PC vs. Console Gaming

PC Gamers Have No Consolation 

by Penn Nayyim

“There is a huge divide between PC and console gamers,” says Ian Cloutier, an avid video game player. “Console gamers are more likely to play face-to-face, while computer gamers are less social in-person.” This may mostly have to do with the differences between the gaming platforms: computers, typically with only one keyboard and mouse, are less suited to more than one player per monitor, while consoles have the option of attaching multiple controllers—up to four on widely-used systems like the XBox 360. Mr. Cloutier posits that gaming culture differences accrue because of “self-selection among gamers,” or in other words, that people who prefer to play one-to-a-monitor games use a PC because it fits with that style, and people who enjoy playing with other people in person use consoles. This implies that differences do not arise because of any impact of the platform upon the user.

There is another differentiation: the pricing. Whereas consoles like the Xbox 360 may be only $199 at Kmart, computer games almost uniformly require more serious hardware to be experienced in their full glory. This might require a computer, like the $699 new Alienware X51, which comes with Intel Core i3, i5,or i7 processors and has 1 TB of  DDR2 memory and 4 GB of DDR3 memory. Before this one came out though, the “cheapest computer that could be considered a gaming computer was much more expensive,” said Ian Cloutier. “unless you were to have built it yourself.”

According to Vassilis Roussochatzakis  console fanboys say that PC gaming is dying, and PC gamers reply by saying that console gamers have no appreciation for the better graphics that the more powerful hardware of the PC platform allows. One of these is provable and correct: PC gaming is dying, and console gaming just continues to grow. From the period between 1998 and 2006, PC game sales declined from $1.8 billion to only $970 million, while console games sold for a remarkable $4.8 billion in 2006.

When he went to a GameStop, Vassilis said that he had to look hard for the PC game display among the many more prominent console game displays.  This is because, according to the industry, much of the PC game distribution has moved online. In 2005, for example, while $953 million was spent on PC games, $344 million of that was spent online. David Cole, a long-time analyst at San Diego-based DFC, said in an interview that PC gaming peaked in 2008.

This rivalry seems like it might soon become irrelevant as handheld gaming on high-powered mobile devices such as the iPhone becomes more common:  according to TechCrunch, in 2010, the new market of iPhone games had expanded to 5% of the total video game market.