How long have you lived in that cave? :-)

Oh wow. These six points are exactly what I was thinking. Except I would expand the point 1 a little bit. Indie games. Many, many games are only available on PC. Especially if you are looking for smaller indie games. But otherwise, yes, exactly. Couldn't agree more.

The PS5 I think.

I wrote a long ass post but GOG didn't post it, fuck. So I'll probs just summarize it briefly.

Aside from indies (itch.io FTW), playing old PC games, and the occasional mod or fan patch, I think that's where the strengths of the PC end. Aside from those, the PC is a platform of compromises. Buy games from one store? Oh well, the other store has exclusive features seen nowhere else. Want physical or used games? Oh wait, Valve brutally tortured and murdered those. Are you playing a single player game? What, you lost connection and the game quit? It's 2021 get internet lol

I picked up a PS3 this May and so far, maybe because it's an old console by now, but it has a lot of stuff I'd wish to see return on PCs (and are probably dying on later consoles themselves). Used games are a thing and I pick them up for sometimes even cheaper than in PC digital store sales, complete with box, manual and disc. Insert the disc and play in seconds, only deal with an installation screen once, and without internet to play, or worrying about stupid DRM.

I say if you're a power user of the PC's few pros, by all means. But ultimately I just want the game to be playable without any ifs, buts, catches, or hidden asterisks, and wouldn't it be nice if I could read a manual while chilling or during work downtime? So far, the PC has been nothing but disappointment - even with GOG around, and I think they've been doing a very great job with the platform (if you ignore their fuck ups and of course the Grand Hitman Screwup).

1. Usually on PC, you'll spend more on hardware...but way less on actual games. So, yeah; PC's where it's at, IMHO. I ain't paid $45 for a game since say Witcher 2. Most games, I get on sale when they get dirt-cheap (i.e. $20 or less) or buy in Bundles (from Humble Bundle, Fanatical, etc).

2. Most PC games these days, I buy digitally from somewhere. Also, I love the PC for modding and my ever-growing PC gaming library, that I've been growing since 1995 and taking it w/ me onto every new PC since then. Usually, there's a fix to get old games going and/or some patch or mod someone's made to fix the game, so it works, which is great.

3. Newest-gen consoles support SSD's. PS5 and X Box Series S/X all support SSD's.

4. PC supports both gamepads officially and KB/mouse. Can't beat having access to both. You can always use XPadder (last free version), Steam (which has built-in gamepad support), Controller Companion (paid program on Steam), Keysticks, or other app's/programs to try to get gamepads and profiles going, if say you have a game not supporting out-the-box.

5. Sure, there are exclusives on Nintendo (Bayonetta 2 & likely Bayonetta 3; Smash Bros. games; Zelda games; Metroid games; etc). Those always sell platforms and/or systems, in general. Though, PC is getting a bit more games that were once exclusive and are getting older, even from Sony of all companies lately - as now Days Gone is on PC (Steam); Horizon Zero Dawn (GOG, Steam, etc); and likely the entire Uncharted Collection is coming here.

If you buy Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, TES 4 Oblivion or TES 5 Skyrim, and if you want to explore a lot, do it over many playthroughs. Don't play one game for too long. If the save file size grows over... was it 2 or 3 MB? Anyway, when the save file gets bigger the game will start to drop fps. A lot. It will become a 0.5 fps game.

So play them through swiftly, explore one aspect of the game thoroughly, then finish the playthrough. Then start another game and play another aspect thoroughly.

Why did you have to bring back those memories. I was fine without them. Now I'm all nostalgic remembering all the times I cried over my VHS getting eaten or the click click click of an I/O error in the floppy drive.

You're probably saving yourself some issues. My GTX 970 is outperforming the RTX 2060 in my new laptop, but granted I have no idea if that's because ASUS can't make dual GPUs work together properly or if it's actually the hardware trying to melt itself.

Damn. I was almost thinking of buying a physical of Skyrim and setting aside my dislike for Bethesda for a bit. Guess I'm better off without them. Thanks for the tip!

They are not unplayable. They work perfectly well. ...until the save file gets too big. So just don't let one game drag on and explore every single nook and cranny in a single playthrough, and you'll be fine.

And you ask this on a site which sells DRM free games which should resolve any issues you may have had from games with DRM using stuff like Denuvo etc....

To be fair, there's only so much that GOG could bring over. At least, not without doing the Hitman thing.

I don't think removing Denuvo will solve all of the problems of the Void Engine. It might solve some, sure - but....that engine's just not ideal in so many ways.

Id Tech 5 just is not a great engine to base a game off of - look at RAGE 1, The Evil Within 1 & 2, Dishonored 2, and Death of the Outsider - upon release, those games ain't that great at running games well.

Id Tech 6 would be a much better choice, if Arkane decided to do a Void Engine 2.

I don't remember any performance issues with Rage, which is probably the only IdTech 5 game I've played. I do remember a number of visual issues, which stem from the whole "the entire game is one giant texture" thing that Carmack decided was somehow a good idea even though the drawbacks were obvious before it was released, and sure enough the actual game contained them all plus a couple more I hadn't thought of. Talk about jumping the shark.

As far as SSDs in consoles, you can stick one in a PS4 easily enough. Nothing remotely new.

I was reading the OP comment more in terms of affect of DRM in general (denuvo is the worst)... imagine there are more issues with games on PC due to the drm rather than choice of gaming engine dev chooses to use? (Unity is pretty crap imho as well).

We'll all agree here - Denuvo's trash and I wish it wind-up in a dumpster set on fire. For annoying DRM's, it's nasty; like how nasty StarForce was, back in the day.

Digital Foundry has a take-down on Deathloop PC w/ its performance, the engine, micro-stutters, Denuvo, etc etc.
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu_XHyO-6zY

Also, DirectX as an API isn't spectacular either. While it's great at software compatibility (compared to most), it also has many layers in between the call, which can cause performance drops. This is more noticeable w/ some games - especially older ones - with say using DXVK API-emulator (which turns DX calls into Vulkan calls), as you can get better performance out of that, even w/in Windows b/c Vulkan has less overhead and layers.

That reminds me that sometimes when I try to start Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch for my kids, it complains there is no media inside (the game is in a... I guess it is a SD card?).

Luckily so far it has worked when I pull the media out and re-insert it, then Switch detects it again. Not sure if the media is breaking, but bye bye for the game at that point, I guess. Not sure if I could redeem a digital copy of it in the Nintendo Store, but I presume not.

I guess in the old times with Amiga floppy disks it was just as bad if not worse. I bought Microprose's Gunship! for my Amiga 500 as a kid, and lost the game because some virus overwrote the game disk's boot block. Oh well, there was the option to obtain the pirated version of the game after that, it worked better because it didn't even have any manual checks.