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Comment by ripdog | Hacker News Reader

Because they are in a dominant market position. Honestly, it's your fault for buying a console - you knew you'd be at sony's mercy due to the monopolistic nature of consoles. The cost of switching to the one comparible console option is so great, most people will not bother unless sony's issues become too great - and network speed is presumably not a deal-breaker for enough people for sony to care.

So you will continue to suffer abominable download speeds on your PS4, because the cost of switching is too great for most. Basically, suck it up.

I hate to get all PCMR on you, but this is why everyone should game on PC. If my steam purchase downloaded super slow, I could simply get a refund on steam (an automated process) and purchase the same game on GOG, or on Humble Store. Sometimes Origin or Uplay. PC means freedom, or not being at the mercy of a single uncaring corporate entity.

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I left PC gaming behind years ago.

I like to sit on the couch and I want my gaming device to be a black box that does its job and is dedicated to couch based entertainment (I use it for TV too).

PC gaming requires a...... PC... usually sitting at a desk, much more powerful than I need, lots of configuration etc etc to hard.... I'm a couch gamer in the evening after the programming is done.

I don't care much about the PlayStation download thing. I generally prefer to buy my games on DVD anyway.

Sony should care however.... despite not wanting to spend money on digital downloads I find I spend ever more with Apple App Store because despite my hesitations they make it easy and it works, whereas I don't want to buy digital with Sony and they make it easy not to do that.

>>>PC means freedom, or not being at the mercy of a single uncaring corporate entity

I just don't care about that stuff any more.. life's too short to worry about who our corporate overlords are.

> I don't care much about the PlayStation download thing. I generally prefer to buy my games on DVD anyway.

Yeah, wait until you will have 30GB update for a game to download.

I don't think you deserve downvotes here. I only buy physical copies of games, and the standard experience is to come home, insert the disc, and wait for a multi gigabyte patch to download and install before playing.

Yup, this was my first experience with my brief stint owning a bloodborne machine.

Put in game, 20GB update. Cool, guess I'm not playing that today then.

Sold that thing a couple of months later, what a waste of money the whole rigmarole was. Bloodborne wasn't even that good imo either.

I have a Steam Link, and I get all the benefits of PC gaming from my couch. It's a pretty seamless best-of-both-worlds situation.

You also get the downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC, which is one of the things I was happy to leave behind when I became a console-only gamer.

I have less free time than most here and somehow I find a way.

"Maintaining" a PC is super easy...

Upgrading a PC is a one time thing you need to do once every few years. You'd be "upgrading" your console by putting it in the bin and buying a new one, so I'm not sure what the argument is against PC gaming here...

There is a convenience factor. You dont have to think if you will be able to play 'xxxx' game on your ps4, if its a ps4 game. That plays heavily in keeping me away from PC gaming. I just dont want to have to even consider can I play the game or not.

Right. If I was using a PC all the time at home for something else it wouldn't be such a big deal, but given that I was only using it for gaming and most games I wanted to play were on the console it was just easier to give up.

Like you said, it's an appliance and I never have to think about it. You buy a game for the PS4 and it works on your PS4 and that's all there is to it.

Until the Pro and One X have been out for a bit, then the question might come up. Or "Pro only games", which they've said won't happen, but I can see any way around that other than "well you'll just have to accept the awful performance".

Go watch some of the major streamers on Twitch. They're constantly trying to figure out why they're dropping frames or why SLI is suddenly fucking up. The illusion that the PC-Master-Race folks like to push is that maintaining and building PCs is easy. Having built many, and owned a computer repair shop, I know that it simply isn't that easy for your average consumer to troubleshoot a computer.

> I know that it simply isn't that easy for your average consumer to troubleshoot a computer.

I don't see how you can state that it's any easier to troubleshoot a console. Usually your only feedback is a generic error code which if you Google refers to 20 different problems all with the same error, or an LED blink code which is equally vague.

Sure, PCs have their own unique problems that consoles don't suffer from (e.g. malware on Windows) but I find that PCs typically have much more descriptive error codes, and usually lack the kind of design flaws present in consoles (e.g. Xbox 360 RRoD due to insufficient cooling).

See that's the thing. I've been a console gamer since the NES and I don't remember ever really having to troubleshoot one.

And since the hardware is fixed games don't have incompatibilities. None of the "this version of the driver causes this but that version of the driver causes that" issues. No worrying about system requirements. If it sold for the system, it will play.

I can't remember that I ever had the problem of not having the right driver since windows 7 or so. Since Windows 10 drivers are also "automatically downloaded and installed through Windows Update" ("for many devices").

> They're constantly trying to figure out why they're dropping frames or why SLI is suddenly fucking up.

But consoles drop frames as well, people just don't care. You can also not care on PC, like lots of people do.

And hardly no one uses SLI or even recommends it, precisely because it's annoying.

It is about where you play your priorities.

> You also get the downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC, which is one of the things I was happy to leave behind when I became a console-only gamer.

Oh, you mean the 15 mins swap of a graphics card every 3 years?

Plus researching WHICH graphics card to buy, plus constant driver upgrades, plus the driver upgrades may cause issues with some of your games...

It's not as bad as it used to be… but it's still not like an appliance.

On Linux driver upgrades are pretty easy and I have not recently experienced any game break related to drivers. Getting much better than before, thats for sure.

> downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC

Easy solution:

You can treat your PC like a console. Just clue everything so that you can't maintain and upgrade it.

Now you have PC that is like a console. Buy a new one when this is not good enough.

> I just don't care about that stuff any more.. life's too short to worry about who our corporate overlords are.

Oh this state of things can change faster than the duration of your lifetime, so you should care.

> ...life's too short to worry about who our corporate overlords are

This is not what freedom of choice is about (to me). What I care about is the amount of power they yield over my experience. In Linux their power is low. Windows? Mac? Too high for my taste.

I don't disagree that this I inportant to you.

Right now my infant child wields "absolute power" over my life so the convenience and time savings of a console is worth it to me.

Touché. :-D

> If my steam purchase downloaded super slow, I could simply get a refund on steam (an automated process) and purchase the same game on GOG, or on Humble Store

I'm with you in general (PC Gamer here) but your example does not really work well. There are many games only available on Steam and not GOG, and while you get most Steam games (but not all) on Humble Bundle, Humble Bundle only gives you a Steam key so you are back to Steam and its potential issues.

Unfortunately, because of Steam's predominance in PC Gaming, you are more of less stuck with the same problems as the PS4, as in "if it does not work, suck it up". There is no other store platform on PC that has the breadth of choice of Steam.

> Humble Bundle only gives you a Steam key so you are back to Steam and its potential issues.

No, you can download the game directly from Humble Bundle but sometimes (often) they also give you a steam key.

No, only drm free purchases are like that but most of what you buy on the HB store are just steam keys.

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