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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

The sheer frustration and potential undiscovered bugs of getting gaming to work with a GPU on a Mac caused me to give up trying to game on a desktop.

Which is actually perfectly fine unless you need 4k60fps or 1440p144fps, which I do not. I originally started gaming on the PC a decade ago when many games and sales were PC only: the gaming market is at a place now where the game selection and prices between consoles and PCs are similar. There isn't anything on a PC/Mac I'm missing that I can't get on my PS4 Pro (or even a mobile device!).

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I prefer PC because i have real ownership of the games i buy (i mostly get my games from DRM-free stores like GOG) and no arbitrary backwards compatibility breakage (i have many games on CD from the 90s and 2000s that work on my brand new PC... though some need several workarounds, but still much preferable to not being able to play the game at all - nowadays i rip my CDs and DVDs to my external HDD alongside community made patches/fixes though so i do not have to deal with hardware issues and scratched disks).

Also the sort of games i prefer to play (FPSs, CRPGs and to a lesser extent simulation games) play much better on a PC than a console or mobile.

Note that with PC i do not mean Windows, although i do use Windows. But with Proton evolving i think that in a few years i should be able to play any game i want on Linux or even Mac (assuming Apple hasn't gone full retard in the meanwhile).

FPS games are a joke on console, if you're into shooty shooty bang-bang type games.

In fairness, gaming has never (Last decade at least...) been the intended purpose of Mac

I don't know if they're a joke. There are quite a few players out there who seem to like it just fine. But I, on the other hand, am absolutely a joke trying to play FPS games with a controller. I need a keyboard and mouse or I can barely play at all. There are ways to hook up a keyboard and mouse to some consoles and some games, but it's generally considered "cheating".

Doesn't matter anyway. My reflexes aren't what they were when I was a teenager.

From what I remember, console fps games will snap your aim on to targets because its next to impossible to properly aim with a joystick.

It's generally an option you can set. When playing on higher difficulty levels, auto-aim gets turned off. It's actually amazing how well some people can aim with the controller and no auto-aim. I am not one of those people.

I feel like auto-aim has always been kind of a sad hack, in that it's done on consoles but not on PC, so it effectively isolates console multiplayer from PC multiplayer.

I feel like a more "proper" solution would be to come up with shooty-shooty bang-bang game mechanics where "ability to aim with finesse at the things you're shooting at" is mechanically irrelevant, so that "aiming at things" isn't really a part of the console or the PC experience. I.e., design the game so that, despite complete ignorance of your input method, there is still absolutely no advantage in using a mouse compared to a joystick.

Any ideas on how such a thing could be accomplished?

• Maybe a game could snap all the people to a 3D voxel grid. You'd move smoothly, but your "shadow" would always exist within a certain voxel; and you'd always see everyone else over the network as popping between voxels. To shoot someone, you just have to target the right voxel.

• Maybe a game could give people, instead of hitscan line guns, extruded hitscan beam weapons of some diameter. Everyone is blowing 1m-wide holes in one-another [and the terrain] with giant laser cannons. I'd play that!

> I feel like a more "proper" solution would be to come up with shooty-shooty bang-bang game mechanics where "ability to aim with finesse at the things you're shooting at" is mechanically irrelevant, so that "aiming at things" isn't really a part of the console or the PC experience

The thing is, even if you remove the finesse, mouse may well STILL have an advantage. I can whip a mouse around to do a 180 far quicker than I can on a controller.

One word: Splatoon.

Well-made motion controls (to the point that motion controls from any other shooter feel terrible) really feel like mouse-level precision for Splatoon.

On the other hand, Splatoon is a third person shooter so it may not translate too well to a first person shooter, although you do get first person perspective when using a Charger, the game's terminology for a sniper weapon, with a scope. Not only that, but I remember the addition of motion controls to the Switch port of Doom being considered such a huge upgrade it might as well have been a new game.

I'm with you on auto-aim being a sad hack. Having been a rabid Splatoon player for the past four years, I tried Overwatch on PS4 and just gave up after a while — I don't want my performance tied to arthritic finger bending to try and convince the game to auto-aim for me, I just want to point and shoot as I've been able to do very accurately with the Wii U GamePad and any Switch controller, especially when the PS4 controller supports motion control.

I was a PC-gamer for 25 years, and recently switched to a PS4. I've also been a pretty avid Battlefield player. One of the pleasant surprises of the platform switch is the absence of cheaters. There always seemed to be at least one. My strategy was to bide my time, and switch to the cheater's side when I could. At least that way, he wasn't griefing me. Now I don't have to worry about it.

I'm not going to say that getting used to the controller from a keyboard and mouse was quick and easy, but it was quicker and easier than I thought it would be, at first. My rankings are almost what they were on PC now, so it doesn't bother me any more.

The price of consoles is subsidized by the fact that the games are super expensive. On PC the prices of games is usually less while they are at full price and massively less while they are on sale which is a quite frequent event. When I look at console games I almost never see any significant sales. Its not uncommon to see AAA games at 90% off when they are a few years old. On console they just stop selling the game.

That's true, but unlike PC there's a used market for console games. $10 each is the norm even for newer "AAA" titles.

> On PC the prices of games is usually less while they are at full price and massively less while they are on sale which is a quite frequent event

That's no longer true; sale prices for the same game on console and the game on PC are typically the same. Additionally, retail sales prices often are synced with digital prices.

> When I look at console games I almost never see any significant sales.

On the digital storefronts, all 3 major consoles have weekly sales, and often deep discounts for special events.

At least on Nintendo's platform this has not been my experience. The same game is often cheaper on PC than on the switch at full price, and for first party titles I don't think I have ever seen a sale on a Nintendo game.

The Switch is slightly different since it gets bespoke ports/remakes, as opposed to simultaneous releases with parity with other consoles/PC.

Nintendo does do sales on their own games, albeit very rarely. But you definitely can't play those on a PC.

  - Factorio
  - Minecraft, w/so many hundred different mods
  - Kerbal Space Program
  - Oxygen Not Included
  - Mods in general, actually.
  - Elite: Dangerous. Or things which require joysticks in general.

I could go on.

All are true except Elite: Dangerous. It’s available on both Xbox One and PS4 and both consoles have joysticks available, which E:D supports.

More specifically, I don't play games that require a massive GPU. Most of those games can be played on simple GPUs and have a native Mac port.

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