New gaming consoles have seen massive improvement. The ability of their raw processing power and design is significantly better than their predecessors. With next gen games continually blowing away fans and developers behind the games who have been in the business for decades, consoles have set themselves apart in design, function, and preference. However, while these advancements have changed gaming for consoles, gaming in itself is being changed by the PC.
It’s not new information that PC’s have more power when it comes to graphics and speed than consoles, nor are PC’s new to the gaming industry. For a long time though, PC’s have been much more expensive than console gaming and the community has been sparse. That is not true today.
To buy an XBOX One would be $500 out of your pocket. PS4 isn’t much better at $400. These prices are without bundles including more controllers and games that have a price range of an extra $50-$60. This doesn’t include online gaming subscriptions that are a monthly payment of $10. One can see how the price can quickly escalate. What are consumers getting for these prices?
The operating system on each console has two cores reserved to it out of the 8, as well as between two and three gigabytes of RAM. Also the 500GB hard drives will quickly lose space due to the 30GB installs needed, and there’s also the issue aroudn the fact that 10% of the Xbox One’s overall power will be devoted to Kinect.
In short, these high system specifications that had consumers excited have turned out to be much less impressive than promised. One could buy their own PC by combining an AMD A10-6800K processor, 4GB of RAM and a decent hard disk and still buy a good case and power supply whilst keeping the cost well below $450. Plus you can upgrade the PC when more funds come in at anytime without having to wait 5 years for a completely new gaming console. Add that on to the gaming platforms such as Steam and Origin to play with and get great bargains on new games. XBOX and PS4 have games exclusive to their system so for some games you cannot play on both consoles, but with PC most all games are available for purchase. A halo fan could pick up the upcoming new game and still enjoy playing God of War for the PlayStation all on a PC.
Gaming consoles have gone far but the price and performance of these new machines don’t seem to be taking gaming much further. PC’s are dominant when it comes to quality and performance and now the price is even more effective. What was once a matter of preference is now a much larger split and soon we may find many console gamers switching to PC.