I turn on my console and it plays games. I'm not messing around with maintaining yet another PC and all those headaches.
I have a gaming PC, a couple of consoles, both stationary and handheld but the Steam Deck quickly became the main device for gaming for me.
PC gaming sucks.
This is particularly irksome on the Macbook when playing Minecraft because you can't just CMD-Tab back in (because Mojang's UI competence is on par with their optimisation competence) - you have to click out of the not-visible Minecraft and then click on it in the dock. (CMD-Tab only works when it's not fullscreen.)
Consoles have system updates that remove features. Consoles add advertisements to the home screen. They can only play games approved by the hardware manufacturer, from their store, and pay their 30% "subsidize our hardware" tax. You have to pay $60/yr to use your own internet. You have to use their online chat system. You can't host private servers. You can't easily share your screen or have a second display for social features. You have to use a controller for all games, and if a game doesn't support controllers it just never gets ported. You also can't install mods, do any serious creative work, or emulate games from competitor's systems.
Console gaming sucks
I got my son a PS5 for Christmas last year. I was able to play and beat Elden Ring over the course of a few months because I could sit down, open the game within ~30 seconds, and then go back to my responsibilities.
PCs are great, but they'll never compete with the effortless convenience of consoles.
> I was able to play and beat Elden Ring over the course of a few months
I congratulate you on beating Elden Ring over a few 20-30 minute sessions.
> Previously, I had a PC that never got turned on except for gaming. When I would sit down to play, I would have to wade through ~30 minutes of OS updates, Steam updates, and then game updates. Every. Single. Time.
Idk man. To me this sounds like nonsense. I've got a big desktop machine I turn on once every couple of months to check out VR stuff and this doesn't resonate with me at all. OS updates, Steam Updates, and Game updates are very negligible to me. 30 minutes sounds very wrong.
At least PC updates let you choose when to update, which could be right after you finish gaming that day.
Assuming they are singleplayer games of course.
Not only that, but windows anti-virus scanner runs all the time and routinely consumes about 20% of my CPU for no reason. I have yet to find a way to turn that off for a specified time period.
Consoles are built for games, so you can safely assume they're not going to consume unnecessary resources and tank your games performance. Games are (usually) built for consoles, so you can safely assume the game will be able to utilize the hardware much more efficiently than your PC that it has no clue about all the hardware/system specs.
That's just a couple reasons I can think of for not being able to just play a game on your PC, and I'm sure other people have more examples.
I really don't think there's any overhead with running a windows PC...
It seems like all the comments are from technically competent people. They seem to indicate that they know exactly what causes the issues and they know how to solve them.
Just because you're technically capable doesn't mean you want to deal with Windows BS everytime you want to game, and this is coming from a primarily MS centered developer.
I don't own any apple products and I only have Linux installed on a laptop I never use anymore. My desktop and work laptop are Windows. And windows still annoys me to no end when it sucks unnecessary resources, forces updates, makes connecting any Bluetooth devices a major PITA, can screw up your performance if you installed the wrong drivers, and everything else the other comments mentioned.
See this is what I don't get maybe that's where I'm an exception and in the extreme minority. But everytime? Maybe you need 30-40 mins to setup a Windows 10 PC "properly" to your taste but after that you barely need to touch anything and it will just work.
If anything I do agree that Windows has _too many options_ and some of them are overlapping with each other + confusing the user. See the Windows 10 System Settings window when the classic (Win 7) Control Panel also exist AND on top of that you can override all of them with the Group Policy Editor (which imo the best way to handle the system)
Minecraft is even worse - starting ManyMC is under a minute (good) but then launching (a medium-ly modded) Minecraft is sometimes 15 minutes of wait. In contrast, the same version with the same mods on my M1 Macbook Pro is under a minute (including starting the launcher.)
FOR YOU. For me, it can (and I am on hdd.) Don't presume that your experience is the experience of everyone - there's literally no way that can be true.
Windows reports (as of yesterday afternoon) no problems with any of my drives.
> That means that something is wrong with your setup.
Sure, possibly, but I installed Windows 10 on a clean drive in a new PC a couple of years back and if that's "setup wrong", how the hell is anyone supposed to get it right?