Sony released ‘Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’ on Steam on July 26, peaking at less than 9 thousand PC players compared to PlayStation success.
Sony released ‘Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’ on Steam on July 26, peaking at less than 9 thousand PC players compared to PlayStation success.
I primarily play on PC, but I’ve always understood this part as the reason why so many people just prefer consoles - and there’s nothing wrong with that. No hassle, just open the console and start playing. While PC does give more customizability and a much bigger library of games accessible through the same machine, it’s also more likely to run into some platform-related issues here and there.
It’s all about finding the balance between negatives and positives: personally I’ll rather just deal with the occasional random problems since the reward is the huge library of games and (usually) better end result.
But I do understand why someone else might go for consoles - as long as it has enough games which you can enjoy, the limited library isn’t really a problem anyway.
I’ve rarely had any real problems, but I’ve also been using windows PC as my main platform for like 30 years at this point - many fixes/workarounds are just intuitive for me at this point (“oh just press alt+enter”), while they might be a confusing dealbreaker for a newcomer. Anyone arguing that “using PC is just as easy!” probably doesn’t realize how many different small things they’ve learned over time while using the platform, or they’ve just been lucky and never ran into a persistent issue (like the one that you described). Or they’re just more interested in the platform as a whole, and happily spend some time learning to use it.
I feel like the main problem with your previous comment is just that you stated “bad experiences with Steam”, while you’re talking about PC issues in general. What you described there (probably) isn’t caused by Steam. But this, again, comes back to just not understanding the platform, which is an understandable reason to just go play on a console instead - less hassle and all that.
Exactly this. I wasn’t trying to be a dick, just pointing out it wasn’t a Steam specific problem. Literally wasn’t trying to insinuate anything else.
I realized some people were getting hung up on the PC gaming vs Steam distinction, which is why my subsequent comments were more PC gaming in general. I understand the difference between the hardware, OS, launcher software, and game. In the moment I got lazy and used Steam as a substitute for the experience, as Steam has become so tied to PC gaming.
Thank you for not being a dick about it, like some others. I’m not sure what people get out of shitting on someone who had a bad experience with a platform they love. All they do is ensure I (and others) will never bother trying it again. I had been thinking about it recently, as my issues happened probably 10 years ago now. But after people here were so shitty, I don’t think I’ll bother. I see little has changed with the community.
I do have extensive experience with computers. I’ve worked supporting Windows and Linux servers in large data centers (hardware, OS, and apps), did desktop support in college, have a degree in the stuff, and am a developer these days. There might be some weird gaming specific stuff I missed, but apparently so did everyone else, because I posted in various areas on Reddit after doing a lot of searching/testing on my own and no one had any answers, or even thinks to try beyond what I had already done. That leads me to believe that it wasn’t something basic that most people just know. I got some snark back then too, which just made me think all those people were idiots trying to protect their ego. If they were so smart, why didn’t they have a single word to say that would help? Like you said, they’ve probably just got lucky and never had any issue, then think they are some kind of computer god. It’s not like I had a ton of issues. I had 1 issue, but that one issue made games nearly unplayable and there was nowhere to go when I hit a dead end. Like I said, there is only so much time I was willing to put into doing that kind of work outside of actual work, and I hit my limit.