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Comment by bigfishrunning | Hacker News Reader

It's important to note that that vendor specific computer is 1) cheaper then a PC that can play equivalent games, and 2) much more reliable (i never have to mess with drivers, updates just work, etc...)

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>cheaper then a PC that can play equivalent games

There are no savings to be had. What you don't pay one way you pay another.

>much more reliable (i never have to mess with drivers, updates just work, etc...)

So do you not own a computer? How do you avoid dealing with those issues, otherwise?

I own several computers, and I use them for work. Running games on them means either running windows or running an emulation layer, and both solutions are unreliable messes. High end graphics cards are generally very expensive and have required binary-blobs that are really hard to troubleshoot, and (in my experience) always have problems.

If I want to play a video game, I turn on my PlayStation and it just works and I don't have to think about it or troubleshoot anything. This has not been my experience with PC gaming.

That used to be my experience, too, and I always expected the PC gaming industry would have to make some serious progress on ease-of-use if they were to survive against the consoles.

What I didn't expect was how fast the consoles would catch up to PC gaming in terms of hassle, complexity, slowness, unreliability, and potential incompatibilities. PC gaming did make some progress compared to when I was juggling boot disks and editing AUTOEXEC.BAT, but consoles got so much worse so fast. In my opinion, the last time consoles were noticeably simpler than playing on PC was probably about 15 years ago.

I exclusively play on Fedora if on pc and the only problem I had up to now was with the ps5 controller and some weird rumble input. That was easily fixed with some googling.

Sidenote but why do you use a PS5 controller? I can understand if someone already has a console they'd prefer to use the controllers they already have, but I see so many PC gamers go out and buy a playstation or xbox controller when they want a controller when 8bitdo is right there and much better for the price

Not everyone wants to do research for every little purchase. XBox and PS controllers are likely to be at least good enough, if not the baseline of quality. A few weeks ago I got an XBox-compatible third party controller with Hall effect sticks, and while it's mostly alright, I found a weird issue where when I enter a specific mode in one game by holding the right trigger I have to have the stick centered or it doesn't register for about a second. This doesn't happen with MS's controller, and I have no idea how the input device can be causing something so specific.

Do people genuinely not know about 8bitdo though? It doesn't take a lot of research if you're in a store or recommended it by amazon

No, they don't. They're a niche manufacturer, of course they're not as well known as Xbox or Playstation.

Because I also own a ps5

> I can understand if someone already has a console they'd prefer to use the controllers they already have

See that's a great example. By the time I sit down to play a game, I don't want to be googling issues.

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