EASE OF USE
The last decade or so has been interesting to watch, as consoles have arguably become less easy to use, while PCs are now much less technical. Before the Xbox 360, you’d pop a disc or cartridge into a console and be playing pretty much immediately; now, pop a disc in and you’ll invariably have to wait for the game to install itself and download patches, if you don’t also have to perform some sort of system update as well.
True, these consoles are able to do some of this in the background overnight, but only if you enable their energy-inefficient “Always On” modes. It’s even worse if you buy a game digitally. CallofDuty and its 100GB+ install sizes take hours to download on an average connection. We picture the poor kids getting an Xbox or PlayStation for Christmas, being overwhelmed with excitement, but then having that feeling extinguished as they have to wait until Boxing Day to actually be able to play something.
The PC, meanwhile, shares a lot of those problems, but we’d argue Windows has become more userfriendly, while a lot of bugs and crashes have been eradicated. Even better, Nvidia’s GeForce Experience and AMD’s Adrenaline software have allowed for one-click tuning of all your games, so you don’t need to worry about tweaking the settings to get a smooth framerate. Steam’s Big Picture mode has also provided a viable living room interface, while Family Sharing makes it much easier to share games with your friends and family.
Ultimately though, if you want ease of use, a console is still the way to go. We’ve never read a command line tutorial in Play magazine, our sister PlayStationfocused title, for example.