Console VS PC Gaming, which is better?

NOTE: The following article was written by my newest writer Matt. He is a PC Elitist who will be posting a weekly article on gaming related topics. This week he is using my account to post his article, so to stop all of you thinking its me (Michael) its not, its Matty. Now for the article: 

 Let me lead this article by saying I am a PC elitist. Now to the half of you who didn't instantly click away because I just said that, please hear me out. I am a PC Elitist because I feel I have valid reasons to be. Some of them are just to troll, and some of them are legitiment. This article will not just be me banging on about how PC gamers are the master race and how you should all become one of us (although I do think that and you should become one of us if you aren't). This will be a break down in to the pros the different devices have over one another and to which audience they are better suited for. So let's get down to it then, and we'll start with the console.

Regardless of which console you prefer (that's a flame war I don't much feel like starting) there are easy and distinguishable benefits that anyone can see right of the bat. The most glaring one is price. The initial price of a console is USUALLY much cheaper than that of a good gaming PC (especially if your chosen console is the Wii). As a direct example, A comprible gaming PC will usually start of costing you around 800-1000 dollars, where as consoles tend to range from about 250-550 depending on the type you want. This is something that is immediately attractive to people. To the teenager who is not yet making a full income because they are still in school, or to anyone who is not making a lot of money, and still wants to game, a price gap this large is hard to resist. To parents buying games and consoles for their kids, this is the first thing they will look at and is the most likely to sway their decision. This leads right in to my next point, the market.

Consoles are aimed at younger gamers, plain and simple. You can see it in their price, there design, even the games that populate them, everything is designed for a younger audience. Now we all have a story or 2 about some squeaker or screamer who has come into our Call of Duty lobby and explained, with many swears and racial slurs, how good he/she (it's occasionally a she) is and how we're all "N00bs” about to get "pwned".  While many will argue that games like Call of Duty are rated MA 15+, and that these kids shouldn't be playing these games, in my humble opinion, this isn't true. Games like Call of Duty are designed for children and casual gamers. They designed so that someone who isn't very good or experienced at the game can do well. That's why there are killstreaks, that's why there are deathstreaks, and that's why the guns have relatively little recoil. Call of Duty is designed for casual gamers and children, which is why they are such a gaming juggernaught today, and why so many other games have tried to copy their formula for success. Now the discussion about Call of Duty is best left for another time, but you can't argue at who it's aimed at, younger gamers. Things about the movie tie in games, like the racing game that came out for Cars 2, did it come to PC? No. What about sports titles that people in high school or college will be dying to play, fifa games, NFL, NHL, all the EA sports games really, do they release those for PC? A console is designed for younger and casual gamers, and you can see even more argument for that in how easy a console is to use.

For anyone who has a controller for a console, go and grab it and count how many buttons you see on it. Now I have an Xbox 360 controller (I don't believe it differs much for the PS3, maybe for the Wii, and I won't get into older consoles) and I count 13, including the triggers, shoulder buttons and the thumbsticks, as they click in. Now for anyone near a keyboard, look down at how many buttons you have. I'm not going to make you count them as that would be cruel, but it's substantially more (again, depending on your keyboard and mouse, my keyboard possess about 30 extra buttons and my mouse has about 10 extras).  This is a huge factor into why console gaming is successful in the market it's aimed at. While it takes some time, getting adjusted to a controller is obviously easier than getting acquainted to a keyboard and mouse. Every controller is designed from the very start to be perfect for gaming, for the placement of its buttons, thumbsticks and triggers, to the shape and feel of the controller, everything is designed for ease of use. However unless you have bought a specialized gaming keyboard and gaming mouse (I have, once again, PC Elitist) then you are using equipment that has been primarily designed for surfing the web and writing text documents, not exactly ideal for gaming. The other benefit that a console with controllers has over a PC with a keyboard and mouse is the ability of multiplayer gaming.

Let me tell a quick story. Last weekend I spent it staying around at a buddies due to the fact my transport service to and from work was down and he lives closer to where I work than I do. Now we are both PC gamers (although he does own consoles) and we wanted to play some games together. You see the problem, split screen or multiplayer gaming isn't possible on a pc. With a console you can gather up a few buddies and play games together. Games like Super Smash Brothers, Guitar Hero, Halo, Need for Speed, all these make great gaming experiences you can share with your buddies. If you're a gamer on the PC however looking for a multiplayer experience, then you need to have an internet connection. These point falls into the same point as the market that consoles are aimed at. Younger people, usually mid teens, are more likely to be the ones to have their friends over after school to do some gaming with them. Once you're out of school and into work, it's very rare you invite your buddies round to come game with you. In the 2 years since I've left school, last weekend was the first time this dilemma had come up.
Ok, now that I've had to betray everything I love to speak highly of consoles, allow me to slip back into my natural role and talk about the benefits of PC gaming.

Now let me pick up where I left off with the whole price talk. Yes, a console is going to less expensive than a PC to buy the hardware. But let's think about that some more. Every time a new game comes out, how much are you paying for it? Depending on where you live and the time of game (we won't include the various collectors editions as that skews the numbers even wider) you're looking at somewhere between 50-120 dollars for a new game. Now what about PC? Well for starters a lot of PC games are free. Games like Blacklight Retribution, Tribes Ascend, Quake Live, League of Legends, Perfect World, EVE Online, DC Universe Online, Team Fortress 2, etc. While you can pay money for these games through microtransaction, all of these games are free to download and play. The other thing you may or may not notice is that when you go to a retailer, say EB Games or JB HI-FI, a new PC title is usually about $10 cheaper than it equivalent on a console. Why is this? Well it's because physical retailers have to compete with online retailers, and that brings me to my next point.
Online retailers make PC gaming a lot more accessible and cost effective for a lot of people. The biggest of these is Valve's service, Steam, so I'm going to focus primarily on that. Steam is amazing for both developers and customers. It allows the developers, from Massive titles like Skyrim, to indie titles like Bastion, to release and market there game to a user base of over 38 million. With integrated support, steam also allows developers to push patches and fixes for games almost instaneously, without having to wait through the certification and approval process that console gamers endure (again, something I will discuss in depth at a later time). The steam sales that are held are also a boom for PC gaming and something no retailer that I know of can rival. If I pop open my steam library, I have 162 games currently. A website has estimated the value of that at over $2200, but I haven't even paid close to that much. During the Steam Christmas sale you could find games like Borderlands (the game of the year edition with all of the DLC) for $3.50, Bioshock was $5, Monday Night Combat was $3, and Just Cause 2 was $7. I have yet to see a physical retailer even come close to matching those kinds of prices. The other major feature of Steam is the Steam Workshop. This allows the community to access the tools necessary to create mods for the games they love, and then place them on to Steam for everyone to try and play. This brings me nicely to my next point, modding.

 Now modding exists on the console, but the modding you mostly see is the people who decided their gamertags need to be red instead of white, or the people who float around the map in god mod firing unlimited noobtubes (you know, those wonderful chaps). The modding on PC however, is different. While yes, modders whose sole purpose it to come in and ruin the game for everyone but themselves still exist, there are also those who mod to enrich the game for everyone. The most successful story of this is Skyrim. Elder Scrolls 5 had over 200 mods within 3 days of its release. This is well before anyone had enough time to play through the whole game, and before the tools necessary to mod the game were even released, this is staggering. People got the game and simply modded it, not played, modded. Whether it was getting rid of all the spiders in the game for those of us who are deathly afraid of them (something, I personally, am extremely thankful for) or adding floating cities in the sky. Serious mods like adding the ability to craft new items like enchanted arrows, to the not so serious mods of turning all the dragons into Macho Man Randy Savage (please Google the video that accompanies this mod, to anyone who has played Skyrim, it will make you laugh hysterically, I promise), these mods enhance and enrich the game, adding hours and hours of additional gameplay and features for nothing. Other mods keep games looking fresh and new, such the HD texture mod for classic PC game Deus Ex, allowing a truly great title to withstand the test of time and aging graphics, and here lies my next point, graphics.

If you have never seen Battlefield 3 on a PC that can handle it at its highest graphical settings, then you are simply missing out, it is awe inspiring. As someone who owns a PC capable of running that game at its best, I found it so beautiful and so mesmerizing that I had to turn the graphics down, as I kept getting distracted and killed. If you are looking for the best possible graphical experience, a PC will win every time. Now the money required to build a PC that will handle the top tier games at there most graphically intense will set you back quite a large chunk of change (somewhere in the ball park of $2000) but if you have the money to spend and what to see games like Crysis look so good you could swear it was a movie, then PC is the only way to go. 

All of these points combine into my last one to support PC Gaming, and that is our market. People who game on a PC, the people who have been bothered to go and spend the money, to build their custom machine, to learn how to put it all together, are simply more mature and more invested in gaming. Will you get trolled in games still, yes, definitely, in fact if you play games with me, it's a certainty. But in all my time gaming on PC, I have never run into a squeaker, calling me racial slurs and talking about how my mother is in bed, not once. The games PC gamers play just aren't meant for kids and casual gamers. Look at games like EVE Online and Starcraft, I can't wrap my head around those games, they are so advanced and complicated, with so many little nuances that it would be impossible for a casual gamer to walk in and just pick it up. The same could be said for anyone who likes RTS games, or simulators, (I'm talking about Microsoft Flight Sim and no The Sims, in case you're wondering) these games are simply too advanced for anyone to really play casually.

But when it boils down to it, people will play what they are most comfortable with, and that's fine. As I stated, I am a PC Elitist, so I love my PC. I think it is a far superior platform for gaming, but I can see the reasons that someone would play a console, hell I used to love my Xbox 360, played it a tonne and met some wonderful friends on Xbox Live. So in short, I can't decide which is better, only you can decide that. You know what you like and prefer, and hey, if I've helped strengthen your argument for either platform, then great. If I've helped you consider a different platform then that's awesome too. Regardless we are all gamers, so we will all game and whatever we want, and be happy about it, although if you want to be happy on PC, then lemme know, we could always use one more PC elitist for the cause.

P.S.
(Note: The following P.S. is by Michael, not Matt)
Hey guys, hope you enjoyed Matt's first Article. You guys will be seeing a new article by him once a week. If you have any questions have a Gaming PC (I mean any questions) feel free to ask him on either his twitter: @MrMattyMouse or his email: matthewwaterworth@yahoo.com. Or if you want to ask a question about anything in general then go this twitter: @AsylumArticles or Facebook: Asylum Articles. That is all for now, don't forget to leave feedback!