one and continue, its cheaper with a lot less hassle.

Also once again i'll state, MMORPG's are but one genre.

Now, you only need a $200 PC to surf the web, and that happens to be the kind of budget a lot of people have. To play games at a reasonable performance level you must go far far higher.

And finally, mods.

99% of them have player bases of less than 10 people, not exactly worth playing. Sure some are alright eg team fortress, but that eventually migrated to console with team fortress 2.

New topic, Piracy is PC games.

PC gaming is inadvertently dying, sales are dropping rapidly and piracy is growing exponentially on the PC format. Games that used to be PC exclusive, like GTA now come out on the console first, like with GTA IV.

 

Sorry, I meant $3 to $4, I was thinking £1 to £2, forgot to convert it. Anyway, the £1 to £2 games are games that appear in offers from Steam I think. My friend managed to get Medieval: Total War for just £2.

And to be honest, if you're only getting a $200 PC to surf the web, you're going to encounter slow-down. Even for mundane tasks like surfing the web and word processing, you'd need something with a bit more power, AT THE VERY LEAST, you'd want a £300 (or $500-$600) PC. If you get a cheap pile of crap PC, then it's not even going to last you a year if you can get over the slow-down, even less if you can't take your PC being so slow. My current PC for example, was a £300 Dell from 3 years ago, and it's encountering slowdown even in basic web browsing (I really want a new one xD).

Now, put £300 on top of, let's say, £150 that you managed to get a Xbox 360 Arcade for (The cheapest one as well, will be much more if it's a normal one, or an elite one, or if you went the smart route and chose a PS3). That's £450. You say a good PC for playing the latest games at a high graphics level costs around $1500. I'd agree with you, because I think a good PC for playing the latest games should cost around £800. Now, if you're on Xbox Live, then you have to pay an extra £50 a year for Gold, unless you don't like playing multiplayer (which will only be a very small percentage of people), and this means that after one year on Xbox, you would be paying £500, and after three years, you would have paid £600. And if you're on PSN, then you have to pay £250 for the console, so the starting price for console would be £550. This is getting pretty close to PC already. And after this, you have to factor in all the prices of games, and as previously stated, the games are generally cheaper on PC than on console. And, the PC should last you at least three years, and if you are only playing your older games, then much more than that.

Meanwhile, the price of Xbox Live Gold keeps sucking money out of people on Xbox. For people on consoles in general, they are spending more money on every game they buy than a PC gamer buying the same game.

And back to mods, I was really talking about the big ones, like the Valve games for example, where thousands to millions of people are still using mods like G-Mod.

And on piracy, sales of retail games may be dropping rapidly, but do your figures take into account all the indie games being sold for money? Do they take into account all the digital distribution platforms (especially Steam)? Answer that and I may believe you.

And here's another new topic:

Games. For a start, exclusives. There are great exclusives on consoles, such as Demon's Souls, but on PC, there are much, much more "exclusives" when you factor in indies (THEY'RE AWESOME DAMMIT!!! MACHINARIUM FTW!!! Sorry...) and MMOs (So many choices... Have you seen Love btw? Indie MMO lol). If you don't factor in the two, there's still quite a lot of great exclusives on PC. Counterstrike: Source is an old game, but it is still the best FPS in the world for many people to this day. Crysis is the best game graphically in the world, no console game to this day can do what it does technologically, and it still manages to be a fun open world shooter. Even many multi-platform FPSs will be better on PC than console, because of the more accurate controls, and because on some PC FPSs, such as Battlefield: Bad Company 2, offer support for dedicated servers and LAN etc, which allows much better connections between a group of people on PCs than the people on consoles. And one last thing, every single one of Valve's previous games, barring perhaps Left 4 Dead, is better on PC than on console, because of mod support, and the fact that those games were built with the PC in mind, and the console versions, if there even was one, was sometimes just a badly done port.

You may argue with your old statement of "that's only one genre" again, but I think I've touched on quite a few by now, right? I'll stop now, because I have work to do and I can't keep going like this the entire of my night.

 

Ok, Let's talk about your PC cost thing. 300 pounds (don't have the symbol) for a PC 3 years ago and it's slowing down now? Another bad factor about PC's they age dramatically quickly.

Also 150 pounds for an xbox arcade must be slightly exaggerated, as I can buy one in Australia for $150.

Also you shouldn't add 300 pounds to the much exaggerated price of an xbox. Gaming PC's and regular PC's are very different things, besides it makes no sense to add them, this is about PC gaming vs Console gaming, if we're adding things like web surfing PC's why not add car cost and petrol?

Honestly please explain why your adding a web surfing PC to the price of a console and using that as an argument price-wise.

You talk about PC only exclusives like Crysis? Crysis 2 is coming out on xbox, yet another game migrating.

As for PC Piracy.

US retail PC game sales down $210 million in '08 - News at GameSpot

Hard times: PC game piracy in US estimated at 75-80%, News from GamePro

Now, I can use my old "that's only one genre" line as much as I want, because it is true. Indie games aren't really a genre, and they are only defined as being developed by an independent developer, yet they come from multiple genres, strategy, MMO etc.

 

I'll post my explanation and counter-argument tomorrow, really must work on Game Maker tonight, Sorry!

 

Game Maker? Lol, I have to work on power game factory, the Mac's Game Maker equivalent, for school

 

Alright, here's my argument.

Firstly, about the piracy. I agree that PC piracy of retail games is much higher than retail console games then. However, a ton of PC games are still being sold through digital distribution, and I think your first article admitted that it is hard to track how many are being sold in that market? And not every console is having low piracy right now. The DS (maybe the PSP as well) are getting pirated like mad, with roms and flashcarts being sold everywhere (and one of my friends claims he knows how to hack into a PSP as well). So, certainly, the handheld console market is taking a hit from piracy as well as PC.

And I included the web surfing PC to the price of a console because it would be the closest equivalent to a gaming PC. If you merely compare just a gaming PC's price and a console's price, then it's not entirely fair on the PC, because most people are going to buy a computer ANYWAY!

And just to inject a little note into this, Battlefield: Bad Company 2's PC version is currently selling higher than the console versions, so, there are PC games out there that are doing well, just to let you know.

About Crysis 2, I rather doubt that the Xbox version will be as pretty as the PC version, at the highest spec, though the PS3 version will come fairly close I think.

And coming back to control schemes, I think that the keyboard and mouse setup is better than the joystick setup, except in certain genres (the only one I can think of is platformer, maybe), because keyboard allows many buttons to be assigned to various actions for the game (very useful to games like WoW, where many hotkeys can be used, and additional keys may be used for add-ons), the mouse's accuracy cannot be replicated by consoles (except Wii MotionPlus, and the Wii sucks anyway) currently, and how it is so versatile, since by remapping keys, many, many, control schemes can be selected (WASD, or arrow keys, or IJKL, or numpad), depending on the user and how he/she wants to play the game.

Alright then, use your 'only one genre' line then if you wish. But I WILL NOT HAVE INDIE GAMES INSULTED!!! Many indie games are much too innovative to simply looked over, you really have to consider them as well when you're talking about PC gaming.

 

~claps for debate~
Great debate so far.

And I love indie games.

 

I'll do my reply after school