Introduction
PC or Console ? What to choose for gaming ? We’ve compared three major gaming devices across a variety of criteria, highlighting important advantages and disadvantages. This will help you choose the perfect option for your needs. Here’s what to look for.
Number of available games and exclusives
Some gamers prefer deep and complex RPGs, others like fast and dynamic shooters or arcades. A wide variety of games allows everyone to find something to their taste. However, there are also fans of one or two game universes who do not pay attention to other titles. Depending on personal preferences, the choice of platform for the game may be different.
PC
It’s hard to say how many PC games there are. There are currently over 70,000 games on Steam . You can find thousands of projects on other platforms, on developer pages, and other resources. There’s also a huge backlog of older games that you can play today.
So no one knows the exact number. According to very rough estimates, about a million games have been released for PC. Most of them have weak plots and graphics, but among hundreds of thousands of mediocre projects there are many interesting exclusive titles with their own audience.
Among the exclusives, there are also so-called AAA games – high-budget titles that entire teams of developers, scriptwriters, artists and actors worked on for years. However, if a popular game was initially released only for PC, over time it is usually ported to consoles. This happened, for example, with the hit Baldur`s Gate 3. It was released on computers, but today you can play it on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Consoles
There are far fewer games for consoles than for PC. For example, the PlayStation Store for PS5 has almost 4 thousand titles available , Xbox Series users can count on about 3 thousand games, and more than 10 thousand titles have been released for Nintendo Switch.
But the PlayStation and Nintendo games market is primarily aimed at the Japanese. Many titles for these consoles are released only in Japanese.
“Console” exclusives are still around, but their number is decreasing every year. Most previously console-exclusive games have already been ported to PC. Although some modern hits can only be played on consoles. Among them, for example, The Last of Us: Part 2, Marvel’s Spider Man 2, God of War: Ragnarok, Bloodborne, Mario Kart 8, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and others.
Some of the currently exclusive games are planned to be ported to PC in the future, some are not. It is unknown how things will develop in the future. On the one hand, console game developers do not want to lose the profit that a multi-million army of PC users can bring them. On the other hand, console manufacturers are trying to stir up interest in their devices with unique titles. So, most likely, the situation will not change in the near future: exclusive console games will be ported to PC, but only some time after their release on consoles.
Impressions from the games
Perception is influenced not only by the plot, gameplay and graphics. Much also depends on the capabilities of the equipment on which the game is running.
PC
Top PC builds demonstrate exceptional image quality and record frames per second (FPS). If the highest smoothness is essential to you, then the PC is beyond competition. It is not for nothing that all serious eSportsmen play in front of computers. 120-160 FPS in shooters for a gaming PC is more the norm than the exception.
Gaming monitors also contribute to immersion in the gaming process – a high refresh rate, support for FreeSync and G-SYNC anti-aliasing technologies ensure that the player will not miss a single detail of even the most dynamic scene.
But if you take a PC comparable in performance to a modern console like PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, then the quality and speed of graphics will be about the same. What matters more here is the platform for which the game was originally developed. Ports to other systems often have worse graphics than the original.
Sound quality depends on the specific assembly. Inexpensive speakers will create a flat, dull sound picture, while 5.1 systems will allow you to fully immerse yourself in the world of three-dimensional sound.
If we talk about control, then the standard PC keyboard and mouse give a big advantage over the gamepad in shooters, RPGs and strategies. Another thing is that today you can connect a gamepad to a PC , and a mouse and keyboard to a console. So here everything is individual: choose the most comfortable setup for you.
Consoles
In terms of image quality, modern gaming platforms of the same level are approximately the same. But the larger the screen diagonal, the better the user immerses himself in the gaming world. And the huge selection of TVs of various sizes contributes to this.
In addition, consoles try to use all the features of TV, such as HDR and support for ultra-high resolutions. So the picture on the TV with the console connected often looks much better than on the monitor.
On the other hand, 120Hz is rare in TVs, and support for dynamic refresh rates (FreeSync and G-SYNC) is even rarer. So in some games, the console owner is at a disadvantage. But this applies more to eSports than to home entertainment.
The console does not have its own sound, it uses the same speakers as the TV. When connected to a home theater, the volume and quality of sound will impress anyone – all modern consoles support Dolby Atmos standards. But if the TV does not have any additional speakers, then the sound will be very inexpressive.
The console’s game controller is ideal for native games. And this is not surprising – they were developed for a specific gamepad. But with ported projects there may be some difficulties and inconveniences.