I've been primarily a pc gamer for about three years now, and while it was awesome in the beginning to be able to play games at 1080p/60 frames a second. My tolerance for the level of bullshit I have to put up with has about run its course. It's not the price of entry, the mouse and keyboard, or playing games at a desk; those issues have already been addressed and largely fixed. It's the constant pc tinkering and general clunkyness that keeps people from pc gaming.
Disabling a keyboard driver to get a game to work, editing ini files and replacing .dll files on a regular basis, certain settings like DX11 or physx breaking a game, windows updates interfering with your game in the middle of a session, limiting certain games to two cores so they don't crash every 10 minutes, poor optimization, games being broken at launch, shitty 3rd party drm, and a whole bunch of other crap that is still common place and shouldn't be tolerated.
I just now reached my breaking point after not being able to progress in Arkham City due to constant crashes during the Mr. Freeze fight. I tried just about every fix I can think of: disable rivatuner-nope, disable D3Doverider-nope, evga precision-nope, restore all default nvida values- nope, update and restore drivers-nope, disable DX11 and physx- nope, and the list goes on and on ad nauesum for about an hour before I just decided to say fuck it, I'm not putting up with this anymore. There goes my money and about 6+ hours worth of play time down the drain. The time I spend to play games shouldn't be taken up with me pulling my hair out just to get a game to function properly, or just work for that matter.
And don't think I'm just being ignorant to the share of issues that plague consoles as well, but at least the only example of a console game I can think of that just flat out refuses to work is Skyrim for the ps3. Spending time to "fix" pc games and deal with the bs is a regular thing for me These issues have really made it hard to decide whether or not I should upgrade, or go ahead with consoles for next gen and for-go the extra bells and whistles with pc gaming.
I truly hope Steam os addresses to fix these issues, otherwise pc gaming will always be a shadow to consoles in terms of public awareness and publisher recognition. I say this as a core pc gamer, and I'm sure I'll get plenty of people playing dumb and telling me how wrong I am, but until people start to really address this and voice concerns, pc gaming will never be something that's taken seriously.
Disabling a keyboard driver to get a game to work, editing ini files and replacing .dll files on a regular basis, certain settings like DX11 or physx breaking a game, windows updates interfering with your game in the middle of a session, limiting certain games to two cores so they don't crash every 10 minutes, poor optimization, games being broken at launch, shitty 3rd party drm, and a whole bunch of other crap that is still common place and shouldn't be tolerated.
I just now reached my breaking point after not being able to progress in Arkham City due to constant crashes during the Mr. Freeze fight. I tried just about every fix I can think of: disable rivatuner-nope, disable D3Doverider-nope, evga precision-nope, restore all default nvida values- nope, update and restore drivers-nope, disable DX11 and physx- nope, and the list goes on and on ad nauesum for about an hour before I just decided to say fuck it, I'm not putting up with this anymore. There goes my money and about 6+ hours worth of play time down the drain. The time I spend to play games shouldn't be taken up with me pulling my hair out just to get a game to function properly, or just work for that matter.
And don't think I'm just being ignorant to the share of issues that plague consoles as well, but at least the only example of a console game I can think of that just flat out refuses to work is Skyrim for the ps3. Spending time to "fix" pc games and deal with the bs is a regular thing for me These issues have really made it hard to decide whether or not I should upgrade, or go ahead with consoles for next gen and for-go the extra bells and whistles with pc gaming.
I truly hope Steam os addresses to fix these issues, otherwise pc gaming will always be a shadow to consoles in terms of public awareness and publisher recognition. I say this as a core pc gamer, and I'm sure I'll get plenty of people playing dumb and telling me how wrong I am, but until people start to really address this and voice concerns, pc gaming will never be something that's taken seriously.