PC Gaming Forever!

I am bored and rather sick of reading the news so I'll bore everyone and write about games instead.

I'm a regular reader of Kotaku, a gaming news blog. An excellent source for all kinds of gaming related news, rumours, controversies etc.

Many readers leave comments and many points are argued. Some subjects always cause lively discussions.

One of these is the "Is PC gaming dead?" story. There are many people on both sides of the arguments. They sometimes leave very funny comments.

I enjoy this kind of topic a lot being an avid gamer myself.

I personally feel very mystified that many people think that PC gaming is dead or dying. A lot of these people are either console fanboys or console game developers who want to create the impression that PC gaming is dead so that they can sell more consoles.

I do have some counterpoints. Don't get me wrong I like consoles too. If I could afford it, I would definitely buy a PS3. But alas...

I love the argument that consoles are cheaper than a powerful gaming PC. Actually it's not quite so simple.

Yes, a console like PS3 or XBox 360 is cheaper than a PC. Sure. But you need to buy a tv to play games on a console. And maybe a good sound system. Depending on what you buy, it could easily run into many thousands too. Sure you can watch the TV and listen to music on your home theatre system.

Same as the PC. A decent gaming PC in Malaysia will set you back maybe RM2000 to RM2500 or even more depending on how crazy you want to go with hardware. Many console fanboys say this is so expensive for gaming. Apparently, they forgot to take into account that most people buy PCs for more than just gaming.

Just for the sake of making a point, there's this thing called the internet and you can't watch that on a TV. Also there are tons of activities centred around a good home PC. There's music and videos you can download and listen to. If you want, you can even create music and films on a PC. It's more than just an appliance. It's also a tool for a whole host of things.

It also puzzles me how some people so vehemently want to see PC gaming die. I guess some of these people must've had a real bad computing experience. Or maybe they are intimidated by the technology and the amount of basic of knowledge overhead required before one becomes a competent PC user. I'll admit that. In order to get the most out of your PC, you need to learn and do a bit of research and some tinkering. I guess some people aren't bothered to do that.

Who knows?

I'm a PC gamer but I have no desire whatsoever to see consoles die out. I really don't get why there needs to be a competition in the first place. It's all very weird. We are all gamers aren't we?

PC gaming does have its share of problems. I know that. There's the piracy thing. One person buy an ori game, God knows how many other people buy the same game for 5 bucks at a pirate shop. Or torrent the thing from the net. I admit, I do this too.

I don't want to kill PC gaming. I can't afford imported original stuff. Having said that, I do have some ori games. My FM 2008 is original. And my WoW. And NFS Carbon. When Diablo 3 comes out, I'm buying the original so that I can go on Battlenet. I won't regret it. Blizzard is a good company that makes good products. They deserve my money.

If I got paid more than I'm getting now, I'm definitely getting more original games.

Console fans like to say that piracy is bad for PC. But consoles also have this problem. It's only a matter of time before PS3 and XBox are cracked.

Some genres of games work best on PC. Games like real time strategy and role playing games and management sims.

Console gaming is on the rise but PC gaming will never die.

WoW has 10 million players and counting. Other MMOs have millions of players too. All playing on PC. Starcraft and Counterstrike are more than a decade old and millions still play them worldwide. For any successful game made, there is always a very active modding community willing to create free content for their game of choice. This ensures that it will remain fresh for years and years.

When games like Fallout 3, Red Alert 3, Starcraft 2 and Diablo3 are released rest assured PC gaming will rise piracy notwithstanding. These are masterpieces. People WILL buy and play. The numbers probably won't be as big as console but does that mean PC gaming is "dead"?

Surely not.

Come to think of it, there's a lot I can say about the PC gaming scene. But this post is quite long and meandering already so I'll just stop here.

Oh by the way, my notebook's MS Vista Home Basic finally got updated to Service Pack 1 without crashing. The update seems to have fixed my random blue screen of death crashing problem...

Have a nice weekend!