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Comment by MomoXenosaga | Hacker News Reader

Consoles today are more powerful than the average PC. I didn't believe it until I saw the steam hardware survey.

Consoles and PC have influenced eachother- how many PC gamers today use controllers? The distinction has blurred somewhere in the 2010s.

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I am probably PC gamer and I do not use controller and do not plan to do. Aiming with mouse vs aiming with controller will always differ - tbf, even when shooter games(Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, even Descent) used keyboard for aiming that had a lot more options than modern controllers, which I personally think is a big step down from PC joystics. What you are mostly seeing are console players, who are playing games on PC and they might use controller - some of the platform games(that are also available on PC) might benefit use of controllers instead of keyboards, but then again - PC gamers have reached virtuoso level with using keyboards, so pleas stap this nonsense of inciting PC vs consoles hatred. Clearly, consoles have bigger income from gaming than PC, but then again - mobile games dwarf all of these combined, but that is not really an argument about what is better, but where is bigger income.

I only see the hatred from one camp my friend. The irony is lost on you.

I switched to PC. I play what once would be exclusive console games with a dualshock on a TV. Consoles and PC have converged.

His point isn't about the superiority of one method or another; it's that PC games all support controllers and many players choose to use them to play. Microsoft made a pretty hard push for that with the Xbox 360/One controllers.

The hardware survey is going to catch machines that aren't even attempting to be in the same class as consoles though.

Combine that with the availability issues that plagued the current-gen console launch, and the actual comparison of PCs used as gaming machine and consoles in people's houses is much closer.

Average PC or average Steam PC? Because I can't imagine anything but the average Steam PC being a lot better than the average PC people have in their house.

The Steam hardware survey shows what hardware people are using to play games on Steam and it is surprisingly modest for the most part.

I think just as much as that budgets are a big driver. If a game costs a bazillion dollars to make, and making it cross-platform is relatively straightforward, making it an exclusive doesn't make a lot of sense unless the platform holder is handing you a bag of money.

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