Thursday, December 22, 2011

Is the “Death of the PC” a Real Question Anymore?

It seems like it was just yesterday that the life of the PC as a viable gaming platform was being challenged. This was all the way back in summer, when all we heard were of rampant studio closings in which piracy was cited as a primary cause of lost sales. But gamers fought with their keyboards, arguing on message boards that they ordinarily would not purchase the given game regardless, even though we know through the numbers of pirated games that it was getting to the point where fans of a series would pirate even their most beloved titles.

Since then all that has been forgotten. All it took was for the consoles to gradually dilapidate in terms of graphical fidelity to the point at which PCs have once again become the preferred system of choice thanks to custom optimizing as well as the constantly evolving nature of the machine.

Now, rather than hearing about another Midway or THQ studio shutting down due to piracy, we hear of how much “better” Battlefield 3 is on PC, or that Skyrim on PC is “the way to go.” It stands to reason that until the next generation of consoles are released, the PC will remain the dominant way to play.

The PC has always had many things going for it, like the mouse and keyboard set up, its overall inexpensiveness, being able to mod at one’s will, free-to-play games, more indie games, Steam, a more mature multiplayer community, LAN gaming, being able to alt+tab out of a game to multi-task, not to mention that the PC makes a hell of a better Word Document machine than does an Xbox 360, and yet the 360 can’t even do half the things the PC can! So why even shell out upwards of $400 for the Xbox 1080 coming in 2013? Kinect 2.0? I think not.

With a PC, you can, for much less, progressively modify it to your specific needs and have a much better, and much more economical experience. (Thanks to Steam’s regular deals and free-to-play games, not piracy, you goon!)

I don’t believe the PC as a gaming platform is being put to question any longer, and for good reason.

Long live the PC!

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