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Comment by sanedigital | Hacker News Reader

I'm a working father. I get maybe 20-30 minutes a month where I can play games. 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.

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.

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> I get maybe 20-30 minutes a month where I can play games.

> 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.

30m sounds about right to me (with crappy internet).

I have good internet and Steam updating on Windows 10 is always 10+ minutes for me (during which time the rest of the machine is mildly unresponsive.)

You could get the same experience by just setting up a power schedule on your PC so it turns on to update the OS and Steam library once in a while. If your son wasn't using that PS5 you would have the exact same experience there with first being forced to sit through updates for both the OS and games before you could get into it.

Console updates are really annoying because they insist that it happen right now, or you lose features in the game.

At least PC updates let you choose when to update, which could be right after you finish gaming that day.

Don’t connect to the internet and play your games in offline mode. Zero updates for anything.

Assuming they are singleplayer games of course.

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