Next-gen consoles vs PC - has the conversation changed?

PC vs. Console has waged online for a long time, but the release of PS5 and Xbox Series X has blurred the lines.

Keyboard and mouse vs. controller. Custom build vs. ease of use. Higher spec vs. lower price. The timeless battle between PCs and consoles rages on but with the arrival of the Xbox Series X and PS5, the fight has turned from trench warfare into something a lot more complicated.

There are some aspects of the conversation that remain relatively unchanged. Namely, cost. Although the new-gen consoles have now arrived at a cost similar to a mid-spec PC, when we’re talking about the higher end of PC the greater power has always come at a price. No blood sacrifices are usually necessary but they can still cost a metaphorical arm and a leg. Especially if you want the latest and greatest hardware, for example, an Nvidia RTX 3090 would set you back more than an Xbox Series X, Playstation 5 and Nintendo Switch combined.

This is old news, of course. If the argument was as simple as ‘buy what you can afford’ then every gamer would have shrugged, said ‘fair enough’ and returned home to their preferred console or PC set up. But like deciding on who the traitor is in Among Us, the debate is harder to settle than that. Now that next-gen is here, the terms of engagement might have changed entirely.

It’s all got a bit blurry

It’s like someone turned the aim assist off because it’s become a lot harder to get a lock on what defines a console or PC experience. You can plug a keyboard and mouse into a PS5 and you can hook up an Xbox controller to a PC. So while it’s still easier to crash back on a sofa if you’re a console gamer, there’s nothing stopping you from switching things up.

Size is still a big factor. PC Cases are still juggernauts compared to a Series X (Apart from the SFF/ITX Builds of course). It’s also fair to say that the PS5 isn’t going to win any prizes for a compact design. On the whole, you’re probably going to choose a console if space is an issue but it’s no longer so clear cut.

We can also consider the hardware available on PC. Traditionally, if you want more up to date or powerful hardware, the PC space was where it was at. For example, the PC used to be the only place you could experience ray tracing, but with the new Xbox and Playstation consoles, they have hard-baked it into their architecture, while not every PC graphics card can deliver ray-tracing yet and those that do can be prohibitively expensive.

Then there’s the question of availability. The new Nvidia and AMD graphics cards are as impossible to get hold of as the new consoles. Scalpers have stripped everything as bare as a Death Stranding hillside. So even if you decide upon a console or high spec PC, you might have to wait a while.

From a games perspective, PC holds the biggest library by far, and perhaps the wider choice of game genres. But more and more traditionally PC based games are coming a little later to console, like Disco Elysium, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Rust. We’re also seeing more ports of games from console to PC as well, some previous Sony exclusives such as Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding have begun to appear on the PC which left some Playstation gamers feeling a little disgruntled. Microsoft has also heavily blurred the line between the Xbox and the PC with their Game Pass being available on both Windows and Xbox, giving gamers the ability to play many of the same games on either platform.

The power question

So you might not have heard anything about it, but a little-known game called Cyberpunk 2077 was released recently. To say the PC and console versions weren’t the same is like saying Kratos and Mario have different personalities.

Now it’s possible to look at the flawed but beautiful PC version against the PR nightmare console versions and think: you need a PC to play the most ambitious games properly. However, glance back at the tail end of the last-gen consoles’ life cycle, you’d see that they were still firing out enough power for technical masterpieces like Ghost of Tsushima, Red Dead Redemption 2 and (the very dividing) Last of Us Part II. So whatever the hell happened to Cyberpunk, it probably wasn’t as simple as a power problem.

There’s still no doubt that if you shell out for the latest high spec graphics card, you’ll get the best visuals - but it’s far from future proof. If you purchased the top RTX 2080TI card a couple of years ago, it’s going to struggle to play Cyberpunk in 4K if you put the graphics on ultra (though DLSS on Nvidia works some absolute wizardry to make things run beautifully). So you can buy the cutting edge PC gear now but in 5 years time, it might only render certain games on potato settings.

The flipside of this is that consoles seem to age very well (Cyberpunk is the glaring exception). As developers got comfortable with the hardware they were able to push it to its limits.

Isn’t the Series X basically a PC these days?

We’ve already touched on this, but I mean, come on. They’re more or less the same shape and specs, each runs basically the same setup, and there’s hardly a single game on Game Pass that you can’t play on PC (as long as you subscribe to ‘Ultimate’). If you’re in the Xbox ecosystem, Microsoft doesn’t seem to mind if you’ve bought a console or not. So the question is, should we?

In some ways, it’s Playstation who is keeping the console vs. PC conversation alive. The PS5 seems to deliberately step away from a PC gaming experience, touting speed and 3D audio over power and graphical fidelity. They have the DualSense controller now, which can’t really be compared to anything else.

While Xbox is happy to share their first-party games with their PC family, Playstation is keeping almost all their first-party games to themselves (besides Death Stranding and Horizon). This is probably a good strategy since exclusives are to Playstation what Master Chief’s helmet is to his face - pretty damn inseparable.

It’s almost worth asking if the timeless battle has changed from PC vs. consoles to something along the lines of the Microsoft ecosystem (PC and Xbox) vs. Playstation. That certainly might be where we are heading. Of course, at this point, we should probably give appreciation to Nintendo for staying well out of the PC/Console wars and doing their own thing. The Switch, their latest masterpiece, is a triumph in gaming. A handheld console that is readily available, does something genuinely different and has an excellent library of games.

It’s a whole new world

Finally though, we think the conversation has changed because game developers made it change. Namely, Epic Games and their industry-disrupting Fortnite. They accidentally left crossplay on for a weekend and, in doing so, blew apart a section of the dividing wall between Xbox, PC and Playstation gamers.

The communities we game with are getting wider - and it’s no longer essential to play on the system all your friends are on. So while the console vs. PC question is more tangled than ever before, there are fewer reasons to single out just one side. Except of course, for your preference! There’s a reason why games feel different to every player and the same goes here. And we can love a good argument as gamers, so maybe the timeless battle will rage on.