Why Do People Hate On Consoles ?

Dicehunter

Dicehunter

Dicehunter

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I've personally been mainly a console player all my life since the SNES up until 1 year after the 360 came out, Red ring of death how I hated thee :p and after that happened I built my first PC, So around late 2006 early 2007 and have been with PC's since then up until recently when I decided to add an XB1 Elite to the side of my rig and I've been pleasantly surprised and have spent a hell of a lot more time than I thought I would playing Halo, Gears, Old 360 games I never played and I've had a proper blast and actually been impressed with some graphics, Gameplay and the all round experience I've had.

Basically I'm quite curious as to why a lot of PC only players hate on consoles as every other post I see on various forums or facebook, YouTube etc... is filled with bile towards consoles and to me it makes zero sense.
 
Well youtube is just youtube - you'll probably find the same person posting the same kind of vitriolic rubbish against PCs in the next video along.

There are some who blame consoles for increasing dumbing down of level design and/or mechanics in games to make them more accessible on a console and/or to the more casual gamer.

I don't hate on consoles but I tend to be a bit negative about them as I've never found the experience playing FPS, RTS, etc. type games anything like as compelling with a controller as with keyboard and mouse and probably sub-consciously worry a bit that with the console appealing more to mainstream gamers of a shift in focus away from the platform I enjoy playing on by developers/publishers.
 
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In my opinion a lot of this can be put down to the fact that games developers spent lots of money making their games work well for consoles, spending relatively little time concentrating on the PC experience. As a result, a game would be badly optimised for PC on release, and the extra investment in superior hardware made by PC gamers that used to be taken advantage of ended up having little effect. Like buying a Aston Martin only for all your local roads to be filled with speed bumps and 20mph speed limits.

Another big one, for me at least, is that it also changed the face of multiplayer gaming. The widespread adoption of matchmaking systems came from the console world, and while there are good things about such systems there are also very bad things, and such systems tended to be forced upon PC gamers because the games were being designed for consoles primarily. From a PC gamer's standpoint, their experience was suffering from having an inferior platform's features shoehorned in to the PC releases, while ignoring both the expectations of PC gamers and the capabilities of their hardware.
 
My main issue is the framerate with most console games. My eyes really struggle with 30 FPS games these days. I love the souls games but I can't get into Bloodborne at all I I'm increasingly sure it's because of the framerate.
 
Because PC gamers are as prone to tribalistic platform warring as any Playstation or Xbox fanboy. They've got their platform of preference and thus it is important that they rep their platform wherever possible and will happily do that at the expense of 'the competition' where necessary.

Then there's the added snobiness that comes from having a system that is technically more capable than consoles in many cases, so they get to rub that in wherever possible and pretend that technical superiority is more important than it is.

In the end, many of them become absolutely insufferable. The pcmasterrace subreddit is one of the main painfully obnoxious and cringe-worthy hobby-based communities I've seen on the internet.

That all said, I do think that PC gaming is, overall, the best platform for gaming enthusiasts. Some definitely have legitimate arguments for preferring console gaming, most of them just practical concerns, but otherwise - I would highly recommend any gaming enthusiast who has the money to give PC gaming a good look.

Console gaming is cool too, though. PC is my preferred platform, but I've always liked console gaming, too.
 
Zefan said:
In my opinion a lot of this can be put down to the fact that games developers spent lots of money making their games work well for consoles, spending relatively little time concentrating on the PC experience. As a result, a game would be badly optimised for PC on release, and the extra investment in superior hardware made by PC gamers that used to be taken advantage of ended up having little effect. Like buying a Aston Martin only for all your local roads to be filled with speed bumps and 20mph speed limits.
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This is not half as common as most PC gamers make it out to be, though. Most games that run badly on PC also run badly on consoles. So it's a case of poor optimization in general, not just a poor effort for the PC version. And for every game that runs bad on PC but not on console, there's a game that runs fine on PC but not on console and not purely because of better hardware.

What a lot of PC gamers also ignore is that the technical limitations of consoles has led to a 'necessity is the mother of invention' sort of situation, where many of the important advances in efficient graphics tools and optimization have been born from developing for consoles. Something that PC gamers generally benefit from quite a bit in the end.
 
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Seanspeed said:
This is not half as common as most PC gamers make it out to be, though. Most games that run badly on PC also run badly on consoles. So it's a case of poor optimization in general, not just a poor effort for the PC version.
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Nowadays, I agree it isn't a problem as much. It was much, much worse back in the days of GTA 4 etc.
 
Moothead2 said:
My main issue is the framerate with most console games. My eyes really struggle with 30 FPS games these days. I love the souls games but I can't get into Bloodborne at all I I'm increasingly sure it's because of the framerate.
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I think Dicehunter is talking about the really vitriolic hatred some people come out with rather than just having a negative opinion.
 
Rroff said:
I think Dicehunter is talking about the really vitriolic hatred some people come out with rather than just having a negative opinion.
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In that case, it's just tribal behaviour and/or bias from belonging to a certain group, having made certain choices or having invested in a certain platform. The same way people fight about nVidia vs AMD, Sony vs Microsoft, Sega vs Nintendo (:cool:) or City vs United!
 
Zefan said:
Nowadays, I agree it isn't a problem as much. It was much, much worse back in the days of GTA 4 etc.
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That's true enough. Sadly, multi-threaded tools/optimization were simply much less developed on PC than on consoles, which is what created situations like GTA IV. But I'd also agree that developers also cared less about PC development at the time. Things have improved a lot since then.

We can thank both increased popularity of PC gaming, but also DRM, which is something people typically speak of with dread. Cracking down on piracy was an important step to get developers to put more effort into their PC versions(or to choose to do one at all).
 
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Sometimes I've always wondered how cool it would have been to see the Uncharted series on the PC...
 
I don't hate consoles by any means, but the latest generation is so incredibly underwhelming that I can see why some people might hate on them.

Seanspeed said:
We can thank both increased popularity of PC gaming, but also DRM, which is something people typically speak of with dread. Cracking down on piracy was an important step to get developers to put more effort into their PC versions(or to choose to do one at all).
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I don't agree with this at all. All of the games that have used Denuvo to date were certanties to come to PC anyway, and the protection against "lost sales" from piracy (in itself a highly debatable subject) didn't stop Warner farming Arkham Knight's PC port out to the lowest bidder. PC gaming's upswing started before late 2014 when Denuvo arrived, and hasn't been notably affected by it. Not least because it's incredibly expensive to license, meaning that only the major publishers, who already released most of their games on PC, can afford it. Even then only for their bigger releases, given that Square Enix have used Denuvo on most of their recent AAA titles, yet didn't bother with the likes of the recent Final Fantasy remasters.

The Witcher 3 didn't use DRM at all and is one of the most successful PC releases of recent years. GTA V didn't use Denuvo, yet has over four million owners on Steam alone according to SteamSpy (not forgetting that the only way to get it on Steam was to buy direct from there, since all keys were for Rockstar Social Club). Being available to pirate day one didn't do their sales any harm. Neither does it seem to be harming the slew of smaller titles (especially Japanese-developed ones) that are now getting PC ports. Evidently they must be selling well, despite not using Denuvo and being available via piracy, or we wouldn't be seeing them coming to PC in ever-increasing numbers. I thank DRM for nothing.
 
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Because PC gamers know their platform plays second fiddle to consoles where developers are concerned.
 
Why Do People Hate On Consoles? Because they're stupid.

All platforms have good games and true gamers should be willing to experience all of them if they can afford to :)
 
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There has been a knock on effect on PC games due to the dominance of console games. Some of that is positive (massive budgets for blockbusters like GTAV) and others are negative (crap ports, daft 30fps caps, less pushing the boundaries of PC hardware).
 
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