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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I feel like PCs are a sliding scale. You have to keep updating them to play the latest games. Wheras consoles are a known - you pay once, and it's good for what, 5 years?

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That's less and less true for PCs. I had to update my PC every year or so before to keep up with the latest games, but nowadays it's clearly a slower moving target, and even with a 2 years old PC (equipped with a good graphics card at the time) I play most games in full/medium details in Full HD.

This seems to be kind of artificially introduced by consoles. The current generation of consoles stuck around forever, and they so dominate the gaming market that games were basically anchored to that rough level of computing ability for years.

Yeah, totally agree. But this is also because the PC has lost a lot of exclusive games which were usually pushing the specs higher and higher. Nowadays most games are made for consoles and ported later (or at the same time) for PC. The PC is not a target platform anymore, except for a few genres.

Consoles end up feeling older and outdated as well (and games even show lag at times on consoles), just it's harder to notice when they abstract away all the graphical choices and settings from the end user (as well as generally sitting farther from the screen). It's very telling when you play a bad console port on PC and see how low quality some of the textures and draw distance are compared to games made for PC or better quality ports. Even games such as Mass Effect 3 had all sorts of low resolution textures thrown in the PC version that were glaringly obvious when playing.

PCs, you become aware of all that and how outdated things are when you realize your cannot run max settings for whatever game you're playing anymore. I guess it's sort of the "content with what you cannot change (consoles) versus discontent in realizing you no longer have the 'best' of something anymore (PC)".

In short, it's much easier to see flaws on PC overall because you realize you can do something about them (given the time to reconfigure game/pc settings or upgrade), while consoles you cannot.

At this point, unless you care a lot about keeping graphics high, I wouldn't be too surprised if you could keep a decent computer for at least 4 years. Even more so if you didn't care about resolution/played games at low resolutions (keep in mind, consoles have run games at 720p or less for the past 7 years!).

The thing is that most people who're willing to deal with pc gaming also care enough to upgrade more often, so a lot of the cost is self-imposed.

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